(Clearwisdom.net) Teacher has stressed the importance of Fa study in many of his lectures. I also know this in my heart. Dafa has created everything, and Dafa is the reason for the entire cosmos coming into being. As mere human beings, we are able to study this universal Dafa, a great honor and fortune that is beyond description in any human language.
Knowing the importance of Fa-study, how does one manage to study the Fa well? Teacher has written an article, “Learning the Fa” in Essentials for Further Advancement. "The only way to gain a good understanding of Dafa is to study it without any intention."
Teacher also mentioned in “A Heavy Blow” in Essentials for Further Advancement,
"I suggest that everyone set his mind to reading ten times the book I wrote, Essentials for Further Advancement, which you call scripture. When your mind isn’t at peace, studying the Fa is not effective. You should study it with a peaceful mind."
From this, I enlightened that when you study the Fa, you should not have any pursuit, and your mind must be pure and peaceful.
I have deeply felt this way during my cultivation. Before the persecution started, as long as I put my heart into studying the Fa, I could feel my improvement on a daily basis. However, after the persecution officially started on July 20, 1999, I seldom had time to calm my mind to study the Fa. I had read through Zhuan Falun a few hundred times already and spent a lot of time studying, so I felt like I knew the book inside out.. However, I began to feel that my improvement had slowed down, so I became worried. I wasn't able to enlighten on this issue for a long time.
I began to feel that I couldn't go on like this forever, so I began reciting the Fa one sentence after another. I felt that it was rather difficult to do, and I progressed very slowly. The benefit was that I could calm my mind, and even though I couldn't study a lot of Fa at once, I always felt that I enlightened from the Fa-study. I felt for a while that I had improved a great deal and that my cultivation state was optimal. After reciting the book a few times, I felt that I could recite the Fa fluently. After a while, however, I felt that I had returned to my previous state. Even though I was reciting the Fa every day, I didn't take it to heart. It was like I was just going through the motions.
In regards to this state of mind, I was very worried, because if Fa study means either reading or reciting the book, but you don't feel that you have put your heart into it, and therefore don't feel secure in Fa-study, then what should you do?
During subsequent Fa-study, I happened to think that since my previous Fa study did not achieve good results, then should I change it? I began to slow down, calm my mind, go slowly but surely, and read every sentence in the Fa carefully. I have since found every sentence in the Fa to have deep content. In many places I have found my shortcomings, thought about difficulties that I have run into, where I have fallen short, and where I have lagged behind. After I saw my shortcomings, I began to enlighten on many areas where I needed to improve.
More importantly, I found that the key to Fa-study is that it doesn't matter which method you employ in Fa-study, whether you read or recite the Fa, or how many pages you cover each day. What matters is whether you can calm your mind, and put your heart into Fa-study. During the process of studying the Fa, practitioners should look within, and rectify our biased words and actions by following the requirements of Dafa. We should continuously rectify ourselves, continuously improve ourselves, and use higher and higher standards to measure ourselves, so that eventually we will be completely assimilated with Dafa.
