The Painful Process of Letting Go of My Attachment to My Elder Brother Having a Good Life

(Minghui.org) I am a female Falun Dafa practitioner who obtained the Fa in July 1997. As a cultivator, I have experienced the joy of improving my {{xinxing} but also the frustration and distress of not passing tests I encountered. Every step of my improvement was the result of Master’s hard work and effort.

I want to share with fellow practitioners how I eliminated my attachment to my elder brother.

My Brother Lost the Environment to Study Dafa Due to the Persecution

I have two older brothers and one older sister. My father died in a car accident when I was six, and Mother had a hard time raising the four of us. My eldest brother was 20 at the time, so he naturally took on the responsibility of helping my mother earn enough to support our family.

A few years after my father passed away, someone proposed to my eldest brother. Because we were poor and my mother was busy, she told him to wait. As a result, my brother missed many opportunities. Later, my sister and other brother got married, but my eldest brother was older, so it was difficult for him to find a wife.

My mother was ill, and life was difficult at the time. My eldest brother worked so that I could go to school and graduate from a secondary technical school. I am very grateful to him. After I got married, I basically took care of all of his expenses. My sister once said that I had too much affection for my eldest brother, but I ignored her.

After I had the good fortune to learn Dafa in 1997, I showed the Dafa books to my eldest brother. He had only gone to school for a year and could only read a few words. After reading a few pages, he developed a persistent cough. I thought that Master had begun to take care of him, but my brother did not think so and stopped reading the books.

After I got home one day, I asked him if he had read the book. He said he’d stopped reading after a few pages because he kept coughing. I said, “You are so lucky. Master was taking care of you and helping you cleanse your body as soon as you began to read the book.” He understood after our discussion. He stopped coughing a month later and began to cultivate. We had a study site in our village, where we all studied the Fa together every night.

When Jiang Zemin began to persecute Falun Dafa on July 20, 1999, my eldest brother lost the group Fa-study environment. He slowly slacked off and acted like an ordinary person.

My Brother Was Scammed

My other brother called me and said that my eldest brother was borrowing money from everyone in the village and wouldn’t say why. I wondered why he would borrow money when he didn’t need it. Over the years, I’d bought him everything he needed: food, clothing, and his daily necessities. He wasn’t spending any of his own money. What did he borrow the money for?

When I went home and asked him why, he wouldn’t tell me, saying it was none of my business. Later, I got my sister, brother-in-law, and my other brother together, and we asked him about it. He finally told us that he’d met a young woman at the market. She told him that her mother was going to divorce her father, and she would ask her mother to marry him after the divorce.

That night, the girl’s mother called my brother and said that she was willing to marry him, but only after the divorce, for which she needed to give her husband a certain amount of money. She wanted to borrow some money from my brother and would repay him after the divorce, when she would get a portion of the family property. Eager to find a wife, my brother believed her and agreed to lend her the money.

The girl came to my brother for the money. My brother gave her it to her and got an IOU. She came several more times and got all the money my brother had. But it was not enough, so my brother went everywhere to borrow money. I told him that he was being cheated. We all advised him, but he wouldn’t listen.

The next day, he gave the mother another 8,000 yuan. She said she would get divorced that day and would return all the money that evening. I was blown away. My brother had worked so hard all his life to earn roughly two hundred thousand yuan, only to have it all swindled away.

My nephew, his uncle, and I went to the girl’s village and asked about her. We learned that the girl and her mother specifically targeted single men in the countryside and conned them out of their money. They had been in a detention center several times. The girl had used a false name on the IOU. My brother was dumbfounded when he heard this.

My nephew’s uncle said he would go to the girl’s house that night to ask for the money, and he would call the police if she didn’t return it. He asked me to go along.

My heart was filled with mixed emotions. I felt heartbroken, like I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I complained to my brother: “Have I done something wrong to you? I felt that you had suffered a lot since I was a child, and you paid for my education. So, after I got married, I thought of you for everything, including food, clothing, and daily necessities. I bought you pots and pans, a new refrigerator, color TVs, bedding, and clothes. I saved the best food for you. But you didn’t even notify me about such a big decision. Now that you have lost all your money, how are you going to live?” My sister even blamed me for all that had happened.

Nothing Is Accidental for a Cultivator

I wanted to cry after I got home. I reflected on myself with tears in my eyes: Nothing is accidental for cultivators, so why did something like this happen? What’s going on? I realized it was my affection, my affection for my eldest brother was too strong. I wanted him to enjoy life and not suffer. But how can he eliminate his karma if he doesn’t suffer? If he, in some previous life owed someone, and the debt between them is not settled because of my interference, then haven’t I done something bad? Thinking about this, I told my nephew and his uncle that I would not go that night, that I would no longer be involved.

It is a blessing to practice Falun Dafa. While I was worried about what my brother was going to live on, it happened that the village began to provide minimum living allowances. He would receive several hundred yuan a month, so his basic expenses would be covered.

This incident exposed many of my human attachments: the attachment to profit, complaint, meddling in other people’s affairs, controlling other people’s fates, and self-interest.

I was upset and didn’t want to see my brother for over a year. Whenever I had something good, I thought of what he’d done and got angry, and I wouldn’t give it to him. As time went by and I understood the Fa better, my thinking gradually changed: “I do need to repay my brother for supporting me so that I could go to school, but giving him material things is only one aspect. The key is to help him improve in terms of the Fa.”

Having said that, when it came down to truly letting go of the attachment, it was not that easy. Maybe my heart was not clean. I went home and heard from my nephew that that woman had gone to my brother’s house again. She said she was going to the neighboring village and borrowed my brother’s electric car. She said she would return it soon, but she never came back and the electric car was gone.

I got angry again and yelled at my brother: “Why didn’t you didn’t let your brother and the others know she was coming so we could ask her to return the money she owed you? You even lent her your car! You are so stupid.” Then I thought again: “Maybe he hadn’t paid her back enough for what he owed in a previous life. Or maybe he was losing money to avoid a tribulation.” Well, my heart was affected again. I did not respond well to this test in my cultivation.

I calmed down and said to my brother, “Why did this happen? It is because you have an attachment to lust and living a good life.” He realized it, too, and knew that he had strayed from the Fa. He said he would study the Fa more and cultivate well in the future. By talking about it, I was able to see things from his perspective and understand him better. I stopped complaining about him. My concern about him has faded.

Looking back, the most important reason my brother was deceived was that he did not have an environment for group Fa study. He was separated from the Fa and only wanted to live a good life among ordinary people. I, who have an unshakable responsibility to Dafa, did not give him timely guidance about cultivation.

After Master’s articles “Dafa Spiritual Practice Is Serious” and “Stay Out of Danger” were published, several of us practitioners in the city talked and decided that we should organize a Fa-study site in the village. During the Fa-rectification period, each practitioner is responsible, and we all have the responsibility to restore our Fa-study sites.

Other practitioners and I in the city went back to my hometown and organized practitioners who had studied the Fa and discussed things with us before, and we encouraged the former assistant there to establish Fa-study sites. I went there twice and studied the two articles “Dafa Spiritual Practice Is Serious” and “Stay Out of Danger” with practitioners. We also studied the Minghui editorial article “Responsibility” and shared about it. The practitioners all realized their responsibilities and missions as well as the urgency of the matter, and the Fa-study site was re-established.

At first, I was worried that my eldest brother’s lack of literacy, slow reading, and stutter would affect his progress in studying the Fa. One night we went to my hometown and studied the Fa together. I found that he read very fluently, without stuttering. I was very surprised. Dafa is truly extraordinary! As I am writing this, I unintentionally discovered another attachment of mine—worry. It is indeed an attachment. I thought: “Well! Once you realize it, destroy it completely!”

Now, with Master’s blessing, my brother is making steady progress and improving in the group Fa-study environment. As I studied the Fa more deeply, my attachment to sentimentality for my elder brother gradually faded.