Cultivating Myself Amid Our Family’s Financial Tribulation

(Minghui.org) I began to practice Falun Dafa when I attended college in 1998. I was 22 years old at the time. I then entered graduate school for a doctoral degree. However, due to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) persecution of Dafa, I was unable to continue my studies and only received a Master’s degree.

I have cultivated Dafa for 25 years. My cultivation path has been bumpy, and I have stumbled multiple times, yet I have also matured and tempered my xinxing. I now understand the seriousness of cultivation. I also treasure the great and most glorious title in the universe: “Falun Dafa practitioner.”

Wanting to Divorce My Husband

My husband used to be a practitioner. I married him because I wanted to rely on him financially. But six months after we married, he stopped practicing. For a long time, I had constant conflicts with him. Each of us felt that we couldn’t communicate with the another. When he had a temper tantrum, he beat me, whereas I always looked down on him and gave him the cold shoulder. Our relationship was as bad as possible, and we lived like that for more than a decade.

Two years ago, I stumbled in my cultivation. I could no longer tolerate his beating me. My thoughts had veered off the Fa, so I asked for a divorce and wanted to marry someone else. He got so upset that he binged on buying lottery tickets online to vent his emotions and used up all of our savings. He then took out loans from several loan-shark websites, plus bank loans, totaling several hundred thousand yuan, which he used to buy more lottery tickets. In the end, our family was left penniless and saddled with a huge debt. My husband spent his days lying in bed reading novels. He didn’t eat and only thought about dying.

When he shared with me all that he did, I collapsed. I felt like I had reached a dead end and quietly shed tears. In despair, I opened up an issue of Minghui Weekly and a story titled “A Desperate Situation Does Not Necessarily Mean a Dead End” caught my eye. A rafting explorer ran into trouble and drifted to a remote island. His only shelter, a broken wooden hut, was burned down in an inexplicable fire a few days later. He was in utter despair. However, people on a distant ship saw the fire on the island and took it as a plea for help, and they rescued him. The article concludes by saying: Desperate situations often contain an opportunity for survival, because you don’t know what kind of arrangement God has. So, my friend, please don’t be disappointed, because a desperate situation does not necessarily mean a dead end.

After I read this article, I felt as if Master was enlightening me. Even though on the surface, it appeared that I was in a desperate situation, it may just be Master’s arrangement. The thought of running away from it kept going through my mind. I wanted to leave him and take our kid away to stay with my parents. However, my main consciousness knew that since I’m a practitioner, I couldn’t handle it that way.

I then rectified my thought of wanting to divorce and marry someone else. I began to seriously look into my cultivation state. When I saw some of my attachments, he stopped beating me.

Fellow Practitioners Reminded Me to Look Inward

I sent an email to a couple of practitioners about my experience. After they read it, they shared with me an article published on the Minghui website titled: “Life is a Sea of Suffering, Dafa Has Supported My Broken Family.” In addition, they came to see me the next morning. When I opened the door and saw them standing there, I was very touched.

What made me most grateful was that, amid the tribulation, they didn’t comfort me like regular people would, nor did they say anything bad about my husband. They just said, “Master Li said, ‘...looking within is a magical tool...’ (“Fa Teaching Given at the 2009 Washington, D.C. International Fa Conference,” Collected Teachings Given Around the World Volume IX). The tribulation occurred because you fell short in your xinxing.”

Even though I no longer resented my husband, looking inward was no easy task. I appreciated the practitioners for their timely and selfless help.

In the beginning, they said I had an attachment to money, but I disagreed. They also asked why I went to a big city to work a couple of years ago. What kind of attachment was behind that? I realized that on the surface, my going out of town to work seemed logical; however, behind this was an attachment to money, which was hard to detect.

My reason for going to the city to work was because the pay was a lot better, which came down to my attachment to self-interest. Plus, it made me look good, which was related to my attachment to fame. Meanwhile, I couldn’t let go of my degree and expertise. I felt the job was a perfect match for my credentials. All of these were attachments that I hadn’t been aware of for a long time.

The next day I went to see Ms. Cai. She was helping Ms. Ding, who was going through a serious illness-karma tribulation. Ms. Cai told me that during the process of helping Ms. Ding, she found her own attachments. Her state of quietly looking inward touched me.

I then found my own attachments: First off, I had an attachment to relying on others. All along, I wanted to rely on my husband financially, so that I could cultivate in a more relaxed way. However, it turned out that I couldn’t rely on him; moreover, I ended up having to support him. Secondly, I became indifferent to my husband. Because I didn’t take him seriously, evil factors manipulated him to buy lottery tickets. Thirdly, I felt what happened to him had nothing to do with me. And if something went wrong, it wouldn’t be a big deal for me to divorce him.

Ms. Cai exuded a pure field of looking inward, which helped me. Cultivation is truly miraculous!

Through Fa-study, Master enlightened me about my fourth attachment, which was that I was very timid. I thought if nothing went wrong, that’d be great. I was afraid of anything big going wrong, but that is what ended up occurring. My fifth attachment, negative thinking, was as if I had a layer of negative thoughts inside me. This is what triggered my tribulation. I had thought that since my husband didn’t study the Fa, he would be manipulated by the old forces to do bad things. Actually, any tribulation that a practitioner runs into is for eliminating karma or improving one’s xinxing. So it will work out regardless.

I noticed that Ms. Ding, who was in the midst of a serious illness-karma tribulation, had a smile on her face. Her shining face made me snap out of my negative thinking, I felt the light of the Buddha Fa had shone into my heart. I no longer felt the tribulation pressing down on me, but just looked at it like anything else. When I studied the Fa again, I realized that those attachments were piles of stones that were being removed.

When I began to think about how I would unconditionally work with my husband to face the big mess he had made, the thought “I’m so great!” kept popping up. My attachment to fame had flared up again. I tried in vain to dispel it.

I then decided to listen to more experience sharing articles. When I heard the podcast titled “Stop the Influence of Communist Party Culture (2) – Following Traditional Chinese Culture,” I suddenly realized: “Feeling great about myself” wasn’t an attachment to fame, but rather came down to Party culture. When the Chinese people ran into natural calamities, the CCP liked to demonstrate its greatness, honor, and righteousness. Didn’t I also behave that way? At the point where my husband ran into trouble, I only helped him a little bit because I wanted to show off how great I was. When I became clear about it, this aspect of Party culture was removed by Master instantly.

I realized that in my day-to-day life, I hadn’t put my heart into looking inward. However, when I did want to look inward and had this true thought, Master would immediately help me find my attachments so that I could get rid of them. I also realized that if the attachment I found was not the cause, then it wouldn’t do until I could find the root cause of it. Say, for example, if it turned out to be related to Party culture, whereby I treated it just as an attachment, I wouldn’t be able to get rid of it.

If I Wanted to Pass This Trial, Then I’d Be Able to

The practitioner couple came to my home every week to study the Fa and share their understandings, so I improved rapidly. At the same time, through having sent forth righteous thoughts for a long time, my husband improved as well. He went from lying in bed and only thinking about death, to beginning to move around and eat. He was ready to face our financial difficulties.

At the time, no matter where I went to study the Fa, I always came across this passage in Lecture Four of Zhuan Falun:

“All of them can be overcome as long as you elevate your mind. You should be able to pull through unless you are not determined to.” (The Fourth Talk, Zhuan Falun)

I was in shock, I felt that Master was encouraging me. I asked myself if I truly believed in Master and Dafa. If so, why did I feel upset in my heart?

After we finished studying the Fa one evening, a practitioner relayed a passage from Zhuan Falun about a qigong master who would not argue with others when they were allocating an apartment. She asked if we were to run into this matter, how many of us could honestly say, “Then one of you can have it.” (The Ninth Talk, Zhuan Falun)

Her words hit me hard! It made me recall an incident from a few years ago: When I married my husband in 2007, my father-in-law had already passed away, whereas my mother-in-law was close to 80 years old. A brother-in-law took a few other brothers-in-law to do farm work. Afterward, they bought a dilapidated house for us with the 5,000 yuan they earned.

Due to the poor condition of the house, I didn’t feel much need for a house title transfer. So my husband signed a private contract with the previous owner, without having the house title transferred. Unexpectedly, a few years later, the old house was demolished and replaced with a new house. His brother asked to transfer the house to his name, but still have us occupy the house. My husband reluctantly agreed, but I strongly disagreed, as I felt his brother was too selfish. In the end, the house was still owned by us. Whenever this was mentioned, I always took credit for it.

Through Fa-study, I came to enlighten that what happened was a trial for my cultivation. When his brother asked for the house, I should have just said: Please take it. The house didn’t belong to us to begin with. It was through Master’s help that we obtained it. However, because I didn’t see my hidden attachment to self-interest, I got something that shouldn’t belong to me, which later caused our financial difficulties.

When our group read Lecture Four in Zhuan Falun again, I came to realize that the practitioner mentioned spent one yuan and won a luxury children’s bicycle. But he ended up getting something he didn’t pay for, so he had to exchange his virtue for it. However, I spent 5,000 yuan to buy a crummy house; then it was upgraded to a new house worth over 100,000 yuan. Didn’t I take something that I didn’t deserve? Wouldn’t I lose virtue? But I used the convenient excuse that the new house was the result of demolition and completely forgot about what Master mentioned about “Costs and Rewards.”

After thinking it over, what Master arranged for me was truly the best: My brother-in-law not only hosted our wedding ceremony, which fulfilled his responsibility of being an elderly brother, but also provided a house for us to live in. Meanwhile, he tried to help me improve my xinxing and let go of my pursuing self-interest. What a great deal it was! However, since I didn’t know how to solidly cultivate, I ended up missing the opportunity to improve. Moreover, I always gloated that we got to keep the house. However, this was a bad deed that led to our financial hardship.

I realized that our possessing the house was only meant for a brief time. So why did I become attached to whose name it was under? Did I want to hold onto things in the human world? I recognized my greed, as well as a strong attachment to worldly things. In Zhuan Falun, Master mentioned that Buddha Shakyamuni asked his disciples to let go of even their begging bowls. Why did I have such a great attachment to property in the human world?

My Husband’s Family Witnesses the Beauty of Dafa

A few years ago, my husband and I started online stores. He sold men’s clothing, whereas I sold women’s clothing. I earned just a few thousand yuan , but he earned more than a hundred thousand. Both of us tried to boost our sales by writing good reviews based on falsified transactions. The sales were fake, but I considered the reviews I wrote to be real, as the quality of clothing was very good. I used that excuse to comfort myself, thinking I didn’t distort the facts, and it didn’t go against Dafa’s standard of Truthfulness.

However, I began to receive returns for almost every single sale I made. When I wondered why, Master gave me a hint in a dream that this was attributed to the fact I owed a debt for faking those sales. Master also hinted that the same thing didn’t happen to my husband because he didn’t practice cultivation.

In thinking back, all the vendors were making false transactions to write positive reviews, so I thought it was acceptable. But this was due to the decline of moral standards. Regardless of what people think is normal, whoever does such a thing is using improper means to sell their products, which also infringes upon the interests of other sellers. All sellers involved in fraudulent transactions will have to pay for them with virtue, let alone practitioners.

After I enlightened to this, I realized that the amount of money my husband lost on buying lottery tickets was exactly the same as the income he earned from his online store, and the house demolition proceeds. How could there be such a coincidence? How could I still resent him? We then decided to work together to settle the debt.

Through Fa-study, I realized the reason I didn’t feel particularly heavy in my heart about the debt he owed was because I just looked for an out for myself. If something happened to him, I’d just go stay with my parents. Besides, both my parents were practitioners. Fundamentally, I treated the marriage that gods arranged as child’s play. When I ran into a tribulation, I looked outward and wanted to rely on others.

I told myself that I had to walk my cultivation path and not push my tribulations onto others. I wouldn’t go to stay with my parents or turn away from the tribulation. I’d support my family. I’d make a breakthrough based on the Fa, dismantle my attachments, walk my cultivation path in an upright manner, and be a true Dafa disciple.

I encouraged my husband to pay off his debt with a true heart. First off, we sold our new house, which helped to pay off the bulk of the debt. But with those loan sharks, I didn’t know what to do. A new policy then came out that stipulated loan shark payments were illegal. I discussed this with my husband and decided that we should still pay back both the principal and interest as stipulated by law. So the problem of the loan sharks would be resolved. When I faced the family debt with courage, our income suddenly jumped higher, with more than ten thousand yuan coming in every month.

To my surprise, our relatives wondered: Under such great pressure, how did I manage to help my husband to snap out of this tribulation. They often said, “You are so great! If it were someone else, they’d have divorced.” “I just knew your family was being supported by you.” I then took this opportunity to talk to them about the beauty of Dafa, and they gradually changed their misunderstandings of the practice. Before then, my husband’s family didn’t like me. But through this experience, they came to see the mighty virtue of Dafa. They began to respect me, a practitioner, and were receptive to hearing the truth about the persecution.

I gradually came to understand that everything we encounter in our cultivation is a good thing. Only by cultivating ourselves with a true heart can our xinxing be elevated, so that we can touch sentient beings’ hearts and save them. If we were to just give lip service, then people wouldn’t be convinced, and we couldn’t save them. I also came to understand that when someone lets go of his or her self-interest and becomes altruistic, the kind of happiness gained is beyond description. This was something that I’ve never experienced before.

This is my cultivation experience, please kindly point out anything inappropriate.