(Minghui.org) I’m in my 60s and I started practicing Falun Dafa, also known as Falun Gong, in June 1995.
In May 1995, I borrowed a copy of Falun Gong Materials Compilation from a colleague. This book was about Master remotely treating listeners’ illnesses on several radio stations and in his lectures. After reading this book, the supernatural phenomenon mentioned in the book made me realize that the benevolence the Buddha School talks about is not just ordinary people’s kindness. This book ignited in me a great interest in Falun Gong.
However, I also remained extremely cautious, because there were so many qigong scams back then. After my initial introduction, I read the book Falun Gong. The Buddhist tradition, Taoist tradition, and prehistoric civilization mentioned in the book totally upended my earlier understanding. I felt that the book truly made sense.
While reading Dafa books, I experienced a very strong feeling of warmth. Even when the room was cold, I felt so hot that I had to keep removing my outerwear, layer by layer. Even when I was down to just an undershirt, I still felt hot.
I still remember that at that time, I felt so hot that I had to clutch my chest. I did not know why reading the book would have such an effect. I only realized a few years later that the phenomenon actually originated from Master’s grace! It was Master’s supremely magnificent offering to a sentient being, worth more than anything in this human world!
I then joined a class organized by the local assistance center to watch Master’s lecture recordings. After the third lecture, I started practicing the five exercises. After completing all the lectures, I shared the same feeling as many other practitioners: Falun Dafa was what I had been ardently waiting for amidst the muddled and aimless drift of life. I wanted to assimilate to the Fa. Master mentioned returning to our original, true selves and our fundamental nature—the ultimate purpose of life.
Zhuan Falun had just been published at the time, and the assistance center’s person-in-charge had brought only a few copies from Beijing. Although the number of books was not enough for all the veteran practitioners, when I mentioned that I wanted to read the book, he handed me his copy without hesitation. Through this practitioner, who had attended Master’s lectures in person, I witnessed a particularly noble quality in how he conducted himself and interacted with others.
At the end of April 1996, when I had been cultivating in Dafa for about a year, a female practitioner from Changchun Normal University moved to our area. She’d started practicing Dafa early on and was connected with the Changchun assistance center. As our area’s practitioners were growing in number, she discussed with the practitioners in charge of the assistance centers of Changchun and our area to arrange a trip for everyone to visit Changchun during the May holidays.
Everyone was eager to go to Changchun, so the assistants helped us all buy train tickets. On the evening of April 30, we boarded the train. We filled two train carriages, but only the assistance center’s person-in-charge and one other practitioner had attended Master’s lectures in person. The rest of us were new practitioners.
On the morning of May 1, we arrived at the Changchun train station before dawn, and several young volunteer practitioners were there waiting for us. We were divided into three groups and the volunteer practitioners led us to different designated places.
My group was led by a female graduate student who took us to Victory Park. Having read Master’s teachings over and over, we naturally felt a special sense of reverence for the place where Master first began teaching the Fa.
We stopped at an open area in the park, right next to a secluded hill. Our guide told us that this was the very spot where Master had started teaching the Fa to the public. We then did the exercises alongside local practitioners, who had started arriving one after another. The energy field was intensely powerful, like I’d never experienced before. After completing the exercises, we had a brief experience-sharing session with local practitioners before settling into a guesthouse that the Changchun practitioners had arranged for us.
At 10 a.m., a young male practitioner led us to Jilin University for an experience-sharing conference. Jilin University is also a place that Master specifically mentioned in his lectures. After arriving at the university, we gathered with lecturers and professors in the auditorium and listened as they shared about how they had obtained the Fa.
A female lecturer who was wearing glasses spoke about the time after she had just obtained the Fa and did not understand the seriousness of Dafa’s teaching that we should practice only one cultivation way. So she passed along a qigong book from another practice among practitioners. Master mentioned in Lecture Six of Zhuan Falun,
“As one of our students was flipping through the pages of a qigong book, a big snake jumped out of it.” (Lecture Six, Zhuan Falun)
This female practitioner was the student mentioned in this lecture. She said that in Journey to the West, Monk Tang Seng had to set out on his journey to obtain the scriptures because he had no Fa to guide his cultivation. But for Dafa practitioners, everyone has Master’s books so we just need to put our hearts into cultivation. We do not need to travel far and wide like Monk Tang Seng. Many of us resonated with her sharing and we all gave her a round of applause.
That night, we studied Zhuan Falun with the university professors, teachers, and students. For those of us from smaller cities, it was a novel and deeply moving experience to see that among the practitioners in Changchun there were so many highly educated people, including university lecturers, professors, and graduate students, all actively practicing Dafa.
The next morning, a Changchun practitioner took us to the Changchun Zoo and Botanical Garden to share experiences with the practitioners there. Although not many practitioners attended, we gained a lot from the sharing. A local practitioner told us that the coordinator of the teaching assistance center at this practice site was the one Master mentioned in the following passage of Zhuan Falun:
“When I was teaching the Fa and the practice in Taiyuan, there was a student over fifty years old. She and her spouse had come to attend my lectures. As they were crossing the street, a car drove by very fast, and its side mirror caught the elderly lady’s clothes. With her clothes caught by the car, the lady was dragged for a distance of over ten meters and “Bam!” slammed to the ground.” (Lecture Four, Zhuan Falun)
That elderly lady was the wife of this practitioner. He and his wife had followed Master to Taiyuan to listen to his lecture, when that incident happened.
After that, a 90-year-old woman shared a miracle that had happened to her after she obtained the Fa. This woman had a hunched back for many years, with her back bent at a 90-degree angle, and the condition was believed to be incurable. She just lived with that stooped posture for years. One time, after she’d started practicing Falun Dafa, she thought she heard someone calling her from behind, so she turned around to look. To her surprise, there was no one shouting for her, but her back suddenly straightened up.
We all witnessed this elderly woman, who was sitting there with quiet dignity, her back no longer painfully bent. She recounted her extraordinary experiences in a calm, understated manner.
After we returned from Changchun, many new practitioners actively studied and promoted the Fa. We went out to promote the Fa, organized the new practitioners to study the Fa together, helped people learn the exercises, and organized experience-sharing gatherings.
During that period of time, I experienced many amazing things in my cultivation. For example, when I was preparing to play recordings of Master’s overseas lectures, I was reviewing the video by myself. As I watched Master’s lecture on the television, I saw Falun coming out of the screen like snowflakes. This miraculous vision gave me great encouragement.
Another time, I asked to borrow a neighbor’s video recorder and he readily agreed. However, there was still a videotape inside the recorder. When I tried to play it, the tape would not play, and eventually, it got all tangled up. It was then that I realized that it was a pornographic video, so Master did not want me to see it.
One day in the summer of 1997, I played the recording of the Dafa practitioners’ cultivation experience sharing conference in Jinzhou for practitioners who’d come to my house. Many practitioners saw that the Taiji symbols in the Falun diagram behind the practitioners who were sharing their experiences opened up like doors, and Master’s Law Body (Fashen) came out from them.
Practicing the meditation was very hard for me at that time. I could not do the full lotus position for prolonged periods of time. After just 10 minutes, my legs would hurt so much that I felt I was going to faint. When I was meditating, my legs would turn dark purple such that people would say that I had too much karma.
I set a goal of doing the meditation for half an hour in order to prove my worth. Then, in one of Master’s overseas lectures, I heard Master mention a situation about setting meditation goals that was similar to mine. I was amazed and said with a sigh, “Master seems to be by my side, watching me meditate. He knows everything about my situation!”
After I finished the meditation and the exercises, I would see Master’s portrait on my wall look vivid and lifelike, shifting and flickering. I later realized that I should not place so much emphasis on looking at Master’s portrait, as it could develop into an attachment.
On July 20, 1999, the former leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Jiang Zemin, driven by jealousy, started his insane persecution campaign against Falun Gong. Practitioners went to Beijing in droves to submit petitions. I rushed to Beijing to submit my petition on July 21 and was intercepted by the Beijing police on the morning of July 22. I was forcibly put onto a bus along with many other practitioners who had arrived in Beijing, and we were taken to Fengtai Stadium.
At the Beijing Fengtai Stadium, the practitioners who filled the stadium formed a stark contrast with the armed police surrounding the stadium. The Falun Dafa practitioners displayed exceptional orderliness, while the armed police, a unit trained for military purposes and commanded by officers, maintained solemnity and discipline.
In contrast, the solemnity and orderliness of the practitioners arose naturally without any command. When we recited Master’s Hong Yin and On Dafa in unison, we were synchronized and resonant. It was a magnificent spectacle created by practitioners from all over China, who had never met before. For those who experienced it, that scene was indeed something never to be forgotten.
Master taught us,
“Practice with the heart you first had, and success is assured.” (“Dafa Spiritual Practice is Serious”)
Master has mentioned this many times in his lectures. When we first listened to Master’s lectures, we felt and understood that we were returning to our original, true selves. Cultivation guides us to return to our innate nature, helps us fulfill our vow to follow Master home, and empowers our mission to save sentient beings.