(Minghui.org) Both Western and traditional Chinese medicine have explanations for the causes of various diseases, but many cultures also believe that there are deeper reasons for why people suffer from illnesses. In the East, there is a belief that karmic relationships dictate that good is rewarded and evil is punished. In the West there is the saying, “You reap what you sow.”

Both Eastern and Western cultures have noted the cause and effect in people's actions resulting in different consequences and fate. As we can see in the three examples below, that has held true from ancient times through to today.　

A Story from the Qing Dynasty

Xiao Dou Peng (Little Beans Canopy) is a collection of short novels from the Qing Dynasty. One story is about Li Kejiu’s grandmother, who was able to speak three days after she was born. She told her family about her previous life.

In her previous life, she was a man surnamed Chen. As the magistrate in Hongdong County, Shanxi Province, Chen ruled with an iron fist and enjoyed torturing people. While still a young man, he fell off his horse and died. After his death, he met the King of Hell in the underworld and was sentenced to be reborn as a woman in his next life with a life expectancy of 23 years. During this new life, Chen was expected to suffer to pay for the sins of his previous life.

When Li’s grandmother (the reincarnation of Chen in this life) was about 7 years old, an official surnamed Wang passed by her house. She recognized him as one of the students who took the imperial exam to become an official with her in her previous life. The two chatted about many things she did in her past life as Chen. Wang knew that Chen was good at painting and asked her to paint something. But her hands were disabled in this life and she could no longer paint.

As she grew up, she contracted various diseases, which left permanent scars on her face, as well as a tumor on her neck.

Her husband mistreated her and she suffered a great deal. She died of massive bleeding at age 23.

Paralysis and Tuberculosis of the Bone

Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), an American prophet, was one of the most famous American clairvoyants. He was able to diagnose people under hypnosis and could see the root causes of their illnesses. In his lifetime, Cayce looked into 14,306 cases and found that illnesses were caused by people’s bad deeds in the past. When people committed wrongdoings, they accumulated a lot of karma, which accompanied them in their reincarnations and could not be avoided or shaken off—it had to be repaid.

One example was a young man who’d broken his back in a car accident at the age of 16. As a result, he was paralyzed from the fifth vertebra down and was wheelchair-bound. At the age of 23, his mother asked Cayce to interpret the cause of his illness.

Under hypnosis, Cayce traced the past lives of the paralyzed youth. In one of them, he was a soldier in the Roman Empire when Christians were persecuted. He took pleasure in watching the torture of Christians and also participated in it. Because suppressing righteous believers created sinful karma, he carried the karmic debt with his reincarnation to this life. No amount of good doctors, treatment, or rehabilitation could heal him in this life.

In another case, a girl was suffering from tuberculosis of the hip and was in severe pain. Cayce looked into her past lives and saw that she was once an aristocrat in the Roman Empire when Nero reigned. Nero ordered Christians to be thrown into the arena and be torn apart by lions. When she saw a young girl being savaged by the lions because of her faith, she laughed without mercy, taking pleasure in the suffering of the martyrs. Her tuberculosis of the bone in this life was her punishment for making fun of the suffering of Christians in that life.

A Vicious Man's Confession

Religious persecution continues to this day. Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa), a meditation system based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, for example, has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1999. As a result of the CCP's massive defamatory propaganda, many Chinese are hostile towards Falun Gong practitioners.

A report on the Minghui website told about a man who suffered from a stroke, cerebellar atrophy, and chorea. He was in great pain and could not take care of himself. In the article, he confessed this was all due to the sins he generated himself.

Born in 1952, the man was a teenager when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. Influenced by the hatred and rebelliousness fomented by the movement, he turned vicious and even dared to curse and beat his own mother. After he married, he physically abused his wife. He did not help raise the children or do household chores and continued to beat his wife as well as the children.

His wife was so depressed that she contemplated suicide many times. But she could not leave her son and daughter. What would become of them if she was no longer there to protect them from their abusive father? She continued to work hard to support the family and raise the children. Her husband spent his income on alcohol and cigarettes, contributing nothing to the family finances. He did not care about anyone, constantly fighting with co-workers, neighbors, and family members.

His wife later began to practice Falun Dafa, and only then did her life change for the better, and happiness return to her heart. He tried every way possible to stop her from practicing. After he ruined her Falun Dafa books in 1998, she divorced him and left with the children.

He had his first stroke in 2013 and then a brain stem infarction. He was hospitalized multiple times and ended up becoming disabled and needing constant care. When his ex-wife learned of his pitiable condition, she and their daughter took turns taking care of him for five years.

In March 2020, he noticed stiffness in his limbs and had trouble swallowing again. He was scared of having another stroke. His ex-wife told him about some of the miracles people who practiced Falun Dafa had experienced and urged him to recite “Falun Dafa is good, Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance is good.”

The man recited the phrases all night and was recovered by the next morning. Since then, he has been reciting the phrases on a daily basis. He sincerely repented his past wrongdoing and promised to get rid of his bad habits to become a good person.