(Minghui.org) When I first started practicing Falun Dafa, my family was still very poor. We barely got to eat any meat throughout the year. Therefore, I did not have any feeling about getting rid of the attachment to meat.
After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started persecuting Falun Dafa practitioners, I had to stay away from home and led a wandering life. After going through a few years of being chased and intercepted by the CCP, my life gradually stabilized and I started working and earning money. I even used my own salary to set up an information material production site. My quality of living became relatively better than before. I was able to eat meat more often, but I still did not feel that it was tasty.
Gradually, I began to find meat tasty and I ate it more regularly. However, I often had a toothache after eating meat. Initially, I thought that it was caused by my speech so I started to control my speech. However, I still had a toothache. Later, I thought that this was to get rid of my past karma. Then, I thought it was because the meat was hard as I often fried the meat until it formed a crispy shell. In order to make the meat softer, I boiled it instead. Anyway, the toothache remained.
Sometimes I thought, “Is this for me to get rid of my attachment to meat?” As I often seemed to feel that it was not so normal to buy meat and eat it every day. However, I read the teaching about eating meat in Zhuan Falun, the main text of Dafa.
Master said,
“In order to remove this attachment, what should be done? Upon eating meat, the person’s stomach will hurt. If he doesn’t eat it, he will not have pain.” (Lecture Seven, Zhuan Falun)
I thought, “My stomach does not hurt. Thus, I still ate meat often and did so for a few years. My teeth also ached for a few years, too but I still did not realize that this was to get rid of my attachment to meat.
Later, I ran out of ways to deal with the toothache and I thought, “Is the toothache trying to hint to me to get rid of the attachment to meat?” However, despite this thought, I still bought meat, cooked it, and was about to eat it. But the toothache was so severe that it felt as though eating meat was no longer an enjoyment but more of a torture. At that moment, I was determined to abstain from meat and the toothache immediately went away. However, I could not throw away the meat that was already cooked, so I was about to eat it again. This resulted in another toothache, but this time it was not so painful. I struggled to finish eating the meat and I thought, “Get rid of it! I am not going to eat meat anymore.” After abstaining from meat, the toothache really stopped. In the past, all my teeth were loose, making the gums soft and painful.
However, my attachment to eating meat did not subside. I just forced myself not to eat it. After a period of time, I could not help myself and bought another piece of meat again. This time I used the meat to make dumplings and ate them while harboring fear of the toothache returning. When I woke up next morning, I felt as if my teeth had floated off the gums and were about to fall out. This scared me so much that I no longer dared to eat meat. My teeth thus were fine. I no longer yearned to eat meat after getting rid of the attachment.
Why did some people suffer from stomachache when they had a strong attachment to meat while for me it was a toothache? For so many years, I did not realize that the toothache was caused by my attachment to meat. Later I realized that this was because if Dafa were so clear that I would not have any of my own understanding, I would just follow the Dafa book. As cultivation requires us to have our own understandings of the Fa, if I were to have a stomachache upon eating meat, I would automatically know that that is for me to get rid of the attachment to eating meat and this would not involve any of my own elevation in understanding. If it is not my own understanding, it would not be counted to have cultivated myself in this aspect, therefore Master changed the method to test whether I could improve my understanding on my own.
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