Hyperspace Fool wrote:
While I do find there is something to the above excerpt, and my comments on this thread show this to some degree... especially concerning the amount of time it takes to truly cultivate a Chi Kung practice....
I must, however, note that Falun Dafa and its system of Falun Gong are NOT truly old school internal arts systems, but rather a new and somewhat political movement. I deplore the Chinese government's vicious suppression of Falun Dafa. It is something to consider, though, why no other internal art system is currently banned in China... in fact, the Chinese government is going out of its way to promote medical Chi Kung and a wide variety of internal arts.
Well the Truth is that Falun Dafa was released to the secular world in 1992 so alot of people mistake it for a rather new Qi Gong practice. However it's True origins are very ancient indeed, it used to be passed down in a lineage type way through the generations in secret so thats why nobody has heard of this practice in the past :
An excerpt from Zhuan Falun:
Our Falun Dafa is one of the Buddhist system’s 84,000 disciplines. It’s never been passed on to the general public before during this period of civilization, but it did once save people on a large scale in a prehistoric age. Today I’m spreading it again widely during this final period of the kalpa’s end, so it’s just extremely precious.
(I share more on the True age of Dafa at the end of my post)
As for why Falun Dafa, which upholds the principles of Truthfulness, Compassion, and Tolerance and has been promulgated in over 60 countries worldwide is being persecuted only in China, not anywhere else in the world?
The truth is rather shocking and can all be found here:
Hyperspace fool wrote:
All I can really say, is that I don't know any Chi Kung master that takes Falun Gong overly seriously. This doesn't, in and of itself, negate anything that was said above about charlatans and such, but it does call into question how advanced the masters who practice it really are. Any moderately skilled Sifu I know is perfectly capable of protecting themselves from absorbing negative energy for instance. And it is somewhat child's play to merge one's energy with others and not absorb any malignant chi from them whatsoever. Furthermore, one does not have to "spend" any of one's personal energy when influencing the chi of another. The energetic systems I studied employ more of an empty technique whereby the practitioner is more of a channel for universal chi (which is infinite) and thus works more like a tube or fire hose than like a battery that has to be charged up.
Actually millions of people now practice Falun Dafa worldwide and consider it a Truly powerful and healing system that has benefited people from all walks of life. There is a book on the healing effects of Dafa that many will find quite interesting. It discusses in depth how Dafa has healed them from many serious ailments:
BOOK INTRODUCTIONThe amazing stories in this book are first-hand accounts of people from all walks of life who recovered from serious, or in many cases, terminal diseases through practicing Falun Dafa.
en.minghui.org
Healing is only the initial level of Falun Dafa and they do not call it healing but 'purifying the body'. One cannot cultivate high energy matter which they call Gong with an ailing body so the initial part is to fully purify the body to the point of no illness.
From this initial foundation the True Goal of Cultivation is actually the Cultivation of Buddhahood. It is truly a far reaching and profound spiritual science.
Hyperspace it sounds like you have not fully read or maybe just skimmed over the core book of Dafa which is called Zhuan Falun and which I highly recommend. This cultivation system is far more profound then just healing methods like regular Qi Gong.
The book talks about spiritual things from a scientific perspective. It talks about other dimensions, the soul, the 3rd eye, the cosmos in the microcosm and the macrocosm, supernatural abilities, the True History of Mankind, Transcending the 5 elements and leaving the 3 realms and many many other fascinating things including Healing. It is a spiritual science of the highest order.
Hyperspace fool wrote:
I won't dismiss everything the Zhuan Falun quote says. But I think it very important to consider that Falun Gong is often considered a dangerous and cultish offshoot of the core Kung Fu systems itself. My limited exposure to those people who practice it has always left me scratching my head and thinking why do people think this stuff is so dangerous? It always seems to me as extremely watered down stuff pilfered from other systems. All I can say is that many of its leaders are quite outspoken and have set it up so that the mere practice of a Falun Gong meditation is grounds for imprisonment in China even though said meditations are often just simplified versions of perfectly legal Taoist and Buddhist practices.
Falun Dafa is actually based on the principles of "Truthfulness" "Compassion" and "Forebearance". Those are the core principles of the practice. No money is involved, people practice when and where they choose and people come and go as they choose, no one forces anyone to practice if they do not want to and one can practice by oneself if they choose.
Cults however usually have members join them for money or power or other evil things and they make it so you cannot leave or other bad things like that. That is what a cult usually refers to.
Falun Dafa is translated into English as 'Law Wheel Great Way' and it is not related to Kung Fu. It's true purpose is to allow one to attain the Buddhahood or the Dao and it's orgins are quite profound and very ancient indeed. To get a sense of how Truly ancient Falun Dafa actually is here is a fascinating excerpt from Zhuan Falun on this topic:
Qigong is Part of Prehistoric Culture
What is qigong? A lot of qigong masters are trying to address this question, but what I have to say is completely different. A lot of qigong masters talk about it at one level, while I’m talking at a higher level about how to understand qigong, and it’s nothing like how they understand it. Some qigong masters say that qigong has a 2,000-year history in our country. And others say qigong has a 3,000-year history. Some say it has a 5,000-year history, which would be about the same as the history of our Chinese civilization. And there are people who say that if you go by historic artifacts it has a 7,000-year history, which goes way beyond the history of our Chinese civilization.
But all the same, the date doesn’t go much beyond the history of this civilization. Now, according to Darwin’s theory of evolution, man first evolved from aquatic plants into aquatic animals, then he climbed onto land, and later up into trees, then he came back down and turned into an ape, and then finally he evolved into modern man, who has culture and thought, which puts human civilization at only about 10,000 years old, if you figure that way. Go back a little further and there wouldn’t have even been quipu record-keeping, and they would have worn leaves and eaten raw meat. Go even further back, and maybe they wouldn’t even know how to make fire, and they would have been those totally savage, primitive people.
But something just doesn’t add up. There are a lot of places around the world where traces of ancient cultures have been left, and they’re really a lot older than our civilization. These ancient remains are excellent in terms of their craftsmanship, and if you look at the artistry they’re superb. It’s almost like modern folks are imitating the arts of ancient people, and they have great aesthetic value.
But they’re from more than 100,000 years ago, hundreds of thousands of years ago, millions of years ago, or even more than 100 million years ago. Then think about it, isn’t this making a joke of "history" as we know it? But this really isn’t just another amusing idea, since mankind is perfecting itself and rediscovering itself on an ongoing basis, and that’s just how a society develops, so chances are what it knows at the beginning isn’t totally correct.
A good number of you have probably heard of the term prehistoric culture, which is also called prehistoric civilization. Let’s talk about prehistoric civilization. On the earth there is Asia, Europe, South America, North America, Oceania, Africa, and Antarctica, which geologists group together as continental plates. It’s been tens of millions of years since the continental plates formed, or you could say, a number of land masses rose from the ocean floor, and a lot of land masses sank to the bottom of the sea, and it’s been tens of millions of years since they stabilized as they are now. But at the bottom of a lot of oceans people have found tall and large ancient structures, the structures have elegant designs, and they aren’t cultural remains from today’s human race. So they must have been built before they sank to the sea bottom.
Then who was it tens of millions of years ago that started those civilizations? Back then, our human race wouldn’t have even been monkeys, right—how could we have created such intelligent things? Today archaeologists have discovered that there was an organism called a trilobite, and that creature was active from 600 million years ago up until 260 million years ago. It hasn’t been around for 260 million years. Yet there’s an American scientist who discovered a trilobite fossil, and what was on it but a human footprint, the footprint of somebody wearing shoes, and the print was unmistakable. Isn’t that like playing a joke on historians? If you go by Darwin’s theory of evolution, tell me, could there be human beings 260 million years ago?
In the museum of the National University of Peru there’s a rock that has a human figure etched into it. A study determined that the figure was etched in the rock 30,000 years ago. But this figure is wearing clothes, he has a hat on, and he’s wearing shoes, in his hand he’s got a telescope and he’s observing the stars. Now how could people 30,000 years ago know how to weave cloth and put on clothes? What’s even more incredible is that he’s holding a telescope and observing the stars, he knew something about astronomy. We’ve always thought that the European, Galileo, invented the telescope, and that it was just a little over 300 years ago.
So who would have invented the telescope 30,000 years ago? And there are lots and lots of other unsolved mysteries. For example, many caves in France, South Africa, and the Alps have murals on the slate there, and the murals were etched in a fully lifelike and vivid way. The figures there were etched with great quality, and they’re coated with a type of mineral pigment. But those figures are dressed like modern people, and their clothes look a little like Western-style clothes—they’re wearing breeches. Some of them are holding things like tobacco pipes, and some are holding canes and wearing hats. Do you mean to tell me those monkeys hundreds of thousands of years ago could have had this level of artistry?
Let’s go back a little further. In Africa there’s the Gabon Republic, which has uranium ore. It’s a country that’s pretty underdeveloped and they don’t have the capacity to extract the uranium themselves, so they export the ore to developed countries. In 1972 a plant in France imported that uranium ore, and after chemical analysis they found that the uranium ore had already been tapped and used. They thought it was strange, and so they sent over some scientists and technical personnel to make an on-site investigation. Scientists from a lot of countries went there to investigate. They eventually verified that the uranium ore mine was a large-scale nuclear reactor, and the layout was really technically sound. There’s no way even us modern folks could create something like that. So when was it built? Two billion years ago, and it operated for 500,000 years. These numbers are just astronomical. There’s no way to explain it with Darwin’s theory of evolution.
And there are tons of things like this. The scientific and technological community has discovered enough new things to change our current textbooks. Once mankind gets its thinking stuck in an old, deep rut, it’s hard for people to accept new ideas. And even when the truth is revealed people don’t dare to accept it—they just reject it impulsively. Because of the influence of old ways of thinking nobody is organizing these things today in a systematic way, and so people’s thinking never keeps up with new developments. You bring up these things, and, even though they’ve been discovered, and just not yet publicized much, you have people who still blurt out "blind belief" and just can’t accept it.
There are a lot of brave scientists in other countries who have publicly acknowledged that these things come from prehistoric cultures, and that they’re from a civilization that came before this human civilization of ours, meaning, before this civilization of ours there were other periods of civilization, and not just one. You can tell by looking at archeological objects that they weren’t all from one period of civilization. So they think that after the many times civilization suffered a devastating blow, only a small number of people survived, they lived primitively, then gradually multiplied into a new human race, and began a new civilization. Then it would head for destruction again, and again they would multiply into a new human race. So that’s how it’s gone through all of these different cyclical changes, time after time. Physicists say that the motion of matter has patterns. Our entire universe’s changes also have patterns.
The movement of our planet earth, when it’s in this vast universe, and when it’s in this turning Milky Way, there’s just no way it could have always had smooth sailing, and chances are it’s run into other planets, or had other problems, and these would have brought about huge catastrophes. If we look at it from the perspective of abilities, that’s just how it was arranged. One time I traced it back carefully and found out that there have been 81 times when mankind lay in total ruin, and only a few people survived, only a little of the prehistoric civilization was left, and then they entered the next period and lived primitively.
When the people multiplied enough, civilization would finally appear again. So it’s gone through 81 of these cycles, and I didn’t trace it back to the end. The Chinese people talk about opportunities of time granted by Heaven, geographical advantages, and unity among the people. Different changes in celestial phenomena, or different times granted by Heaven, these can bring about different situations in the ordinary world. In physics they say that the motion of matter follows patterns. Well, the same goes for the motion of the universe.
The main reason I just talked about prehistoric culture was to make this point: qigong is not something that today’s human race came up with, it was handed down from ages ago, and it’s part of prehistoric culture. And we can find some passages about this in scriptures. Back in his day, Shakyamuni said that he completed his cultivation and became Enlightened many, many hundreds of millions of kalpa ago. So then how many years are in a kalpa? One kalpa is many, many hundreds of millions of years. You really can’t even imagine a number that huge. So if what he said is true, then doesn’t it match up with mankind’s history and the changes the whole earth has been through? And another thing Shakyamuni said was that before him there were six Buddhas of the primeval age, that he had masters, and so on, and that all of them had cultivated and become Enlightened many, many hundreds of millions of kalpa ago.
So if these things are really true, then could some of those authentic, real practices and some of the legitimately passed down ones that are spread in the world today, could they include those types of cultivation ways? If you ask me, I’d say of course, sure. But you don’t see them much. Nowadays those fake qigong, phony qigong, and those people who are possessed go and recklessly concoct some stuff to con people, and they outnumber the true qigongs by umpteen times. It’s hard to make out which is real and which is fake. And it’s hard to tell if something is real qigong. It’s not that easy to find.
Actually, qigong isn’t the only thing left from ages ago. The Tai-ji symbol, the Hetu and Luoshu diagrams, the Book of Changes, and the Eight Trigrams, to name just a few, all of these have been passed down from prehistory. So today when we go and study it from an ordinary person’s standpoint, or try to understand it that way, it’s just not going to make sense no matter how we try. When you look at things from the level of an ordinary person, or from that standpoint, or that level of awareness, there’s no way you’re going to understand what is real.
