Sickness Karma  

Why does a new student who has just begun studying the practice, or a veteran student whose body has been adjusted, experience physical discomfort in his cultivation, as though he were seriously ill? And why does this happen once in a while? I told you in my Fa lectures that this is to eliminate your karma and to improve your enlightenment quality while eliminating the karma from your different previous lives. Besides, this is also to test whether you are determined in following Dafa; this will continue until your cultivation reaches Beyond-Triple-World-Law. This is putting it in general terms.

As a matter of fact, a person does not know how many lifetimes—in each of which he has accrued a great deal of karma—he has gone through. When a person reincarnates after death, some of his sickness-karma is pressed into his body at the microscopic level. When he reincarnates, the new physical body’s matter has no sickness-karma on the surface (but there are exceptions for those with too much karma). What was pressed into the body in the previous life then comes out, and when it returns to the surface of this physical body the person becomes ill. Yet the sickness usually appears to have been triggered by an external condition in the physical world. This way it superficially conforms to the objective laws of our physical world. That is, it complies with this human world’s principles. As a result, everyday people have no way of knowing the actual truth about the cause of the sickness, and they are thus lost in delusion without being enlightened. Once ill, the person takes medicine or seeks various kinds of treatments, which in effect press the sickness back into the body again. This way, instead of paying for the sickness-karma from his wrongdoing in the previous life, he does some additional bad things in this life and hurts others; this brings about new sickness-karma and leads to different kinds of sicknesses. Nevertheless, he again takes medicine or uses various treatments to press the sickness back into his body. Surgery can only remove flesh in the superficial physical dimension, while the sickness-karma in another dimension has not been touched at all—it is simply beyond the reach of modern medical technology. When the sickness recurs, the person will again seek treatment. When a person reincarnates after death, any sickness-karma that has accrued will again be pressed back into his body. This cycle goes on one lifetime after another; it is unknown how much sickness-karma accumulates in a person’s body. This is why I have said that all of today’s mankind has come to this point with karma rolling on top of karma; besides sickness-karma, a person has other kinds of karma as well. So people have hardships, tribulations, and tensions in their lives. How could they only pursue happiness without paying for karma? People nowadays have so much karma that they are soaked in it, and they will encounter unpleasant things at any time and in any situation. Bad things await a person the moment he steps out the door. When there are disagreements, however, people do not endure them and fail to realize that they are paying off their karma from the past. If a person is not treated well by others, he will treat others even worse, thereby producing new karma before paying for the old. This makes society’s moral values decline daily, and everyone becomes enemies among one another. Many people cannot understand this: What’s happened to people today? What’s going on with today’s society? If mankind continues like this it will be extremely dangerous!

For us cultivators, other than the karma Master has eliminated, we still have to pay a portion ourselves. You will thus feel physically uncomfortable, as if you were suffering from sickness. Cultivation practice is to cleanse you from your life’s origin. The human body is like the annual rings of a tree, whereby each ring contains sickness-karma. So your body must be cleansed from the very center. Were karma to be pushed out all at once, however, you wouldn’t be able to take it, as it would endanger your life. Only a piece or two can be pushed out every once in a while, allowing you to overcome it and pay for your karma through suffering. But this is only that little bit left for you yourself to endure after I have eliminated karma for you. This will continue until your cultivation reaches the highest form of In-Triple-World-Law (i.e., the Pure-White Body), when all of your karma will have been pushed out. Yet there are also some people with very little sickness-karma, and there are other special cases. Cultivation practice in Beyond-Triple-World-Law is that of the purest Arhat body—a body that does not have any sickness-karma. But as for a person that has not yet achieved Consummation and who is still practicing cultivation towards higher levels of Beyond-Triple-World-Law, he will still suffer and have tribulations and trials to advance his level. These will only involve interpersonal tensions or other things in the area of xinxing and the further abandonment of his attachments; he will no longer have physical sickness-karma. 

Sickness-karma isn’t something that can be casually eliminated for an everyday person; this is absolutely impossible for a non-practitioner, who must rely on medical treatment. Doing this at will for an everyday person would actually be undermining the principles of heaven, for it would mean that a person can do bad things without having to pay for the karma. It is absolutely unacceptable for a person to not repay his debts—the principles of heaven won’t permit it! Even the treatments of ordinary qigong also push karma to the inside of a person’s body. When a person has too much karma and is still doing bad things, he will face destruction—the complete destruction of both body and soul—at his death, which is total extinction. When treating a sickness for a human being, a Great Enlightened Being can completely eliminate the karmic cause of that sickness, but this is done mainly with the purpose of saving people.  

Li Hongzhi

March 10, 1996