Friday, June 21, 2002

On June 17th, 5 practitioners from Germany, Sweden and the U.S. were invited to a Zen Centre in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to talk about Falun Gong. The meeting was actually arranged by a journalist who knew that this Zen group was very involved in human rights issues and is very influential in Vilnius.

We drove just outside of Vilnius to a forest area where the Zen Centre is located. There were about 15 people who were part of the Zen Centre and they were all interested in learning about Falun Gong. Considering the issues of "practising only one cultivation way" we decided that we would just go without any expectations and see what happened.

The meeting started with tea and some informal discussion about each other's practices, as well as the situation of the persecution of Falun Gong in China. The most frequently asked question was, "Why does China persecute something that benefits the people so much?" Their style of Zen was from Korea and their teacher actually lives in America. After hearing about the exercises, everybody decided that they wanted to learn the Dafa exercises. We went into an open area in the forest and taught them the four standing exercises. We then went into their meditation room and taught the sitting exercise. Afterwards they all agreed that the Dafa exercises were very good and they inquired about how they could continue learning.

We then had some more tea and snacks and continued our discussion about Dafa and the persecution in China. After hearing some of our cultivation experiences, many of them were interested in reading the Dafa books. It turned out that one of the Zen practitioners is a talk show host for a major Lithuanian TV station, and he said that he would do whatever he could to expose the evil.