One time I encountered a person with a demonic illness. In Manchuria there is a species called "yellow weasel," known commonly as "yellow immortal." In northern China there are two kinds of immortals: fox immortals and yellow immortals. The fox ones are foxes, and the yellow ones are weasels. In the north, these two types of animals are known as spirits, but they are kind of petty. If you say something that offends them, they will make you ill. Now I'll tell you about the experience I had. The first time I encountered a yellow weasel, he fought with me but couldn't beat me. I captured him with the "lariat hand," and then he knelt before me and bowed and begged piteously, "Please let me go. I want to take refuge with you." (The spirit was speaking through the sick person's mouth.)

I said, "Fine, you can take refuge." Then I let him go and told him to go to the temple to take refuge. But by the time I returned to the temple, he still hadn't arrived. He had cheated me. He liked to tell lies and simply didn't go.

When I was at his home, the sick person had gotten well. But after I left, the sickness returned. I went back there, recaptured the weasel three or four times, and said, "If you lie to me again, I won't be nice to you. This time you'd better change your evil ways and become good." He didn't lie again. So you see, it's not easy to save even one living being. When I was trying to save that weasel, he kept trying to trick me, but I didn't get disgusted with him. I finally managed to get him to take refuge and gave him the Dharma name Guo Wang. That was the first weasel disciple I had. Probably you haven't heard this story before, and you probably don't believe it. But this is something that personally happened to me.

When my mother was sick, there was a fox immortal at Baiyunhe ("White Cloud River") who used his spiritual powers to give people medicine. Some people travelled over three hundred miles to go seek medicine from him. What was the background of this fox immortal? When the Japanese army had occupied the area, the fox immortal also stayed in the barracks. Later he drove the Japanese soldiers away. How did that happen? The Japanese army went around capturing Chinese people and transported them to Baiyunhe by train. As soon as the doors of the train opened, the prisoners would step out and fall right into a cauldron of boiling oil, where they would be fried alive. No one knows how many people were fried to death like that. Probably the fox immortal was not too happy about that, so he transformed himself into a white-bearded old man and went to fight the Japanese. When the Japanese saw the old man, they pointed their guns at him to chase him away, but he ran into their ammunitions storage and blew it up. After two such explosions, the Japanese decided they could not stay there anymore, so they moved away. That's how powerful the fox immortal was. After the Japanese troops left, he dispensed medicines and performed miracles. People came from all over to seek his aid. All they had to do was cover a bowl with a piece of red cloth, and then get on their knees and pray to him. Then medicine pills or whatever kind of medicine they sought would appear in the bowl. It was that efficacious.

When my mother was sick, I also went to seek medicine. After kneeling there for three days and three nights, I lifted the red cloth to take a look, but there was no medicine in the bowl. I tried again, but still no medicine appeared. Since I didn't get any medicine, I quit seeking. After I left the home-life, the fox immortal attached himself to the body of a relative of mine and wanted to take refuge with me. I asked who he was. He identified himself as the fox immortal who gave people medicine. I wanted to set things straight with him, so I asked, "Why was it that when you were dispensing medicine to people, you didn't give me any when I went to seek from you?" That was the second time a fox took refuge with me.

In the fourth village of Xianglanqi (Blue-bordered Banner), there were over eight hundred white foxes who assumed human form and took refuge with me. That day a child was going to leave the home-life. That morning, before he arrived, I said to one of my disciples, "Today a child is coming to leave the home-life. When he comes, let me know right away." Sure enough, at a little past one o'clock in the afternoon, a twelve-year-old child showed up and asked to leave the home-life. So my disciple came running from the front of the temple and said in his Shandong accent, "Teacher, this morning you said a child would be coming to leave the home-life. Well, he's here now."

"Where is he?" I asked.

"In the kitchen," he said.

I went to the kitchen to take a look. There the child was, cocking his head to the side.

"Are you the one who wants to leave home?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Why do you want to leave home?" I asked.

"My home is over three hundred(one thousand) miles away from here. One night I had a dream. In fact, I had the same dream three nights in a row. In the dream I was told that if I wanted to get over my sickness, I had to go to Three Conditions Temple to look for Dharma Master An Ci, bow to him as my teacher, and leave the home-life and cultivate. Then I would get well."

"Are you lying?" I asked. I saw that he was dressed very shabbily. "Is it because you have no food to eat and no clothes to wear, and it's hard to make a living that you want to leave home? Did you hear that people will make offerings to monks, so they don't have to worry about food or clothing or do any work? Is that why you want to become a monk?"

"No," he said, "I really had the same dream three times."

"In the dream, who told you this?" I asked.

"It was that fat monk, the one at the entrance of the temple. He was the one who came to me three times in my dream and told me to leave the home-life here," said the boy.

Originally this child had been able to heal people from the time he was five. No matter what illness people had, he could cure them. But when he himself became sick, who could he ask to cure him? When he had been a shaman in past lives, ghosts and spirits would possess him and allow him to heal people. That was in his past lives. And so now when he was only five in this life, those ghosts and spirits came to seek him out again. But he himself had a stomach illness which he couldn't cure on his own. Everyone called him "little demonic obstacle." When he was twelve, Maitreya Bodhisattva, that "fat monk," appeared three times to him in a dream, telling him to come to Three Conditions Temple to leave the home-life. And so he came, and I allowed him to leave home.

After living at the temple for half a year, he opened the Five Eyes and could cure people's illnesses. Everything went fine. Then one day we went to the home of Good Man Chen (Tianxi Chen). His wife said to the boy, "You are so young and yet you have the power to see people's past and future lives. Does your teacher have such great powers?" She was trying in a roundabout way to find out about me.

He recklessly replied, "My teacher probably can't do such things."

Strangely enough, after he said that, he lost the Five Eyes and Six Spiritual Penetrations. And after he lost them, those deviant spirits returned to haunt him. He became kind of loony and acted like Ji Gong (the Living Buddha). Seeing him like that, I tried to cure him. But his was a perverse sickness caused by the ghosts and spirits that wanted him to live the kind of life he used to live. I didn't want him to go back to doing those things, so every day I battled with those fox immortals and yellow immortals. The fighting lasted for twenty-one days, and during that time I neither ate nor drank nor slept. I just kept fighting with them, until I finally chased them off. When I was still dueling with them, there was a thirteen-year-old student who saw me and joined me in the fight. But when the sick boy breathed on him, he fell to the ground writhing in pain. His stomach hurt so badly he felt like he was going to die. I first saved the student, and then I cured the boy's illness.

During those twenty-one days, I offended a lot of ghosts, demons, and all kinds of weird creatures, such as snake spirits, cow spirits, mountain sprites, and sea monsters. These weird creatures kept waiting for an opportunity to get back at me. I went to Dongjing (East Well) Village, which was so named because the village was shaped like a well, high on the four sides and concave in the middle. Taking advantage of the fact that I was staying in the low-lying central area, the mountain and water monsters caused a flood and tried to drown me. It was like the flood (ravaging the Gold Mountain Monastery in China.)we had at Gold Mountain Monastery. The courtyard where I was staying was fenced in by loose wooden latticework that kept out neither water nor wind. Yet during the deluge, while the water rose to over eight feet outside the fence, inside the fence there was only a couple (two) feet of rainwater. Although the fence was full of holes, strangely enough the water didn't come in. It was because we had "tied up the boundaries" earlier. The sea monsters failed in their attempt to drown me, but they did drown over thirty other people. The waters rose quickly and subsided quickly. The flood lasted only four hours, yet it drowned thirty-odd people and washed away over eight hundred houses. Even people who had climbed on top of their brick beds were drowned. After that, I didn't dare to meddle too much in people's affairs anymore. Most of you wouldn't know about this, but behind every sickness are resentful ghosts coming to demand your life, to collect a debt, or to seek revenge. These are the reasons people get sick.

I met another demented person who, when he walked, would take three steps forward and two steps back. He was always looking up at the sky, as if he were drunk or something. At that time I looked into the reason for his sickness. He always repeated these words: "The three lights universally shine on the three powers. If it weren't for offenses, I wouldn't have come." The three lights are the sun, the moon, and the stars. They illumine the three powers--heaven, earth, and man. "If he hadn't committed offenses, I wouldn't have come to make him sick." From this I knew that sick people are sick because they are being forced to pay their karmic debts.

I also met another sick person whom I could not cure no matter how I tried. She would go to people's homes and claim to be their kitchen god, their ancestor, or their father or mother. It was a kind of insanity. When I tried to heal her, a horn grew out of her head. It grew to two inches in length. Everyone who was present saw this happen. It was very bizzarre, and when I looked into the matter more carefully, I discovered that this happened because she and her father had buried her elder sister alive over fifty years ago. At that time (seventy years ago from now) people were very old-fashioned. When her unmarried sister had become pregnant, her father could not tolerate it and so he dug a pit and, with the help of his younger daughter, buried his older daughter alive. The younger sister had helped her father bury her older sister, and so now the angry spirits of her older sister and the unborn baby were coming to demand justice. They were making her act crazy. When I tried to cure her, her older sister used her powers to cause the woman to grow a horn, thus telling me that the woman's karmic obstacles were too heavy for the Buddhadharma to be able to cure her.

Every karmic illness has its underlying causes and effects. For example, the reason many people are getting cancer nowadays is that they have killed too many creatures and eaten too much meat, thus poisoning themselves too deeply. This is also a case of karmic debts being repaid.