The first set of precepts includes the Five Precepts, the Ten Honesties, the Root of Goodness, and Honest Fortune. This set is known as The Precepts of the Tao’s Place.
The second set includes these:
❖ Preserve and do not undermine the Tao.
❖ Do not allow people around yourself to be mistrustful, leading to discontinuity with the Buddha’s cause.
❖ Do not insult Buddhist practitioners to make them abandon their practice.
❖ Do not deceive practitioners to give them doubts and distrust of the Tao doctrine of the Buddhas’ teaching words.
This set of precepts is called The Precepts of the Three Postures.
The third set includes the Unique Conduct precept, which is also called The Buddha’s Precept. It is the attestation of the complete vow.
When practitioners are fulfilling reliability-conduct and precept-mindfulness, they naturally include Buddhist intelligence and vow in their corresponding parallelism. Therefore, the above states that reliability-conduct-vow and precept-mindfulness-Buddhist intelligence have a simultaneously rhythmical parallelism.
Practitioners and Faithful Followers! Buddhism is an ultimately wonderful guideline and purpose that is dynamically flexible and lives forever in the enlightened conscious mind on every level. It ultimately solves birth, death, sickness, age, and misery. In any time or in any period, Buddhism is always the highest civilized Tao. If the practitioner knows how to solve ignorance, destroy hindrance and intransigence, practice in conformity with the true nature, and has the bright mind and nature’s awareness, then he or she can admit that the previous statement is genuinely true.
Practitioners! Faithful Followers, when you initiate the Bodhi mind to practice and perform in visible teachings, the supreme secret or the supreme meditation, or the still salvation, these are not outside of self-abandonment, dissolving doubt and intransigence, and relying on no-self to practice until you ultimately reach the authentic ego of the complete enlightenment; this is the true practice. Otherwise, a practice of holding the self on account of a negligible cause makes faithful followers and practitioners feel hesitant, separated, and hindered, and thus abandon the practice– really is wasteful. The purpose of this Tathagata Meditation sutra is not outside of bringing enlightenment to its practitioners; this sutra is not outside of leading its practitioners to realize that the true nature, the meditative nature and the essential nature are all the same of the unique essence.
Faithful Practitioners! The reason and fact of error are not outside of failure to recognize changing natures that you do not yet know how to utilize. Therefore, practitioners and faithful followers must endure mutual reluctance and opposition. If thoroughly aware of changing natures and thus directly knowledgeable in how to utilize them, then practitioners and faithful followers will naturally acquire the dharma nature. Once enlightened to the dharma nature, one immediately acquires the dharmas of the Three Errors’ supernatural power. At the same time, one really knows asamkhyeya (an infinite number) of lives, thousands and thousands of Buddhas, devas, deities, saints, and pure lands, all of which are in perfect holding and matchless to the utmost.
Practitioners and Faithful Followers! Once you engage in the practice of meditative sitting, you should not, either in your regular meditative sitting or in your free time, initiate wishes or illusory thoughts, or conceive and expect that meditative sitting will enable you to see or meet fairies or deities, and at the same time, reason and fact your wish to know, to come, and to obtain. Otherwise, the received knowledge, the reached destination, and the obtained acquisition will all be false, dreamy, and confused. These are not useful to faithful practitioners; they will only steer your meditative practice in the wrong direction. I wish that the faithful followers and practitioners would correct their characteristics and behave nobly; may they dissolve ignorance and intransigence every day to widen their (Buddhist) intelligence; may they initiate the great vow and the true performance of it; with authentic practice, one directly reaches the invariable genuine attestation.
Faithful Practitioners! Everyone builds houses with bricks, tiles, wood, steel, iron, or planks. No one can build a house with dreamy thoughts or logical thoughts and be accomplished. Dreamy thoughts and logical thoughts belong to knowledge. When it’s necessary, we use them to observe, re-examine, and conclude whether a work is appropriate, thorough, or beautiful. The same applies to the dharma subject, meditative sitting. Faithful practitioners should use regular performances to create effortful deeds and virtues. When one meets with hindrance and opposition, one should use (Buddhist) intelligence to dissolve in order to be aware and open; that is,
POSSESSING CORRESPONDING VIRTUE AND INTELLIGENCE;
THE INTUITION OF THE IMMORTAL ORIGINATION.
Written to completion on June 26, 1976
at the Central Superior Congregation,
Nha Trang, Vietnam,
By THE SUPREME PURE KING,
Who is THE LONG-HOA SANGHA CHIEF,
Who also was THE SUPREME MAITREYA BUDDHA incarnate in Vietnam 1918–1993.
(Sealed-Writing)