On this Buddhist observance day, the teacher taught on the precepts, beginning with a saying from the late master: "Lose your wealth and it's gone — but never lose your precepts. Keep them, for the precepts themselves create wealth. Whoever keeps the precepts is called a good, pure person, and wealth will be drawn to them without any hardship."

What Are the Precepts, and Why Are They a Marvelous Tool

Within us lies a marvelous treasure: the sphere of Dhamma, which stores everything about us — merit, demerit, pure energy, subtle elements, and the spheres of precepts, concentration, wisdom, liberation, and knowledge-and-vision of liberation, which are tools to help us. But we're born with these tools without an instruction manual, so we must learn from those who know. Only Buddhism, recorded in the scriptures, teaches that precepts, concentration, and wisdom are the three trainings every human being must study in order to use these tools properly.

The sphere of precepts is a bright, round sphere that continuously draws in the pure energy called merit day and night — whether asleep, awake, standing, walking, sitting, or lying down. Simply intending to undertake the precepts, with the intention not to transgress, causes the precepts to protect and guard the safety of oneself and others from the unwholesome forces that would harm life, wealth, family, truthful speech, and mindfulness.

What Happens When We Take the Precepts

Taking the precepts begins with paying homage to the Triple Gem and taking refuge, softening the mind to receive the purity of the precepts. Once the words of refuge are spoken, the sphere of precepts automatically lights up and begins drawing in pure energy along with subtle treasures — form, wealth, virtues, retinue, fame, praise, and happiness — continuously, until we make a mistake that tarnishes the precepts. If ever unsure, one can simply retake the precepts and become renewed. Precepts elevate an ordinary person into someone worthy of respect, because they are a bearer of safety for both themselves and others.

The five precepts draw in pure energy to a certain degree; the eight precepts, being of higher quality, protect against both the unwholesome and the neutral. The scriptures state that the merit from keeping the five precepts exceeds even offering alms to the whole monastic community headed by the Buddha, because the stream of merit flows continuously day and night, purifying the mind level by level until one's inner dimension shifts, entirely without one noticing.

How the Precepts Protect Those Who Keep Them

There is a story of a certain teacher who once shared that while driving to deliver Dhamma recordings to a radio station, his car was struck from behind by a ten-wheel truck while stopped at a red light, crushing the rear completely — yet he felt nothing at all, as if cushioned inside a soft bubble of air. This is the result of the purity of the precepts protecting both body and mind. Even in cases where past karma catches up to the point of death, precepts and Dhamma still guide the practitioner toward a good destination — unlike someone without precepts, who has nothing to protect them when death arrives.

Taking the precepts and regularly reflecting on one's own purity of precepts — called reflection on virtue — causes the stream of merit to flow more continuously, purifying defilements layer by layer until one reaches the acquired image, the counterpart image, and inner spheres of Dhamma or jhāna attainment, simply by constantly recollecting the purity of one's own precepts.