SACRED TEACHINGS: QUAN AM BODHISATTVA — HUNG DAO DAI VUONG — BAC NHA THIEN SU
Sacred Teaching of 11 October 1969
Speaking through spirit-writing, Quan Am Bodhisattva greets the assembled disciples and observes that most people who enter religious life think of practice simply as vegetarian diet, chanting the Buddha’s name, reciting scripture, repentance, and charitable acts, done in hope of receiving Heaven’s blessing — yet few ever stop to analyze the actual stages of spiritual progress, or to honestly assess which stage their own cultivation has reached. Without this self-examination, one rises and falls spiritually from day to day without even realizing it. The Bodhisattva therefore lays out seven successive stages of the religious life:
- Joining the faith (entering the gate / taking refuge): motivated by a wish to escape the deceit and corruption of ordinary worldly life, one chooses a religious community as one’s new way of living, and one’s name is entered both into that community’s earthly register and, spiritually, into the register of the Immortals, Sages, or Buddhas.
- Keeping the faith: honoring the community’s rules and doctrine without transgressing them — to join without keeping the precepts is like a sick person who takes home a charm or amulet from a priest merely to hang over the doorway, without it doing any actual good.
- Studying the faith: learning its scriptures and teachings to know what should and should not be done — to keep the faith without studying it is like owning a radio one never bothers to open up and learn to repair, merely admiring its outside case.
- Understanding the faith: genuinely harder than it sounds, since people interpret the same teaching differently depending on background and inclination. The Bodhisattva illustrates this with the phrase “things exist to nourish man” (vat duong nhon): one reading uses it to justify killing animals for food; the truer reading, the Bodhisattva says, is that the Supreme God, out of boundless love of life, provided plants, minerals, and natural resources — not living creatures — as the raw material from which humanity fashions housing, clothing, food, and every means of transport, by land, sea, or air; if animals were truly meant to be sustained only through human medicine, then wild fish, birds, and beasts, lacking doctors, would long ago have gone extinct — yet they possess their own instinct for self-preservation, itself likewise a gift of the same life-loving God. Genuine understanding, the Bodhisattva adds, comes not only from study of scripture and sacred teaching but from meditation and stilling the mind until wisdom naturally arises from within — only then does one grasp one’s own place among Heaven, Earth, and Humanity (the Three Powers) and among all sentient beings, and know what one must willingly do in order to act in accordance with Heaven’s design.
- Cultivating the self: to understand the faith without cultivating oneself is to shirk responsibility, like a child who can recite a poem fluently without grasping its meaning. Self-cultivation is the first step of purification — restraining oneself, building good character — without which a person cannot avoid the everyday faults that come from friction with others, nor become a good seed for the present and future generations.
- Practicing the faith in action: laying the concrete foundation, through good deeds, on which the edifice of sagehood is built; cultivation of self and active practice must reinforce one another — action without inner cultivation lacks a proper moral foundation, while inner cultivation without action delays progress immeasurably, just as a silkworm, cared for and nurtured, can spin thread of real value, while one left untended remains merely a worm and never becomes a moth.
- Sagehood, sacred-heartedness, or liberation: the culmination of the long preparation through the six preceding stages. True liberation does not mean abandoning the body or fleeing worldly duty; it means that the sage, though still living amid the impurity of the ordinary world, remains inwardly unstained by it, and continually uses higher understanding to help and guide others — this is “attaining the fruit while still in the world.”
The Bodhisattva warns that counting years of formal membership is no true measure of merit: without genuine study, understanding, self-cultivation, and practice, even a thousand years of nominal membership changes nothing, and one should not misuse the saying “one lifetime of cultivation, one moment of awakening” as an excuse to coast along accumulating worldly merit across many lifetimes while postponing real inner cultivation indefinitely. The teaching closes with a short verse urging daily diligence in self-cultivation, since “one lifetime of true practice yields the fruit of ten thousand lifetimes,” before the Bodhisattva withdraws.
Sacred Teaching of 8 July 1973
Duc Hung Dao Dai Vuong descends to witness the initiation ceremony of three new male and six new female disciples. Questioning several of the initiates in turn about the meaning of the Three Refuges and Five Precepts they have just vowed to keep, he receives answers affirming that keeping the precepts does not curtail true freedom but rather restrains the excesses that come with unchecked freedom, guiding one back to the Great Way; that periodic vegetarian fasting is meant to reduce wrongdoing and the taking of life; and that regular temple attendance on the new and full moon is meant to pray for the well-being of all people. Duc Hung Dao then explains that religious training resembles secular schooling: enrolling is only the beginning, and whether one is promoted from grade to grade, or ultimately passes the final examination, depends entirely on one’s own effort afterward. Keeping the vegetarian diet, attending temple, and observing the Three Refuges and Five Precepts are only the introductory, outward level of practice — comparable to a child’s first exercises in a lined notebook — not sufficient by themselves to attain the fruit of Immortality or Buddhahood. Because disciples carry accumulated karma of body, speech, and mind from countless past lives, formally joining the faith and keeping its precepts only halts the accumulation of new karma; real progress additionally requires deep study of doctrine, which illuminates the path and opens the sacred heart, bringing peace and steadiness to one’s practice. Attaining the fruit of Immortality or Buddhahood further requires patient, sustained cultivation built upon that opened sacred heart. Without ongoing study and practice, formal membership is empty, like a student who enrolls and pays tuition each month but never studies the lessons, remaining just as ignorant at year’s end. Duc Hung Dao concludes by formally recording the new disciples’ vows on behalf of the Court of the Three Teachings, before two closing verses reminding all that self-purification and merit gradually strip away one’s ordinary nature, and that the Immortals and Buddhas of old were themselves once ordinary people who attained sagehood only through sustained cultivation.
Sacred Teaching of 1 December 1973
Bac Nha Thien Su offers reflections to those newly entering, or preparing to enter, the faith. He observes that disciples often equate “entering religious life” narrowly with formally joining a temple, wearing religious robes, and keeping its rules — yet in truth, everyone has already been living within the Way since before birth, since the Way is simply the source of life itself, in which all beings already exist, whether or not they realize it. A child who obeys parents, respects elder siblings, and later respects teachers and remains faithful in marriage and loyal to homeland and people is already practicing the Way of Humanity — nothing more is needed to call it “the Way.” Similarly, people imagine that vegetarian fasting only “counts” if formally vowed on set days or observed year-round, forgetting that as infants they were nourished purely on milk and rice without any of today’s rich foods, already unconsciously living a kind of “vegetarian” life. Having now become conscious of these things and choosing to formalize one’s practice within a religious structure, one should not feel behind others, nor imagine that “entering religion” means abandoning worldly life, or that indulging in worldly life first means giving up on religion — for religious life and worldly life differ only by a hair’s breadth, as do Buddha-nature and the demonic, being separated only by the choice of a single instant: compassion, charity, and upright conduct are Buddha-nature; deceit, selfishness, and harm to others are the demonic — and either can arise from the very same person from one moment to the next. Yet this does not mean precepts, temple attendance, and scripture study are unnecessary — an old saying holds that “rice needs its broth, and cultivation needs its companions”: a beginner needs the support of more experienced fellow believers, just as Bac Nha Thien Su earlier compared beginning students to schoolchildren needing lined paper before they can write freely. Another proverb applies as well — “near ink, one turns black; near a lamp, one is illuminated” — meaning that association with worldly vice (gambling, drink) corrupts just as surely as association with virtuous, cultivating companions uplifts, since one still carries an ordinary, unrefined nature easily influenced by surroundings; even watching a play, knowing full well it is only staged, still stirs real compassion for the wronged character and real anger at the villain — showing how easily the heart is swayed by whatever surrounds it. For this reason, one should deliberately place oneself within a disciplined, virtuous environment and community, so that if one should ever falter, fellow believers of good character are there to support and steady one another.