About This Teaching
Asked by retreat organisers in Australia to share his personal practice, Ajahn Dtun begins with his birth. Before his conception his mother dreamt of a star falling to the house and turning into a diamond. She died of illness when he was three, and he grew up in Bangkok with relatives.
He then traces how he came to keep the precepts one by one. His father told him never to take anything from another house, not even a needle, and at about nine he and his elder brother vowed always to tell each other the truth. As a teenager he saw an elderly woman on a bus look at a flirting schoolboy and schoolgirl and imagined her disapproval, and vowed not to have a girlfriend until he finished his studies. Soon attracted to a girl, he kept the vow, resolving that if he could not act on the feeling, it was better not to like her. Hearing a neighbour's household in uproar when the father brought home a mistress, he resolved at seventeen or eighteen to have only one wife and never to deceive anyone.
On a beach trip to Phuket, while crabs were cooking for dinner, he describes something from another dimension asking whether he cherished his own life and his family's. All beings love their lives, it said; they simply cannot speak human language. From then on he kept the precept against killing. Reflecting that good and evil come as a pair, he resolved to do whatever good humans can do, and by his last years at university he was keeping all five precepts; when attraction arose he tested it, and found that a girl's beauty changed with a new hairstyle or clothes.