Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"I remember that when I first learned about the hindrances and how ill will doesn’t mean negativity or dislike — it means actively wanting to see somebody suffer — I couldn’t see in my own case that I wanted to see anybody suffer. But then I reflected: During my first year in particular, when I was meditating on the top of the hill there at Wat Dhammasathit, the thoughts that would destroy my concentration more than anything else came from thinking back on some injustice, where somebody had done something wrong or was doing something wrong and getting away with it. I could get worked up about that for hours at a time, with a strong sense of righteous indignation — and that’s a lot of what ill will is. You don’t like what’s happened, and it seems wrong that there’s no punishment, that people are getting away with things you can clearly see they shouldn’t be getting away with. But that, the Buddha says, is wrong view. Remember that the right attitude to have toward somebody who has

"This is where true happiness is going to be found: in learning how to train your actions. Any loss of that conviction would be fatal to a pursuit of happiness that could be reliable, trustworthy. So that’s going to be a serious loss. Fortunately, the things that would be a serious loss are things that are under your control. You can maintain your virtue. People can offer you all kinds of rewards for breaking the precepts, but you can say No. You can maintain your right view. As for loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of your health, that’s going to happen at some point anyhow, sooner or later. You lose these things; you get them back. You get them back; you lose them again. But with loss of right view, loss of your virtue: If you lose that, you’re going to be acting on wrong view, acting in unskillful ways, and that’s going to be for your long-term harm. That’s why it’s a serious loss. But it is under your control. You can prevent that. So you work on that — you’re firm in

"The Buddha says there are five kinds of loss, three of which he says are not serious. When we listen to his list of things that are not serious, we find that a lot of things on that list are ranked by the world as very serious: loss of wealth, loss of your health, loss of relatives. But as the Buddha said, you don’t go to hell from losing those things. And when you lose them, you get them back — as you have, many, many times in the past. What’s serious, he says, is loss of virtue and loss of your right view. These are areas where the world says, “Oh, those things are not important.” So you can see the Buddha’s values are very different from most people’s. He looked at things from the perspective of the really-long-term. If you lose your virtue, you’re going to create the kind of karma that could pull you down for a long time to come. If you lose your right view, you’re tempted to do anything at all because you feel that your actions have no consequences, they’re not real, so you

"You can think of situations in which people are trying to force you to do something that’s unskillful, and they’re going to punish you if you don’t. If you refuse, you have to put up with the punishment. But at least you’ve preserved the quality of your intention, and you have to believe in that. You have to have faith in that. In the long term, it’s going to be for the good. Because what you do now, of course, is what’ll create influences now and on into the future. Sometimes the influences are not immediately all that visible, but they will have influence in the future. It’s because of this principle that we’re training the mind. This is why we meditate. We may be coming to meditation for other reasons, but when you meditate for the long term, though, this is why you stay: You realize that the quality of your intentions shapes your life, so you have to look into the quality of your mind in the present moment. We’re trying to bring the mind to the breath to give it

"We suffer not because of what other people do, and the path to the end of suffering doesn’t lie in straightening other people out. We suffer from what we’re doing, and the path lies in straightening out ourselves. So that’s where our focus has to be. That’s where we have to be centered. This means we shouldn’t try not to be self-centered. We have to be self-centered in a wise way, a skillful way." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "How to Be Self-Centered" (Meditations11)

"Even though there are miserable people in the world — and by that I mean people acting in miserable ways — not all human beings are like that. There are human beings who have been shining examples. You can take them as an example and you’ll benefit. That was one of the Buddha’s discoveries: By being good — in other words, developing really skillful qualities of the mind, qualities that are harmless, qualities that strengthen the mind in a good direction — you can find true happiness. And it’s not the happiness simply of patting yourself on the back that you were good, but you open up to a dimension that’s totally other, totally free from suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "To Gladden the Mind"