Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"The Buddha’s image of each person’s karma is seeds sown in a field: Some seeds are sprouting right now; others are waiting to sprout. When you see the sufferings of others, you’re seeing only their seeds that are currently sprouting. The good seeds waiting to sprout, you can’t see. At the same time, you don’t know what bad seeds are lying in wait in your own field. Still, the most important seeds in your field are the ones you’re planting right now, because they can determine whether you’ll suffer from your old seeds or not. So you look for the good old seeds in other people’s fields that may be ready to sprout, and try to get them to plant good new seeds so that they won’t have to suffer from any bad seeds already sprouting. After all, that’s how you’d like them to treat you when your bad seeds start to mature. Acting in this way, you create good karma for yourself, and a more humane world all around." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma is Individual"

"When you forgive someone who’s wronged you, it doesn’t erase that person’s karma in having done wrong. This is why some people think that forgiveness has no place in the karmic universe of the Buddha’s teachings, and that it’s incompatible with the practice of what he taught. But that’s not so. Forgiveness may not be able to undo old bad kamma, but it can prevent new bad karma from being done. This is especially true with the bad kamma that in Pali is called vera . Vera is often translated as “hostility,” “animosity,” or “antagonism,” but it’s a particular instance of these attitudes: the vengeful animosity that wants to get back at someone for perceived wrongs. This attitude is what has no place in Buddhist practice. Patience can weaken it, but forgiveness is what clears it out of the way. The Dhammapada , a popular collection of early Buddhist poems, speaks of vera in two contexts. The first is when someone has injured you, and you’d like to inflict some injury back. The second...

"There’s a slogan that sometimes you hear floating around Buddhist circles: that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at their current condition; if you want to see their future condition, you look at their current actions. But that’s not true. There’s a lot more to a person than you can see in the present moment. That slogan seems to think that we have a single karma account and what you see right now is the running balance. But in the Buddha’s image, karma’s more like a field full of seeds. What you see right now are the seeds that are sprouting. But there can be lots of other seeds in the field that you don’t see at all. They’re ready to sprout or they’re just lying dormant. Which means that when you see somebody suffering, or see somebody doing something that could lead to suffering, you don’t just say, “Well, that’s their past karma,” and leave it at that. The same when you look at yourself: You don’t say, “All I’ve got is the karma I see right now.” If we’r...

"If you’re practicing and you still haven’t come to the end of the practice, what would you want? Where would you like to go? Part of the mind will say, “I want to stick with the practice,” but there are other parts of the mind that have other ideas about what would be a nice life. You’ve got to watch out for them. Learn how to reason with them, to see through them. This is one of the reasons why we have that reflection on the body. It’s not only for dealing with lust. It’s also to get you to reflect that if you were to come back as a human being, you’d have to do this all over again: going through the period of being in a womb, coming out, and being totally defenseless; then gradually learning how to use this body and being subject to the illnesses that come with the body, and the aging, and the death that will come with the body. Do you want that again? When the Buddha was asked to give some advice on how to counsel someone who was about to die, he basically said, “Set your min...

"The fact that we’re meditating is directly related to the teaching on kamma, too. Where does kamma come from? It comes from our intentions. And where do our intentions come from? They come from the state of the mind. So we work on the state of the mind to improve our intentions — to make them not just good, but skillful. “Good” is well-meaning. “Skillful” is not only well-meaning, but also involves checking up to see, when you do a well-meaning action, do the results actually come out well? If something you thought was good turns out to get bad results, you go back and you recalibrate. It’s the act of reading the results and then going back and using your experience to inform your intention: That’s what turns good intentions into skillful ones. So, when we think about kamma, the kamma of meditation, remember we’re focusing on the good side — the fact that we can make a change for the better, particularly in our own minds. After all, look at the mind: It’s a huge mess of all kinds...

"In another passage where the Buddha’s teaching kamma, he starts with the virtues of generosity and gratitude. For most of us, when we hear about kamma, there’s that “Oh darn” moment, where we start thinking about all the bad things we did in the past and all the bad things that are going to happen to us in the future because of that. But the Buddha doesn’t start with the bad things at all. He starts with the good. He does say that certain actions tend to lead to certain results, but the fact that a past bad action has happened doesn’t mean that you, acting in the future, can’t make some changes in how it’s going to be experienced. He gives the analogy of a crystal of salt. You’ve got a crystal of salt, say, the size of your fist. If you put it into a cup of water, you can’t drink the water because the water is way too salty. But if you put it into a large, expansive river of clean water, you can still drink the water in the river. In the same way, if you develop an expansive min...

"You’re chipping in the right direction as you’re focused on the appropriate line of questioning: “What am I doing right now? Is it skillful or unskillful? What can I do to make it more skillful?” That quality that the Buddha said lay at the heart of his awakening, which was not resting content with skillful qualities: If you see there’s room for improvement, you’re happy to improve, happy to try to figure out how to do it. If you haven’t figured it out yet, keep your eye out in that direction." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Abandoning the Effluents (1)"

"Conviction in the principle of karma requires that you make a commitment not to hedge your bets. You’re going to depend totally on the skillfulness of your own intentions to whatever extent you can develop that skillfulness. That’s the principle to which you have to devote yourself. As for other principles or lack of principles, let them go. Sometimes this feels a little scary. You’re so used to hedging your bets so that at least you’re popular, at least you’ve got connections, so that if the principle of karma doesn’t work out you’ve got something else to fall back on. But to be really committed to the principle of karma, to get the best results from it, you have to be committed. And to be really committed requires repeated acts of commitment. This is why in the Forest tradition so much emphasis is placed on the virtue of courage. Not foolhardiness, but courage. It takes a certain amount of courage to keep the mind centered and still, because otherwise we’re always trying to pla...

"I don’t know how many times I’ve run into people who say that they’ve learned from their meditation that there is no agency, there is no choice. There are meditation methods that try to drive choice underground: You get to the point where you deny that you have choice, that you’re simply there on the receiving end of what happened from the past. But that’s not in line with what the Buddha taught. He said that if you think that the present moment is totally determined by the past, you have no freedom at all. If whatever you do is determined by the past, you have no choice as to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to steal. It would be a meaningless life. There would be no meaning in the path. And, he said, it would leave you unprotected and bewildered. “Unprotected” in the sense that you wouldn’t have any way of arguing against your urges to do something unskillful. And “bewildered” because you’d say, “What did I do in the past that made me compelled me to do this?” Because you...

"So always remember that you’re not just sitting here on the receiving end of the world. You’re actually generating your experience, you’re taking in potentials that come from the past and you’re creating your experience of the world — every time you look, every time you listen, every time you deal with the senses in any way. Every time you move the body, every time you speak, with every thought: You’re a producer, you’re a creator, you’re a put-together-er. In this way, you shape your life. This is one of the reasons why when the Buddha talks about harming yourself, it’s not hitting yourself or killing yourself or anything like that. It’s actually killing other people, stealing from other people, lying to them, having illicit sex with them, taking intoxicants. You harm yourself in these ways, because the part of you that’s the karma-creator creating lots of bad stuff is going to have an impact on your experience now and on into the future. In the same way, he said, when you harm ...

"Sometimes we believe in the power of our actions and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we say, “I really hope that my actions give results,” other times you do something and you say, “Well, I hope this doesn’t give results.” You try to convince yourself that the law of karma is something you can turn on and off. But actions always give results, and the results are in line with the quality of the action, and particularly the quality of the intention behind the action. So if you want good results, you have to make sure that the intentions are good. If you want those good results to be consistently good, then you have to make sure your intentions are consistently good. Remind yourself that you have the choice: You don’t have to act on every intention that comes in the mind. Even though some of the unskillful ones based on greed, aversion, and delusion seem awfully strong, they don’t have to overwhelm the mind. The mind can strengthen itself in its conviction that its actions really do...

"It’s good to think every day about the huge length of time that we’ve been around. That helps put things into perspective. As the Buddha said, the amount of tears you’ve shed is greater than the water in the oceans. The amount of blood you’ve shed, having had your head cut off — for having been a thief, for having been a highway robber, for having been an adulterer — in each case, is more than the water in the oceans. It’s good to think about that vast stretch of time, to give rise to a sense of samvega as motivation to want to get out. Because as the Buddha saw, we can go to many different kinds of rebirth, up and down, and there’s no place where you can stay and say, “Okay, that’s it.” You rise and then you fall. You fall and then you rise. Ajaan Maha Boowa once made a comment that people who like to plan their next life really don’t believe in rebirth. They say, “Okay, I’ll make merit here, and that’ll take care of everything next time around.” I saw this in Thailand. Ther...

"Some people say Buddhism is selfish or harsh with its teachings on karma, selfish in the fact that each person is looking out after his or her own well-being, harsh in that people are being held responsible for their own suffering. If the Buddha could have saved us all, he would have. He had an enormous immeasurable heart, but he saw that this is the way that karma is. There are lots of things about karma that are not fair. Look at Ven. Angulimala: He had killed almost a thousand people and yet he was able to become an arahant without having to undergo a thousand deaths to pay off that karmic debt. By training his mind, he was able to mitigate a lot of the suffering he would have otherwise undergone. A lot of people were unhappy about that. They felt it wasn’t fair. The Buddha didn’t design the teaching on karma to make things fair or to be consoling. He didn’t design it at all. He just pointed out that this is the way things are, this is how they work." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu...

"When the Buddha described his quest for awakening as a series of responses to questions of the form, “Why am I doing this?” he was indicating the point at which the search for a way out of stress turns inward: the realization that stress may be caused by one’s own actions. He was also indicating that an important part of the path consists of the realization that one’s habits — and in particular, one’s intentions — are not to be blindly accepted or taken for granted. They should be called into question and subjected to honest scrutiny. However, he also was indicating that not everything is to be questioned — in particular, conviction in the efficacy of action should be maintained as a working hypothesis all the way to release." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Skill in Questions: How the Buddha Taught"

"All of [the Buddha's] really basic teachings have to do with action, which is why kamma is so central to what he taught. Kamma consists of your intentions, and your intentions are shaped by your views. If your views are concerned with what you are or what the world is, you’re going to be sloppy in your actions. But if your views deal with what are you doing, what kind of actions are skillful, what kind of actions are not skillful, they focus your attention where it really can make a difference — where it really can be of use. The rest of the path then follows on that. You make up your mind that you’re going to act on intentions that are not harmful, and you apply that principle to your daily life." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Expert's Mind"

"For a lot of people for whom death is the end, the current pandemic is really cause for dismay. And of course, there really is dismay in the fact that so many people are dying, and there seems to be no end in sight. But when you realize that death is not the end, it gives you the courage to keep on doing what you know is right, even in the face of overwhelming odds — because you’re being asked to have conviction in the fact your actions have a power, and that they’re not snuffed out. These are good things to believe. Now, it is possible to come to know that they’re true, but that requires that you take them on first as working hypotheses. Some people say, “Well, the Buddha didn’t teach you anything that you can’t prove for yourself,” which is true. But the proving requires that you first put a lot on the line. Spend time being generous, observing the precepts. Spend time practicing concentration, developing discernment into the areas where the mind is less than honest with itsel...

"As [the Buddha] noted, you can’t see all the results of actions here in this lifetime. Some people say, “Everything I’ve seen in life is enough to convince me that kamma works.” Well, No, it’s not. There are plenty of people who do all kinds of horrible unskillful things, yet they’re still alive. They thrive. The Buddha has a long list of people who thrive because they kill, steal, engage in illicit sex, lie, or take intoxicants [Saṁyutta Nikāya 42:13]. They do it with the right people and they do it in the right way to please someone in power, so they actually get rewarded by society in one way or another. But as the Buddha commented, those are only the short-term consequences. You’ve got to take the long-term consequences into consideration as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Rebirth is Relevant"

"As the Buddha pointed out, the principle that “whatever we do, for good or for evil, to that will we fall heir” implies rebirth as well as kamma. It’s our working hypothesis. Without rebirth, the principle of kamma doesn’t jive with the facts. There are many cases in the world where people break the precepts but they get rewarded. If you were to say that actions are always rewarded in kind in this lifetime, it’s obviously not true. So the Buddha invites you to think about the long term — and we’re talking about really long here. In his own case, in his awakening he thought back many, many lifetimes, thousands and thousands of eons — thousands and thousands of universes, actually, forming and then falling away — back so far that he said that the beginning point is not only unknowable, it’s also inconceivable. In the course of that long, long time, you’ve probably done lots of things, you’ve been lots of different beings in lots of different situations. As he said, it would be har...

"Remind yourself that your life isn’t already written in stone, that you’re not a slave to fate or a little nameless cog in the big machine. You’re actually a doer, a mover, a shaper. You can shape your life in the direction you want it to go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Impossible Things" (Meditations1)

"As the Buddha taught it, karma has nothing to do with the popular conception where karma is bad karma or bad fate coming to you. The Buddha taught karma as the power we have here in the present moment to shape our lives and to take advantage of the opportunities that come our way to do something really skillful with our abilities. We do make choices. We are responsible for the choices. So we live in a world where our lives have meaning. If we couldn’t make choices, we’d be just like machines. Or if everything were preordained, predetermined, we’d be like machines. Life would have no meaning at all, just as the running of a machine has no meaning. But the fact that we can make choices and there are choices that have consequences — they shape our world, they shape our lives, they make a difference: That gives meaning to our lives. It offers us the possibility to give as much meaning to our lives as we can. We’re the people who decide what do our lives mean. What are we alive for? T...