Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"What’s actually going on in this mind-body complex? And what possibilities do you have of actually making a difference? Again, this gets into that question of what you’re responsible for and what you’re not. You are responsible for your perceptions, the labels you put on things, how you think about things, how you focus: That’s something you can do something about. As you work with the pains in the body, sometimes you find there are things you can’t do anything about. So you learn how to accept it as really strong past karma. And your willingness to learn that lesson: That’s present karma. That’s something that’s up to you. So the whole meditation is an extended lesson in that one question: What are you responsible for and what are you not? As you learn these lessons in the meditation, you can apply them to the rest of your life as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Range of Our Responsibility"

"Start with this simple intention, “May all beings be happy.” Now, you’re not expecting that all beings will be happy, but you want to make sure that at least from your quarter there’s no danger for any beings at all. You’re setting your intentions straight. And that’s really all you can be responsible for." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Right Attitudes"

"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, w...

"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 an anchor in...

"The reflection on how all living beings are the owners of their actions is meant to induce samvega — realizing that wherever you might go in the cosmos, even in the deva realms, kamma still reigns. There’s no place anywhere where you can come to the end of having to keep on making the effort to act skillfully unless you make it to nibbāna ." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reflection on Kamma"

"Most often we go through the world, looking not at our own actions but at what other people are doing, and then we react. We feel that our reaction is a natural response, built into the way things are: When people do outrageous things, we feel we’re bound to get angry. But as the Buddha said, whether they’re outrageous or not, your reaction is still your kamma. You have to look at it that way. So you have to ask yourself, “What kind of action would be skillful in a case like this?” It’s not the first thought that often comes to us. When you look around at the world, it’s hard to say, “It’s a wonderful world, everything’s fine, therefore I’m going to be good.” You have to realize that, ok, even though the world is a mess, and people are doing all kinds of horrible things to make it messier, still, for your own sake, you have to ask yourself, “What kind of actions can I do right now that would lead to good long-term results?” That’s what you’re responsible for, and that’s what y...

Autonomous Good Karma , short morning talk November 16, 2015. Okay, focus on your breath. You might say there are lots of other things in the world that need attention right now, but the primary thing for each of us is to attend to our own minds: make sure our minds are in good shape, so that as we engage in the world, we’re not going to be adding more danger to the world, not be adding more of a mess to the world. After all, our actions are what shape the world, and where do our actions come from? They come from inside. Other people’s actions come from their minds. Try as we may to have a good influence on them, it doesn’t always work. But we can influence our own minds, so focus there first. Get your own mind in shape, and then from there if you come out into the world and see something you can do, something you can help with, you’re coming from a much better place. All too often, people who meditate are accused of being irresponsible in the face of all the troubles of the world. Wel...

"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 action...

"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 Thai...

"So instead of an empirical proof for his teaching on karma, the Buddha offered a pragmatic proof: If you sincerely believe in his teachings on causality, karma, rebirth, and the four noble truths, how will you act? What kind of life will you lead? Won’t you tend to be more responsible and compassionate? If, on the other hand, you were to believe in any of the alternatives — such as a doctrine of an impersonal fate or a deity who determined the course of your pleasure and pain, or a doctrine that all things were coincidental and without cause — what would those beliefs logically lead you to do? If you acted consistently in line with them, would they allow you to put an end to suffering through your own efforts? Would they allow any purpose for effort at all? If, on the other hand, you refused to commit to a coherent idea of what human action can do, would you be likely to pursue a demanding path of practice all the way through to the end? This was the kind of reasoning that the Bu...

"We’re creating our lives. And even when the mind seems to be simply spinning its wheels, it’s not just idly spinning its wheels. It’s creating new states of being, new possibilities — some of which are good, some of which are not so good. You have to keep that principle always in mind as you’re meditating. You’re not simply here innocently watching what’s going on without any responsibility for what you’re experiencing. You’re responsible for your experiences — through your actions in the past and in the present moment. On the one hand, this sounds a little onerous because nobody likes to take responsibility. On the other hand, though, it’s empowering. If you don’t like the present moment, you can create a new present moment because the opportunities to do so are endless. We’re not just consumers of experiences. We’re also producers. We have to keep this principle in mind as we go through the practice. Our training in the precepts reminds us that we shape our life by the choices...

"The Buddha says that uncertainty is overcome by looking at skillful and unskillful qualities in the mind. To begin with, you’re focusing your attention on the most important issue in life, which is what sort of impact your actions are having, and particularly what kind of impact your mind states are having. After all, the source of action is in the mind. If you’re uncertain about different mental qualities, then watch. Try developing goodwill; try being generous; try observing the precepts. See what kind of impact these qualities have on your life." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Virtue Contains the Practice" (Meditations6)

"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." ~ Thani...

" Manopubbaṅgamā manoseṭṭhā manomayā: Phenomena are preceded by the mind, excelled by the mind, made by the mind. The people who put that statement first in the Dhammapada knew what they were doing, because it expresses a principle that holds all the way through the practice: The mind comes first; the heart comes first. We live in a world where we have to put a lot of energy in. It’s through the energy the mind puts in that we reap the results, good or bad, depending on the energy. To begin with, this is a refutation of the principle of materialism, which is that the mind is just an epiphenomenon of material processes — or, in other words, that it’s the result, it’s on the far end of the causal spectrum, whereas the real causes are material. Somehow matter happens to be aware, but the matter is doing all the acting, not the awareness. The awareness is just coming along for the ride. That’s the material hypothesis. The Buddha’s saying the opposite. The mind is what’s doing the act...

"The reflection on everyone’s karma is also a reflection to induce equanimity for the things that you can’t change, particularly the things that you’ve already done in the past or the results of things that you’ve done in the past. Not only things that you’ve done, but also things that other people have done. There are people who you want to help but you can’t help them because of their karma. Sometimes you can’t help them because of your karma. So instead of banging your head against the wall, against things you can’t change, you learn to regard them with equanimity, and look around to see, “Well, what can I change?”" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Faith in Karma"

"I’ve noticed over the years that when I teach in various places, the teaching that sets most people off is the teaching on rebirth. They regard it as totally irrelevant, but it’s not. You’re making decisions about what to do all the time based on how you calculate what the results of those decisions are going to be. If your calculation includes only this one lifetime, you’re really going to limit your sense of where the dangers are in the mind — what an act of desire or an act of attachment might do — which means that you end up with a lot of things in the mind that don’t get probed, don’t get investigated because they seem perfectly innocuous or perfectly fine. You get a nice state of equanimity and you feel it’s going to take care of you. But as the Buddha points out, you can get stuck on equanimity. It leads to a long rebirth in a nice place, but even those nice places are places you’ll ultimately have to leave. When you leave them, the number of people who go on to other nice...

"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 hone...

"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"

"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"

"You know the story about Angulimala who had killed 999 people and then, not long after the Buddha taught him, became an arahant. A lot of people like that story. It shows that no matter what your background, there’s hope. But we have to remember that, at the time, there were a lot of people who didn’t like what had happened and were pretty upset. Here was Angulimala who had killed all these people and he was literally getting away with murder. You could say that he deserved to suffer, but the Buddha didn’t take that into consideration at all. He said, “Here’s a person who’s suffering really badly and his suffering is spilling out and affecting other people.” By curing Angulimala’s suffering, or showing him how to cure his suffering, he saved a lot of other people, too. So if there’s the question of whether you deserve to be happy or not, you learn how to put that aside. Realize that that’s a non-issue. The issue is that you’ve got actions. The mind is an active principle." ...

"You have to see the importance of your actions, that there are dangers out there and dangers in the mind. You have to make an effort to overcome those dangers, but the effort is not doomed. It really does make a difference whether you act on skillful mind states or unskillful mind states." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Making a Difference"

"Then there’s that reflection on karma. That’s where our refuge is. If you look at it, it says: “We’re owners of our actions, heir to our actions, whatever we do for good or for evil, to that will we fall heir.” And you can focus either on the good or the evil. Karma is scary. There are a lot of things we do that are unskillful and will bear results, one way or another. It’s so easy to slip and forget. That’s one of the reasons why you want to be mindful. But there’s also the good side to karma — there’s a lot of good that you can develop with your actions. When the Buddha teaches karma, that’s what he focuses on — the good that can be done. This is why the reflection on karma is meant to give rise to confidence — that you have it within you that you can do this. If your habits are unskillful, you can change them. They’re not written in stone. Past karma doesn’t control everything. In fact, your primary experience is what your intentions are right now. When the Buddha analyzes th...

"So look out for any wrong views that would make you want to listen to what the world out there has to say about how you have to get back at certain people, or that you have to fight in an unfair way for what you think is right. The idea that ends justify the means is really destructive because there are no ends in samsara. It’s like a series of meadows I walked through one time near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. You came across a meadow and you could see to the end of the meadow. But then when you came to the end of the meadow, it turned out there was a slight turn in the path, and there was another meadow. You saw to the end of that meadow and when you walked there, there was another meadow. It just kept going and going and going like that. So remember: There are no “ends” out there in samsara, there are just “means.” They only real end is nibbana. You may not be sure whether you can attain any of the ends that you want, but you can be sure that your means are good. Those a...

"If you can’t get any control over your craving and clinging, then rebirth is going to be very difficult. It could lead you in all kinds of directions. Because at the moment of death — when the body is weak, the mind is frustrated, the mind is distraught — cravings and clingings can bubble up inside. We latch on and we go . When the mind is distraught like that, it tends not to be very choosy. It just takes whatever comes. And who knows what’s going to come up bubbling up out of your karmic past. So we meditate to get some control over our cravings and clingings. Every time the thought comes up that you could go away from the breath, you’ve got to realize, “Okay, this is exactly how rebirth happens. If I’m not good at sticking with what I know is right, then who knows what side paths the mind will take.” So try to be really on top of yourself, watching yourself carefully. One of the strange tendencies in modern Dhamma is to tell people, “Don’t try too hard, don’t place too many d...

"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"

"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...

"So remember, pain is normal. The fact that the mind is suffering around the pain is normal. There’s no question of “why me?” When pain comes, you have to remind yourself that pain comes to everybody. In fact, that’s a useful contemplation when you’re in pain. Remind yourself that everybody out there has pain to some extent or another. Some people are pain-free for the moment, but pain’s going to come. You’ve got to have compassion for everybody out there who’s got pain. That helps you realize it’s not just you. You don’t feel like you’re being singled out. Maybe you have the kamma that leads to that pain. In fact, you probably do. Now, the next question is: How can you cheat that kamma? We may tend to think that the universe is unfair in the way it hands out pains, but maybe it’s actually very fair. But the Buddha’s path allows you to cheat the system. You can get out. This path, the noble eightfold path, as the Buddha said, is the kamma that puts an end to kamma. Not only does i...

"In the second watch of the night of his awakening, the Buddha gained insight into how beings pass away and are reborn in line with their actions [MN 19]. This insight was the source both of the content and of the method of his teachings on skillful and unskillful kamma. He saw that beings fared well on the basis of skillful kamma, and poorly on the basis of unskillful kamma. Their choice of skillful or unskillful kamma, in turn, was influenced by their views and by their level of respect for noble ones. This last factor indicated that skillful and unskillful kamma were not inspired solely by internal factors. If beings could be induced to develop respect for the noble ones, they could learn from those noble ones to develop right view and skillful kamma. This meant that they could be taught." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Skill in Questions: How the Buddha Taught"

"When the Buddha pointed out the causes of suffering, he said they’re inside. Sartre said that “Hell is other people,” but no, hell is yourself. Yet it doesn’t have to be. Your self doesn’t have to be hell. The things you do in the mind can switch around and they can become your genuine friends. Your admirable friends." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Tending the Flame"

"Beings react to suffering in two ways: bewilderment and a search for a way out. If the conditions for suffering were not so complex, it would be the result of a simple, regular process that would not be so confusing. People would be able to understand it without any need for outside teachings. The fact of its actual complexity, however, explains why people find it bewildering and, as a result of their bewilderment, have devised a wide variety of unskillful means to escape from it: recourse to such external means as magic, ritual, revenge, and force; and to such internal means as denial, repression, self-hatred, and prayer." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Wings to Awakening: An Anthology from the Pali Canon"

"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 ba...

"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...

"[The Buddha] doesn’t give a complete theory about how everything happens in the world and can be traced back to particular actions. He teaches karma to the extent that it’s useful in getting the mind to be trained so that it can put an end to suffering. That’s as far as his teaching goes, but that’s pretty far. It’s much better than having a map to everything but still suffering. So use these teachings to take you where you want to go because they can take you farther than you can imagine." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Meditation Karma Checklist"

"We do have the power to exert control over our intentions right now. And our intentions do shape our experience of the world around us, the world inside us, at least to some extent: enough to make the difference between suffering and not suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Limits of Control"

"At the very least, when you're sitting here meditating and things don't seem to be going right, don't blame it on the weather. Don't blame it on the time of day. Just look at what you're doing. Look at the raw material you have to work with and your skill in fashioning that raw material into a state of calm. From the Buddhist point of view, that raw material comes from past actions. You can't change the fact that this is the raw material you have at hand, but you can fashion that raw material in different ways. That freedom of choice is always present. So if things aren't going well in your meditation, look at your intentions to see what you might change. Look at your perceptions, at the questions you're posing in the mind. Experiment. Improvise. See what makes a difference. When things are going well, try to maintain them well. See how you can develop that sense of wellness even further. This is Right Effort. This is where we encounter the eleme...