Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"We don’t often think of the teachings on karma as having much relevance to the meditation. Sometimes we’re even taught that karma was one of those weird pieces of cultural baggage that somehow got smuggled into Buddhism from its cultural background. But that’s not the case at all. The Buddha had some very specific teachings on karma that had nothing to do with what anybody else was teaching at the time, and they’re immediately relevant to why and how we’re meditating. The “why” has to do with the point I just raised. Given that karma is intention, and intention is the huge shaping force in your life, you want some control over it. If you make up your mind to do something that you know is good, you want to be able to stick with that intention. And where does intention happen? Right in the present moment. Where does it get changed? In the present moment. This is why we focus on the present moment, so that we can see the process of intention in action as it happens and...

Question: I’ve come to meditation to help me bear the atrocities of the world. What is awakening? Is it a moment of conscience when one embraces all the sorrows of the world, and in that case means hello to all sorrows or is it on the contrary a state of total forgetfulness and egotism, in that case it would be hello to guilt? So, which is it? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Neither. Remember the image of feeding. Ordinarily, we feed on the world, both physically and mentally, in order to gain happiness and maintain our identity as beings. But when you gain full awakening, the mind no longer needs to feed because it already has enough in terms of its own happiness. When you’ve reached that state, you can engage in the world without having to feed on it. You can help those whom you can help, and you don’t have to suffer in cases where you can’t help. In this way, you’re neither embracing the sorrows of the world nor are you running away from them. Instead you have a different relatio...

"When you look at other people, the Buddha says the best lesson to learn is, if you see them doing something unskillful, ask yourself, “Do I do those unskillful things, too? This is what it looks like, this is the impact it has.” Or if you see someone suffering, he doesn't say, to think about what past bad karma they have and why they deserve to suffer. That's not what he says at all. That's not the skillful use of the teaching on skillfulness. He asks you to reflect that you've been there as well. And you might be there again. If you were in that position, what kind of help would you like to receive? Perhaps you can give that help now. So the teaching on karma is not there to judge other people. It's there to remind you that you have to act in a skillful way. You have opportunities to act in a skillful way." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Large Canvas"

"[The Buddha] recommends having a sense of love for yourself, in the sense that you don’t want to act in any way that would cause you harm down the line. And if you really care about yourself, you’re also not going to cause harm to any other people at all, because if you can harm them, then there’s going to be trouble coming back. If your happiness depends on their misery, they’re not going to stand for it. Even if they can’t get you, your kamma will, at least to some extent." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "See Yourself as Active Verbs" (Meditations10)

"Figure out what your actions are and what the results are, how they’re connected, and which actions give rise to better results than others. This is why we meditate — to develop those powers. So it’s not a matter of you versus the system outside, where you are trustworthy and the system outside is not. Rather, it’s learning how to sort out inside you which perceptions and which thought constructs are actually more trustworthy than others." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Trust in Heedfulness"

"Even when people behave unjustly, you have to learn how to set aside thoughts of revenge, because they accomplish nothing good. Remind yourself that what other people do is their kamma; what you do is your kamma. You can’t ultimately be responsible for their kamma; however, you can be responsible for your own actions. So, you spread thoughts of goodwill [mettā]: thoughts that they may be happy, and especially that they may understand the causes for true happiness and then really act on them. That’s a thought you can extend even to people who are really cruel. In fact, you especially want to extend that to cruel people so that instead of focusing on getting revenge or retribution, you open your mind to the question of what you might do or say that would actually get them to change their ways. That way your intentions become more skillful." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Wisdom of Wising Up" (Meditations6)

"Oftentimes, we think of success in the world in terms of getting ahead in our work, doing good work that we like, leaving good results behind in the world. But so many times those results are dependent on factors that are totally outside of our control. So the emphasis should be on areas that are more under our control: the mind. You do good things for the sake of the good that it does for your mind. If for some reason the world changes so that the good you do gets wiped out, still the goodness of the mind doesn’t get wiped out. That’s what stays with you. So spend your time on the aspect of life that does stay with you. Arrange the rest of your life around that. That way, as you sit down to meditate, the outside world doesn’t impinge so much. Because you remember: The outside world is not a set factor. A lot of your experience of the outside world depends on how you interact with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. That’s the world you experience. A...

"Two principles in [the Buddha's] teaching on kamma were especially distinctive. The first is that kamma is intention [AN 6:63]. In other words, action is not simply a matter of the motion of the body. It’s a matter of the mind — and the intention that drives the kamma makes the difference between good actions and bad. The second distinctive principle is that kamma coming from the past has to be shaped by kamma in the present before you can experience it. You actually experience your present kamma before you engage with the results of past kamma. Without present kamma, you wouldn’t experience the results of past kamma at all. The importance of your present kamma is the reason why we meditate. When we meditate, we’re getting more sensitive to what we’re doing in the present moment, we’re creating good kamma in the present moment, and we’re learning how to be more skillful in creating good kamma all the time, from now into the future. Now, in learning to shape our ...

"Kamma not only plays a role in shaping experience of the cosmos, it plays the primary role. If this were not so, then even when kamma was ended there would still remain the types of experience that came from other sources. But because no experience of the cosmos remained when all present kamma disbanded, and none would resume after all old kamma ran out, kamma would have to be the necessary factor accounting for all such experience. This fact implies that even the limiting factors that one encounters in terms of sights, sounds, etc., are actually the fruit of past kamma in thought, word, and deed — committed not only in this, but also in many preceding lifetimes." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Wings to Awakening"

"Remember that goodwill [mettā] is the desire not to harm anybody. If you can get other people to act in skillful ways, so much the better. But if you can’t, you have to guarantee that your own skillful actions aren’t going to be affected by other people’s crazy, strange, bad behavior. After all, your actions are yours. No one else can give you bad karma. You’re the only one who can give yourself bad karma. And you do that through a lack of goodwill, a lack of discernment. So goodwill’s something you have to keep in mind all the time. And as for the battles you fight in the world, choose them well. Choose your battles well. But always fight using goodwill. Remember that it is a strength." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill as a Strength"

"The concept of kamma is usually disliked because people believe it to be deterministic, teaching that your present experience is controlled by your past kamma, which is something you’re powerless to change. But as the Buddha pointed out, your present experience is shaped not only by past kamma but also by present kamma. In fact, your present kamma is more important than your past kamma in determining whether or not you suffer in the present. Present kamma deals with the way you shape your experience in the present moment. We are active beings, not passive. The mind takes an active and proactive role in shaping its experience from moment to moment. It’s like fixing food. Our past kamma is like raw food, and our present kamma is like the act of fixing the food so that we can eat it. In fact, feeding is one of the central images in the Buddha’s teachings: Because we are beings, we need to feed both physically and mentally. To feed properly, we need to know how to fix o...

"A lot of people out there are really hard to like. In fact though, it’s especially important that you spread goodwill to people you don’t like. It’s a kind of protection. You make up your mind that you don’t want to harm them, you don’t want anybody to meet with any harm. Part of that, of course, means that you have to treat them well, but also it means that they have to learn how to act well, too. This is why you can spread goodwill even to people who are cruel and have done a lot of evil in the world. You hope that they see the error of their ways and change, because that’s what’s going to lead to their true happiness. You want them to understand the causes for true happiness and be able to act on them. And you want the same for yourself. This way when you go out into the world, you’re in a much safer place. On the one hand, other people pick up on the fact that you don’t mean them harm. That protects you from a lot of dangers outside, because they don’t want to retaliate. But ...

"There’s no way you’re going to straighten out other people’s minds unless you can straighten out your own mind first. And even then, they won’t let you straighten them out: You can give them pointers, and they may or may not be willing to listen to you, but at the very least you’ve taken care of the part where you are responsible and you can see results. When you come right down to it, that’s all you can ask of a human being. You’ve got this one person who you’re responsible for. All too often we’re irresponsible about ourselves but we want to straighten everybody else out. It doesn’t work. Only when you’ve straightened out your own mind will other people be curious about how you did it. Only to that extent can you actually have an influence out there on other people’s behavior. But at the very least, make sure you’re got your own behavior. As Ajaan Suwat once said, it doesn’t matter whether we get other people here at the monastery, what matters is that you get yourself. If you ...

" “Fabricating” here doesn’t mean that you’re lying, it simply means that you’re creating things, jerry-rigging things together, to make some sense out of your experience, or to get something out of your experience. But the way you jerry-rig can carry lots of problems with it. A lot of things that bother us in life are not simply “givens.” We’ve taken some raw material from our past karma and have shaped it into something oppressive. That’s the kind of pain that the Buddha is focusing on — the pain that comes from craving." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Fabrication of Pain"

"It’s often the case that when we’re disappointed outside, it’s not just the case that we simply suffer. We can also lash out at what we don’t like — out of disappointment, out of a sense of being treated unjustly. That often creates more problems, just more bad karma. So this practice we do is not only for our own good in the sense of finding a reliable sense of comfort inside, but also it means that we can become more reliable in our actions — the things we do and say and think. In that way, regardless of what’s happening outside, we can behave in a responsible manner, a harmless manner." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Inner Refuge"

"What the Buddha taught about karma is this: Your experience of the present moment consists of three things: 1) pleasures and pains resulting from past intentions, 2) present intentions, and 3) pleasures and pains resulting from present intentions.With reference to the question of happiness, this teaching has three main implications. • The present is not totally shaped by the past. In fact, the most important element shaping your present pleasure or pain is how you fashion, with your intentions in the present, the raw material provided by the past. • Pleasures and pains don’t just come floating by of their own accord. They come from intentions, which are actions. This means that they have their price, in that every action has an impact both on yourself and on others. The less harmful the impact, the lower the price. If your search for happiness is harmful to others, they will fight to undo your happiness. If it’s harmful to yourself, your search has failed. • Your se...

"A lot of people believe that kamma is one of those teachings that’s not particularly relevant to their meditation practice. But essentially, kamma is what the practice is all about. After all, kamma is what you’re doing to create suffering. Changing your kamma is what’s going to bring suffering to an end. The Buddha tends to avoid talking about metaphysical issues, but kamma is the one big metaphysical issue he talks about a lot. The nature of action, what action does, when it gives its results, the fact that action is real, that it gives results both immediately and over time: These are metaphysical issues. And the reason the Buddha focuses on these and not on other issues is because the nature of action is important for understanding why we suffer and how we can stop suffering. There’s the kamma that leads to suffering; there’s the kamma that leads to its end. So we’re here trying to understand what action is all about, what action does, and what it creates." ~ Thanissaro ...

"So you have to learn to think about what’s really important in life, and realize that the quality of the mind is your real treasure. Get your priorities straight, along with the combination of having a comfortable way to be with yourself in the present moment and ways of thinking that place the emphasis on what you’re doing inside — on the internal goodness you can develop right here, right now. This is one of the good qualities of the Dhamma. It reminds you that the things you get by being dishonest outside are not worth it, and the really good things in life come from goodness inside. The Buddha talks about internal treasures. There’s virtue, not harming others; a sense of shame, in other words, being ashamed at the idea that you would do something harmful. Compunction, realizing that if anything that would cause harm, you just don’t really want to have to inflict that harm on yourself or anyone else. Conviction, conviction in the principle of karma, that your actions really do...

"We focus our attention on the present moment because of the way the Buddha taught karma. He said that our actions influence the future, and they also influence the present moment. In fact, it’s our present actions that will determine whether we’re going to suffer in the present or not. So we want to look into the present moment to see exactly what we’re doing." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mindfulness Gets Intimate"

"When you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions. They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting. Also, you have no idea what other seeds, whatever wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place. There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions. This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception: that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present is the current running balance in each person’s account. Actually, no one’s karmic history is a single account. It’s composed of the many different seeds planted in many places through the many different actions we’ve done in the past, each seed maturing at its own rate. Some of these seeds have already sprouted and disappeared; some are sprouting now...

"So remember, we’re here to go beyond ourselves, to go beyond just being beings that are consuming all the time. We try to redefine ourselves, not by what we eat or what we own or what we consume, but by what we produce, what we can give. Making this switch in the mind changes everything. Difficult patches come up in the meditation and you ask yourself not, “Why is this so bad? Does this mean I’m a miserable meditator?” You say, “No, what can I give to this situation so that it doesn’t snowball? What resources do I still have? What can I draw on to give to the situation to turn it into a different kind of situation?” When things are going well, again, what do you give to make sure that they continue to go well? You don’t just sit there slurping up the pleasure and the rapture. You look after them. You give your energy to protect them." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Better to Give than Consume" (Meditations6)

"Karma, what people do, in the present moment: This is one thing you can know directly. You can know directly what you’re doing. When you focus the mind, you know you’re focusing the mind. When the mind settles down, you know it’s settling down. When the mind wanders off, you know it’s wandering off. These are things you really know here and now. When you experience suffering, you know. When you experience a lack of suffering, you know. So those are the two issues the Buddha focused on: the feelings of suffering and the knowledge of actions. The second knowledge suggested that there was a connection between the two, so the Buddha decided to see if this was true. These two are very certain things. When you’re suffering, no one can convincingly tell you, “That’s not really suffering; you’re not suffering.” Other things you might know can be shaped by the rules of the languages you’ve learned, but your experience of suffering is pre-linguistic. You know it more directly than anythin...

"So the first lesson of karma is that if you really want to be happy, you can’t trust that deep down you know the right thing to do, because that would simply foster complacency. Unskillful intentions would take over and you wouldn’t even know it. Instead, you have to be heedful to recognize unskillful intentions for what they are, and to act only on skillful ones. The way to ensure that you’ll stay heedful is to take your desire for happiness and spread it around." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras"

"Years back, I was giving a talk to a group of people on the topic of karma. They’d been meditating and most of them had the impression that karma was something superfluous in the Buddha’s teachings, something that had nothing to do with their meditation. So I pointed out that you have to look at your meditation as a kind of action: You’re creating karma by focusing on the breath, you’re creating karma by spreading thoughts of goodwill [mettā] . It’s good karma, but you want to learn how to do it even more and more skillfully. I was getting a lot of blank looks from the audience as I said this, and I found out later that the type of meditation they’d been doing was one where you’re not supposed to be doing anything at all. You were supposed to allow whatever’s going to happen to happen and take a totally passive, accepting role to what was happening. But that’s not how the Buddha taught meditation. He said he wanted you to see meditation as a kind of action that you want to maste...

"Meditation is a type of kamma. Kamma can also be a topic of meditation. This contemplation is aimed primarily at giving the mind a sense of values — as to what is important in life, what things are not important — and to give us even more motivation to do what is skillful and to avoid what is not." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Meditation on Kamma"

"There was once a young monk who was asked by a wanderer from another sect what the results of karma were and the monk said, “Stress.” Then he went back to the Buddha and asked him if he’d given the right answer and the Buddha said, “No. When asked about karma, you talk about how skillful karma leads to pleasure, how unskillful karma leads to pain.” Another one of the other monks piped up and said, “Well, wasn’t he thinking about the fact that all feelings are stressful?” And the Buddha replied, essentially, that was not the time or place for that teaching. So, an important part of strategy is knowing which teachings to use when. And not jumping the gun or trying to skip over things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Noble Warrior's Path" (Meditations8)

"There’s a story about Somdet Toh. A young monk came to see him one evening and said, “This monk came up and hit me. I hadn’t done anything to him at all. He just came up and hit me.” And Somdet Toh said, “No, you hit him first.” They argued over this for a while, and then the young monk, frustrated, went to find another senior monk to complain about Somdet Toh, who he said wasn’t listening to reason. So the senior monk came and asked Somdet Toh, “What’s this all about?” And Somdet Toh said, “Well if this monk hadn’t had any kamma with that other monk in the past, the other monk wouldn’t have come up and hit him.” But then of course that raises the question, why did the first monk hit the second monk, or who hit who first? When you trace it back and back and back, that question becomes meaningless. And the funny thing is, is that making it meaningless takes a lot of sting out of it. The part of the mind that says, “I’ve got to right this wrong,” that holds on to old w...

"The second principle to keep in mind is that, in the Buddha’s teaching, there’s no question of a person’s “deserving” happiness or “deserving” pain. The principle of kamma is an impersonal one: that there are actions leading to pleasure and actions leading to pain. In this way, it’s not a respecter of persons; it’s purely an issue of actions and results. Good people may have some bad actions squirreled away in their past. People who seem horrible now may have some wonderful actions in theirs. You never know. The Buddha didn’t create the principle of kamma, or say that it’s good or just. He simply pointed out the way actions produce results. So there’s no question of a person’s deserving or not deserving pleasure or pain. There’s simply the principle that actions have results and that your present experience of pleasure or pain is the combined result of past and present actions. You may have some very unskillful actions in your past, but if you learn to think and act skillfully wh...

"Don’t let the fact that old bad karma is showing itself be an excuse to create more bad karma. It should be your signal that, okay, this is what bad karma is like when it shows its results, and you don’t want it. So do what good karma you can in the meantime. That includes developing qualities like patience, but also looking around to see what other opportunities there are to do something good. Lift your spirits. Learn how to give yourself a pep talk." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma Storms"

"The Buddha says that if you think there is a creator god who is responsible for the pleasure and pain you experience, you can’t really practice the Dhamma. You have to realize that the important issues are the things that *you* create. When you solve the issue of your own creations, then you’re done with the problem." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"