Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"Many people in the modern world come to Buddhism suffering from their conceptual framework. They’re raised in a materialist worldview whose basic concepts — that life comes from nothing and returns to nothing, with a brief chance to pursue pleasure in the interim — are pretty dismal. They believe that if they could free their minds from these concepts and simply dwell in the present with no thought of what happens at the end, they’d be happy. They’d be able to squeeze as much pleasure out of the present as they could before the inevitable hits. So they look for a way to be free of all concepts. When they come here, though, they run into concepts. They see the Buddha’s teachings on kamma and rebirth, and they say, “This is invalid; you can’t make presuppositions about these things. Nobody knows anything about what happens before we’re born. Nobody knows anything about what happens after we die. Doesn’t the Buddha say that you have to prove things before you can accept them? All we...

"Ajaan Suwat came from a very large peasant family, and large peasant families usually don’t have much to hand down to their children. He met a forest monk who said, “Hey look, it’s your actions that matter. And the fact that you’re poor now: You may have not been generous in the past, but you’ve got the opportunity now to practice the Dhamma.” So this quality of conviction is what sees us through. When things are going easy, the idea of having conviction doesn’t speak that much to us. But when things get hard: We look at our lives, we look at the people around us, the situation we’re in — and the last thing you need is something that teaches you to just give in. The teaching of karma is precisely what tells you not to give in. It places power in your hands." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Faith"

"There’s no wrong that goes unpunished, no good that goes unrewarded. That’s simply the way kamma is. Therefore, we don’t have to carry around ledger sheets — which person did this, which person did that — with the fear that if the ledger sheet disappears then that person’s not going to get the retribution he or she deserves. The principle of kamma takes care of that. But remember that it also takes care of you as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Story-telling Mind"

"[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)

"Even if we don’t get all the way to the ultimate skill of reaching the Deathless, the fact that we’ve trained ourselves to be more and more skillful leads the mind in the direction of less and less suffering. It inclines the mind in that direction. If you don’t make it all the way to the Deathless in this lifetime, your quest for skillfulness insures that your next lifetime will keep heading in that direction. You build up a momentum." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Anger" (Meditations2)

"It’s easy not to believe that the quality of your intention is going to determine the results of your actions, because you see a lot of people acting out of greed, hatred, and delusion, and yet they seem to be pretty happy, in the short term at least. So it is a matter of belief. And the Buddha’s proof simply is a pragmatic one: If you believe in your actions, you’ll act more skillfully." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Believe in Your Actions"

"Think about the dangers of our moods: They can induce us to do all kinds of unskillful things. If we get really depressed, we get apathetic. Nothing seems to matter — you lose any sense of concern for the results of your actions. When you get really happy and manic, you get complacent — and again you lose any concern for the results of your actions. You end up doing and saying things that can cause harm very easily. Then you’re stuck with the results." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "At Normalcy"

"Although the precise working out of the kammic process is somewhat unpredictable, it is not chaotic. The relationship between kammic causes and their effects is entirely regular: when an action is of the sort that it will be felt in such and such a way, that is how its result will be experienced [AN3:99]. Skillful intentions lead to favorable results, unskillful ones to unfavorable results." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Wings to Awakening"

"The main feature of relationships is that they end. So, keeping in mind the fact that the relationship will end, what do you want to be able to look back on? Not so much the good times you had together, but the good things you did for the other person. Those feel really good. As the Buddha said, if you have a really good relationship that you want to continue in the next lifetime, make sure that you both observe the precepts together." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Buddha's Relationship Advice"

"The ability to talk to yourself skillfully can be strengthened by a different kind of feeling: not emotions, but feelings of pleasure. The mind doesn’t operate totally on its understanding of things. Feelings of pleasure and pain do play a role in the way we act, the way we think. This is one of the reasons why we try to give rise to feelings of well-being within ourselves, through the breath, through the meditation." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Feeling & Intention"

"Your ability to appreciate other people’s happiness is going to help your ability to appreciate your own. It’s not infrequent when people come to meditate that they gain a sense of pleasure from the meditation and they don’t feel that they’re worthy of it. They feel they don’t deserve it. To get past that feeling, they should look back on their own attitude toward not only their own happiness but also toward other people’s happiness. If you resent other people’s happiness, then it’s going to be hard for you to feel that you deserve happiness. The question of deserving gets in the way. When the Buddha was teaching, as in that passage we chanted just now on how to put an end to suffering, there was no question about how this teaching was only for people who don’t deserve to suffer. The path to the end of suffering is for everybody, for all kinds of suffering, “deserved” or not. The question never comes up in his teachings — simply the question that people are doing thi...

"Look at your mind from the point of view of karma: Things come into the mind from the past, and they’re going to be skillful and unskillful because you’ve done skillful and unskillful things in the past. Everybody has. But the question is, do you want to keep on doing the unskillful ones? What can you do to foster the more skillful ones? When you think in these terms, that’s when you’re really being kind to yourself." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Kindness in the Light of Karma"

"It’s not the case that the Buddha leaves you to explore everything. He gives advice on things not to do under any circumstances. You don’t want to break the precepts. You don’t want to engage in wrong speech — not only in lying but also in divisive speech, harsh speech, idle chatter. And you avoid greed, ill will, and the view that your actions don’t yield results, don’t make a difference. Those precepts are principles you don’t have to test. Just use them." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Kamma of Concentration" (Meditations9)

"The passages related to the social virtues are the ones that sound the strangest. For example, “There is what is given.” This sounds perfectly obvious, but it had a special meaning in the time of the Buddha. For millennia, the brahmans had been preaching about the virtue of giving, especially when things were given to brahmans. In the texts of old brahmanical ceremonies for making merit for the dead, for example, there’s a part of the ceremony where the brahmans will address the bereaved and say, “We are speaking in the voice of your dead relatives: ‘Give to the brahmans!’” When the bereaved gave to the brahmans, the brahmans — again assuming the voice of the dead relatives — said, “Give more!” You can imagine the reaction that eventually developed. Over the centuries, there sprang up schools of contemplatives who said, in reaction, that there is no virtue in giving. One of their arguments was that people do not have free will, therefore even when they give things, it doesn’t m...

 "First, kamma: When someone is suffering, you have to reflect on the reasons why people suffer. Here we have to correct a common misunderstanding about kamma. The Buddha didn’t say that our present suffering comes entirely from our past actions. In fact, he actually said that to believe that what you experience now depends solely on past actions is an extreme form of wrong view. He took this point so seriously that — even though he wasn’t the sort of person to look for fights — when he heard that other people were teaching this view, he sought them out to argue with them. If you teach that everything depends on past kamma, he said, it leaves your students unprotected and bewildered, for it leaves them with no way of escaping from suffering in the present. One case involved some Jain ascetics: They claimed that by engaging in extreme asceticism, they were burning off the pains caused by their past bad kamma. So he asked them: “Have you noticed that when you don’t engage in asceti...

"The Buddha’s cousin, Mahānāma asks the Buddha for instructions on how to advise a wise person who is about to die. The Buddha replies that if the dying person is plagued by worries about his family, he should be reminded that his worries at this point cannot help his family, so he should let those worries go. If he is fixated on human sensual pleasures, he should be told that human sensual pleasures are no match for the pleasures of the sensual heavens, so he should focus his mind on those heavens instead. If he’s fixated on the pleasures of the sensual heavens, he should be told that even those are inferior to the pleasures of the Brahmā world, and he should instead focus his thoughts there. If the dying person is fixated on the Brahmā world, he should be told that even the Brahmā world is “inconstant, impermanent, and included in self-identification.” In other worlds, the Brahmā worlds are unstable...." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Sublime Attitudes: A Study Guide on th...

"Look at everything, even your sense of who you are, as types of action, and then look at whether they’re skillful or not. This is where that reflection on karma can take you. That fifth reflection may sound very simple, very basic — some people call it kindergarten Buddhism: You do good, you get good results; you do bad, you get bad results. But it’s exploring that basic principle that can take you all the way." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Up for the Challenge"

"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)

Question: The precept against killing is often translated into adopting a vegetarian diet. Is this necessary? Aren’t you also killing these poor vegetables, stripping their skin off while they’re still alive and boiling them? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: For the monks, our rule is that we’re not allowed to eat meat if we either know or suspect that it was killed for the purpose of feeding us. The precept against killing is specifically against either killing something on your own or telling someone else to kill. Now, if you want to take the precept further and adopt a vegetarian diet, that’s perfectly fine. But the precept doesn’t require it. Just make sure that when you go to a seafood restaurant and they have a fish tank with live fish, don’t choose any of the live fish. As for vegetables, they don’t come under the concept of sentient being — they don’t feel pain — so the precept doesn’t cover them. We’ve received several questions on the issue of the relationship between the ...

"So learn how to separate yourself from the chatter in the mind. And don’t worry about how long it’s going to last. As long as you’re not getting involved, you’ve covered the important point. Think of the chatter as past kamma, and your determination not to get involved as your present kamma. Focus on your present kamma. Let the past go. This way, you find it a lot easier to stick with the meditation." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Patience & Tenacity" (Meditations9)

"We live in a world where good actions are rewarded, both in this lifetime and in future ones. We ourselves are beings who will survive death — as we have already survived death many times — to enjoy the results of our actions." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Clinging & the End of Clinging"

"When the Buddha advises you not to kill, he also recommends that you be gentle and protective of other beings. The same with the precept against stealing: You also protect other people’s belongings as best you can. The precept against illicit sex: You respect people’s rights; you don’t let your lust overcome the bounds of propriety. The precept against lying: You try to be a person who tells the truth, you try to promote friendships, you try to promote goodness in other people as well. So there’s a positive side to virtue, too." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Spread Goodness Around" (Meditations9)

"You’ll learn how to reflect on all your actions, because this is what Dhamma practice is about. How are you going to learn something new unless you reflect? You look at what you do, what you get as a result. Then you ask yourself, “Are the results really satisfactory?” As long as there’s suffering in the mind, no. There’s something wrong with what you’re doing." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Something New"

"One of the complaints you often hear about the Buddha’s teachings on karma is that they’re all about past and future, whereas the real practice is in the present — the implication here being that the teachings on karma are a distraction from where the real work is. But that’s not the case. When the Buddha talks about being in the present, it’s in the context of the teaching of karma, both in terms of the motivation of why you want to be in the present moment and what you’re looking for in the present moment. Your motivation is that there’s work to be done here and if you don’t do it now, you don’t know how much longer you’ll have the chance to do the work. Remember the Buddha’s contemplation of when you see the sun set that this may be your last sunset, or when you see the sun rise that this may be your last sunrise. Are you ready to go? And a large part of the mind will say No. So there’s work to be done. There are things in the mind that will weigh you down or pull you back if ...

"For most of us, we’re miserable and we slosh our misery out on others, thinking that we’re lightening our load, but it just makes things worse. Well, you can take care of the source of this sloshing stuff inside. You benefit. The people around you benefit." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "So Little Time" (Meditations8)

"The teachings on action, or karma, are so central to the Buddha’s message. Contrary to popular belief, the Buddha did not teach fatalism. In fact, he was extremely critical of fatalism — the belief that your experiences are already determined from causes in the past — because fatalism denies that your present actions can make a difference. In one of his discourses, he notes that fatalism leaves you without protection, for it allows no foundation for even the idea of what should and shouldn’t be done. If everything is predetermined, there’s no way of saying that one action is good and another bad. Everything is just the way it has to be. The Buddha’s teaching on karma, however, focuses on the fact that while your experiences are influenced to some extent by actions from the past, the way you experience those influences depends on what you do with them in the present. In fact, without the karma of your present actions, you wouldn’t experience anything at all." ~ Thanissaro Bhi...

"So when the Buddha’s teaching kamma, it’s not primarily for the purpose of making you feel guilty or bad about what you’ve done in the past. He always emphasizes the fact that you have to realize you’ve made mistakes in the past, but you can resolve not to do them again. Then you develop an expansive mind: a mind of unlimited goodwill, unlimited compassion, unlimited empathetic joy, unlimited equanimity. A mind trained not to be overcome by pleasure or by pain. A mind developed in virtue and discernment. These qualities expand your mind, so that what comes in from the past doesn’t have to make you suffer. What the Buddha does emphasize when he introduces the topic of kamma is the need to be responsible and to focus your attention on your present kamma, and not to worry about the past. Your focus on the present moment is not simply for the purpose of being fully present to everything in the present. It’s for the purpose of looking closely at the choices you’re making and the resul...

"The conviction here is conviction in the principle of karma: that the pleasure and pain we experience depends on the quality of the intentions on which we act. This conviction counteracts the delusion that “It’s not in my best interest to stick to moral principles in the face of danger,” and it attacks this delusion in three ways. First, it insists on what might be called the “boomerang” or “spitting into the wind” principle of karmic cause and effect. If you act on harmful intentions, regardless of the situation, the harm will come back to you. Even if unskillful actions such as killing, stealing, or lying might bring short-term advantages, these are more than offset by the long-term harm to which they leave you exposed. Conversely, this same principle can make you brave in doing good. If you’re convinced that the results of skillful intentions will have to return to you even if death intervenes, you can more easily make the sacrifices demanded by long-term endeavors for your o...

"We all know that life is going to end at some spot and the question is, what comes next? So you want to develop the qualities of mind that will help ensure that, whatever comes next, it’s something not to be afraid of, but something actually to look forward to. Not in the sense that you want to die, but at least you feel secure about where you’re going after death." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Try This at Home"

"The second lesson of karma is that just as you’re the primary architect of your own happiness and suffering, other people are the primary architects of theirs. If you really want them to be happy, you don’t just treat them nicely. You also want them to learn how to create the causes for happiness. If you can, you want to show them how to do that. This is why the gift of dharma — lessons in how to give rise to true happiness — is the greatest gift." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras"

"We get into the present moment not because the present moment is a wonderful moment; after all, a lot of things that happen in the present are not wonderful at all. But the present moment is an important moment, because it’s where we’re making decisions that shape our life. Decisions that were made in the past are things you can’t change anymore. They are done. Decisions that you’re going to make in the future will depend a lot on what you’re doing right now. So this is the most important place to be. The world tells us that things other people are doing on the other side of the world are the most important thing going on. But you don’t have to believe that, because your world is being shaped by your actions right now. You want to understand this process of acting. What does it mean for the mind to act? What’s the difference between a simple event in the mind, the appearance of a feeling, and an action, the intention? How are intentions formed? What goes into that process? What k...

"When you’re playing tennis, the first lesson is keep your eye on the ball. You never forget that. Even when you become a great pro, you still have to keep your eye on the ball. In the same way, when you practice, keep your eye on your actions, because that’s where everything will become clear." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reflections on Kamma"

Question: The Buddha trained Rāhula in how to comport himself so that he would not be a nuisance to other people. Unfortunately, not everyone in the world is Rāhula. What attitude should one adopt in the face of people who do things that are unreflective and who have no sense of their own limits? Should we develop patience, tolerance, forgiveness? What other things should we do, especially given that we have not yet attained the first level of awakening? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: When dealing with difficult people, the approach we take should be determined by whether they are responsive to our actions or not. Some people are responsive and we can actually have a good influence on their actions. In that case, try to be proactive in helping them. Others are difficult to deal with and will not respond. That’s where you have to develop equanimity and forgiveness. And this is why it’s good to think about the principle of kamma in general. That helps put your actions and the other person’s actio...

"We’re saying, “May all beings understand the causes of true happiness and act on them.” It’s not the fact that our thought of goodwill is like a magic wand that’s going to spread happiness and light in whichever direction we point it. What we’re doing is getting our intentions straight: that we don’t want to cause anybody any harm and we’re happy to help other people as they work on their own quest for happiness." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reflection on Kamma"

"You’re judging actions; you’re not here to judge yourself as to whether you’re a good person or a bad person, a good meditator or bad meditator, talented or hopeless. That’s not the issue. The issue is: What are you doing right now? What are the results? Are they good enough, or could they be better?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Judging Your Meditation"

"There’s a passage in the Canon where one of the asuras basically says, “If people see that you’re not fighting back when they mistreat you, then they’ll think that you’re weak and they’ll mistreat you even more.” And Sakka, the king of the devas replies, “No. How they see you is not the issue. The issue is your own behavior, because that becomes your karma. If other people misbehave and you misbehave in response, then that misbehavior becomes yours. If they think you’re weak, then they know nothing of the Dhamma” — because you have to remember that qualities like goodwill, patience, equanimity, and kindness are forms of strength." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Helping Yourself by Helping Others"

"Ajaan Fuang once said that it’s a good thing most of us can’t remember our past lives because we could very easily get fixated on all the wrong that was done to us, all the issues that never got settled. And we might want to go back and settle some old scores. Of course, there’d be no end to that. After all, the people whose scores got settled would probably want to settle some scores with us, because the other part of potentially remembering your past lives is remembering all the wrongs you did, the ways you harmed people, that you’d be ashamed to think about now. But just the thought of that possibility leaves us with an important lesson. No scores are fully settled. Things don’t come to closure. This is the nature of samsara: It just keeps wandering on and on and on. No story comes to an end. We watch plays, read books, where events come to a satisfying closure, and part of us would like to see that in our own lives as well. But one of the facts you have to accept when you c...

"You’ve got the body here; you’ve got the breath. And a lot of what you experience in the body and breath comes from old kamma. As the Buddha said, all of our six senses should be experienced as old kamma. But we’re not just stuck with old kamma; in fact, our present kamma is something we experience prior to sensory contact. This is a peculiar point in the Buddha’s description of causality: that intentions come prior to our experience of the six senses. In one sense it’s not peculiar. We can often see for ourselves how the way we have an intention in the mind is going to shape the way we experience things. If we’re hungry right now, we’re going to experience the world in one way. If we’ve had more than enough food, we’re going to experience the world in another way. It all comes down to our intentions. What’s strange about this is that your present intention, your present kamma, is actually something that you experience prior to the results of your past kamma. The contact at the s...