Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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"

"Belief in the principle of rebirth helps to counteract one common reason for fearing death: the fear that death means total annihilation. The Buddha affirms that as long as there’s still craving in the mind, you’ll continue to have opportunities to pursue happiness even after death. In other words, if you want to be reborn, you will. At the same time, if you’re afraid that death will separate you from those you love and those who love you, the Buddha offers reassurance that loved ones who want to meet again after death will do so if they develop, in common, four qualities: conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment. Still, repeated rebirth is at best an iffy proposition. To begin with, even if you don’t want to be reborn, you’ll still have to take rebirth as long as there is ignorance and craving in the mind. And as for hoping to meet again with your kin and loved ones, how many of them can be relied on to develop right view and maintain it all the way through death? The nu

"You should start every day with thoughts of goodwill [mettā] and end the day with thoughts of goodwill, to keep your intentions in line. Because the major motivation for our practice is that we want a happiness, a sense of well-being that doesn’t harm anybody. We have to follow a path of practice that doesn’t harm anybody. But it’s so easy to think thoughts of harm. So we have to consciously train the mind not to think those thoughts. You have to reason with it. You can’t browbeat it into submission by just saying, “May all beings be happy, be happy, be happy.” That doesn’t do it. You have to think about what that means, and particularly what it means in terms of your own actions. On the one hand, you realize other beings are not going to be happy unless they actually put together the causes for happiness, genuine happiness. Think about that for a bit and you realize that’s a thought you can think about anybody without any kind of hypocrisy, even people who’ve been really miser

"We hear about the Dhamma protecting us or we hear about our good intentions protecting us, and we think that we don’t have to be wary about the world around us. Our good intentions will protect us. But the Buddha never said that. The protection you get from the Dhamma is that you’re not creating any new bad kamma right now, but it doesn’t protect you from your old bad kamma. So you still have to watch out. I noticed that Ajaan Fuang was a very wary person — wary of dealing with other people. He wouldn’t trust people right away. He would watch them for a while first. When I lived with him, it was two or three years before I was even allowed in his room. I eventually became his attendant, and then it became my duty. I had to clean up his room and arrange everything. But he wouldn’t allow me in there until he felt that he could really trust me. And when different issues came up in the monastery — so-and-so said this about you, so-and-so said that about you — he would sometimes ask t

"A lot of people like the brahma-vihāras. It feels good to be sitting here thinking, “May all beings be happy” or to think of anyone who’s suffering and send compassion: “May that person be free from suffering.” You see people who are happy or doing things that are good, you’re happy for them. Those are pleasant things to think about, and you feel good about yourself thinking them. But you have to realize the brahma-vihāras are not entirely pleasant, especially the first three, because after all they’re involved in wishes. May all beings be happy. May all those who are suffering be free from their suffering. May all those who are happy or doing good things, may they continue to be happy. May, may, may. But you look at the world. Not everybody is happy. A lot of people are suffering or doing things that are going to cause suffering both for other people now and for themselves on into the future. And there are some people who are happy and yet are abusing their happiness. So the b

"When looking at people around you, it’s important that you get away from your sense of competitiveness, of this person versus that person. You look, not at them, but at their activities. Otherwise you start comparing yourself to the other person: “This person’s better than I am. That person’s worse than I am.” And that brings in questions of conceit, resentment, and competition, which are not really helpful because we’re not here to compete with each other. We’re here to work on ourselves. So again, look at other people simply in terms of their thoughts, their words, their actions. And see what’s an admirable action, what are admirable words, what are admirable ideas, ones you can emulate, ones you can pick up. In this way the fact that we’re living together becomes a help to the practice rather than a hindrance. The same is true when you notice people around you doing things that are not so admirable. Instead of judging the other person, simply judge the actions by their result

"You sometimes hear that everyone deserves your compassion because they all have Buddha-nature. But this ignores the primary reason for developing compassion as a brahmavihāra in the first place: You need to make your compassion universal so that you can trust your intentions. If you regard your compassion as so precious that only Buddhas deserve it, you won’t be able to trust yourself when encountering people whose actions are consistently evil. At the same time, you have to remember that no human being has a totally pure karmic past, so you can’t make a person’s purity the basis for your compassion. Some people resist the idea that, say, children born into a warzone, suffering from brutality and starvation, are there for a karmic reason. It seems heartless, they say, to attribute these sufferings to karma from past lives. The only heartlessness here, though, is the insistence that people are worthy of compassion only if they are innocent of any wrongdoing. Remember that you don’

"We’ve all made mistakes in the past, but we’ve all done some good things, too. Focus on the good things. Those are what give you strength to keep on doing more good things. If you focus on the bad things you’ve done, you just start spiraling down and it’s hard to pull yourself up. So focus on the good that you’ve done. Dedicate that to your future, dedicate that to the people you’ve harmed in the past, so that you can live in this world without a sense that you’ve got a big debt. You’re working on paying off your debts, so work at it every day, every day." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focus on the Good"

"If you really want happiness, it has to come from training your own mind. This is why the practice of the Dhamma is a practice of looking inward, not looking outward. You look outward and all you see is other people’s bad habits, other people’s bad actions. Where does that get you? Nowhere at all. Turn around and look inside, and you’ll realize that there’s work to be done inside. This doesn’t mean you’re in the wrong or the other people are right, simply that your work is inside." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Looking Inward"

"Your actions are what are real, that have the most reality. The world out there is not the issue. The world that you experience comes from your actions. Your [intentional] actions [karma] are more solid, more powerful than your experience of earth, wind, water, fire, and all the other elements. That’s a pretty radical statement. This is why the Buddha keeps focusing back on what you’re doing right now because what you’re doing right now is the big shaping force in your experience." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "So Little Time" (Meditations8)

"In its most sophisticated expression, though, the Buddha’s insight into causality implies that each moment is composed of three types of factors: results of past intentions, present intentions, and the results of present intentions. Because many past intentions can have an impact on any given moment, this means that there can be many potential influences from the past — helpful or harmful — appearing in the body or mind at any given time. The role of appropriate attention is to focus on whichever influence is potentially most helpful and to look at it in such a way as to promote skillful intentions in the present." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Food for Awakening: The Role of Appropriate Attention"

"If you feel goodwill [mettā] for people, then when they’re suffering the ill effects of their bad karma you can’t help but have compassion for them. You want them not only to stop experiencing whatever pain or suffering they’re undergoing at the time, but also to stop doing whatever’s going to cause them to continue to suffer. This is an important part of compassion. It’s not simply a soft spot in your heart for people who are suffering. It also means also trying to find some way to help them to stop doing the things that are causing them to suffer to begin with." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Sublime Attitudes" (Meditations2)

"But the fact is that you’re making choices all the time, and what you’re experiencing right now is the result of choices you’ve made in the past plus choices you’re making right now. A major part of the path is learning how to accept that fact and then to work with it — to do something positive with it. In other words, if there’s suffering right now, you’ve been making some bad choices in the past, and you’re making some bad choices right now. If you weren’t making bad choices right now, there wouldn’t be any suffering. So wherever there’s any stress, dukkha in any of its forms, you’ve got to look into what you’re doing. But you can change what you’re doing, and shape a different present: That’s the positive point." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "One Thing Only" (Meditations7)

"There’s a story Ajaan Lee tells of a woman who came to a monastery and saw that one of the walking meditation paths was dirty. So she swept it and set out some water. She felt really good about what she had done. It so happened on her return home she had a heart attack and died, reborn as a deva. She asked herself, “Gee, what did I do to deserve this?” The memory came to her that she had swept the path. So she thought, “Suppose I had done more than that? I’d have an even nicer palace and even nicer setup here.” So she went back down and found a meditating monk out in a forest and just stood there staring at him to see what she could do for him. It turned out he had psychic powers. He could see her, and so he chased her away: “Stop trying to butt in on human beings’ merit. You had all that opportunity when you were alive. Stop being so greedy. Let human beings have a chance to make some merit.” So she fled back to her palace." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "You're Already D

"Everything the Buddha teaches gets analyzed down into actions, intentions and their results. The intention you can gauge as to whether it’s skillful or not, the results you can gauge as to whether they are skillful or not. What kind of person you are, how good or bad you are, that’s not anything you can gauge at all. If you try to do it, it really gets in the way. So your duty here is to look at your intentions, and then to see how well those intentions play out when you act on them. And learn how to judge the results. Look at things simply in terms of cause and effect, and measure the effects in terms of whether they’re harmful or not, whether they lead to happiness or whether they lead to stress and suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Thoughts with Fangs"

"As the Buddha said, “You don’t go to heaven or hell because of other people’s actions. You go because of your own actions.” Those can take you to heaven; they can take you to hell. So why are you taking yourself to hell? And why are you upset with what other people are doing, which really has nothing to do, really, with you? It’s your actions that make all the difference." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Look at Yourself"

"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. He adds that if you really want to put an end to suffering through your own efforts, this is what you have to believe. You have to take this as your working hypothesis." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Believe in Your Actions"

"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"

"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." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"The Buddha’s teachings on karma are often presented as a form of determinism — fatalism even: What was done in the past is going to determine what you’re going to experience in the present, and if you do something in the present moment, you have some hope that it will have an effect on the future. But there’s that question: Well, do you really have choice in the present? If the present moment is shaped by the past, what can you do? That would be a problem if the teaching were deterministic, but it’s not. The Buddha makes it very clear that if you believe everything that you experience is shaped by past karma, you have no way of practicing. There’s nothing you can do. You just have to accept what’s coming. There’s even the question of whether you could legitimately say you had the choice of accepting or not. If everything were already shaped, then there could no directions as to what you should or shouldn’t do, what’s skillful and what’s unskillful in the present moment. This, the

"If you meet up with the results of some past bad kamma — suppose somebody does something bad to you — it doesn’t mean that your past kamma compelled them to do something bad. It’s simply that your past kamma left the opening. They saw the opening and they took it. And of course, that becomes their kamma now. The fact that you had that past bad kamma: There are unskillful ways and skillful ways that you can think about it. The unskillful way would be to think, “Well, this person was simply carrying out the dictates of kamma. So the person’s not responsible or is actually doing something good.” That’s unskillful. There’s no excuse for that person’s behavior, because the person did choose to take that opening. The skillful way is to say, “Well, I must have some past bad kamma, so I’ll learn how to take it in stride and not get too worked up about it. And I’ll take it as an incentive to try to be more skillful in the future.” As for times when someone does something real

"When you experience something, there’s also a doing in the experiencing. You want to look for that as well, because it’s not that you’re sitting here totally passive, experiencing the results of past karma. You’re also creating present karma, present intentions, right now. The intentions you have right now are going to determine what you experience and what you focus on, what you do with what you focus on. This doing is really important here. So, for the purpose of the path, what you are doesn’t go beyond what you are as the doer, so that you focus on not so much on your identity here, but the actual quality of your actions, the quality of your intentions." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Riddle of 'I Am'"

"If other people were ultimately responsible for shaping your experience, what could you do? You’d have to go around pleasing them all the time. But the key fact is that you’re shaping your pleasures and pains here in the present moment. Some of your experience comes from past actions, but a lot comes from the way you shape things with each present intention. So learn to be open and honest about the role you’re playing in this moment. That way the meditation leads to greater and greater sensitivity into precisely this — what you’re doing right now — and into the fact that if you were really observant you’d be a lot more sensitive in shaping your experience. There’d be a lot less suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Get Real" (Meditations3)

"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 can have a say in where that intention is going to go. The more solidly you can stay in the present moment — the more steadily you can maintain your balance here — the more you'll be able to see, and the more conscious say you'll have in the direction those intentions are going to take you." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sticking with an Intention" (Meditations3)

"We realize that Buddha was right: that acts of merit are another word for happiness. In other words, when you’re generous, when you’re virtuous, as you get your mind under control, this is where happiness lies. As you realize happiness is in your power, you don’t have to go around begging it from somebody else or having to demean yourself. As Ajaan Fuang once said, when we come to the practice, we’re nobody’s servant. We’re here independently because we see that what the Buddha said was right, that it’s our actions that will make a difference. So we take responsibility. We assume that power and then we reap the rewards. That happiness is lasting: a happiness that doesn’t harm anybody in anyway. That’s the kind of happiness you want for a happy New Year. As for the things outside, whether they’re good or bad: A lot of that is beyond our control, but we can control our actions. We can make up the mind that we’re going to do only skillful things. Anything that’s unskillful, we sta

"So everything depends on your actions, realizing that what comes out of your mind is a lot more important than what comes in. What comes in will have an effect, but it’s your choice of what to look at that matters, along with what’s actually going out to look at things and listen to things: What choices are you making? Try to make skillful choices. Because those skillful choices will shape your life now and on into the future." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "What Matters in the World"

"There are things we may want out of other people that they don’t want to give, like respect, acknowledgment of our existence, or acknowledgment of our worth as a person. Then you have to ask yourself, “Is it really worth fighting for? What does the fighting accomplish? Is it going to gain any respect? And even if it does, how much is that respect worth?” There are so many battles in the world that just lead to bad kamma even when you win, sometimes especially when you win. Look at the history of the world when nations that won battles ended up being transformed into the enemy, taking on the enemy’s characteristics. Is this what you want? At the same time, when you win a battle, you gain the animosity of those who lost. This is why the Buddha said that it’s better to focus on the battles inside, battles over your own defilements, greed, aversion, and delusion. Those are the battles that can be won, and when you win, you don’t create any bad kamma. As for whether the people outsid

"So when things come up in life, don’t ask yourself, “What kamma did I do in the past that’s making me suffer now?” or “What is somebody else doing to me that’s making me suffer?” The question is: “What am I doing right now? To what extent am I actively creating the suffering? To what extent can I see that it really is true that to suffer is an active verb, that it all comes from my own actions?” When you see that, you also see the opportunity not to do those things anymore. You’re not compelled to do them anymore. That’s when you’re free. As for where the outside conditions came from in the past, that’s no longer an issue. The suffering you were creating moment to moment was the only suffering that was weighing down the mind. And now you’ve stopped." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "To Suffer Is an Active Verb"

"I had a student once who told me that his version of checking the morning news was to go out into his garden and check on what was growing, what was blooming, what was dying. I had to tell him that even that was too far afield. The important news is what’s going on in your mind right now: What are you doing? What are you saying? What are you thinking? Why? What’s the motivation? This is the news that’s really important for us, because it’s what we’re responsible for." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Current News" (Meditations10)

"A lot of our problem with kamma is that we don’t have a sense of how to relate to it in an emotionally positive way. But when you think about it in terms of gratitude and generosity, you realize that this power we have to make choices is important. It’s to be valued. You want to protect it. You want to train it. As for the knowledge that we’ve done unskillful things in the past, the Buddha said the proper way of thinking about that is that as soon as you realize it’s unskillful, you make up your mind you’re going to refrain from it, you’re not going to make that mistake again. That’s it. As he says, feelings of remorse over the mistake, strong feelings of guilt, the feeling you see in a dog when it knows it’s done something wrong, gets on its back, and wags its tail, hoping you’ll forgive it: That’s not the kind of reaction the Buddha advocates. Because if you let remorse take over, then you feel more negative about yourself, and because you don’t like these negative feelings, th

"Conviction in the principle of kamma: That’s a strength because it emphasizes how important each decision is. Sometimes there will be a member of the committee that says, “Okay, you can make a skillful choice right now, but in another five minutes you’re going to go back to the old ways, so why bother right now?” Don’t listen to that voice. It’s destructive. Just say to yourself: “Well, I don’t care about five minutes from now. Right now, I’m going to do the skillful thing. When five minutes is up, we can deal with what to do then. But right now, I’m going to make the best choice because it’s important.” You could sit around and think about how the Sun is going to go nova sometime, and everything in the world is going to burn to a crisp, and that would make your actions and choices seem really minuscule. Well, don’t think in those ways. It’s your life that you’re shaping. It’s your experience of pleasure or pain, and the pleasure and pain of the people immediately around you, a

"You get an idea of the difference between the perspective that’s provided by thinking about the many times we’ve been reborn and the belief that we have only one birth. When there’s only one birth, we can get very worked up about things. Things are tragic, things are horrible, great injustices have been done. But from the Buddha’s point of view, a lot of those ideas and feelings come from the fact that we don’t see the whole story. Think about it. He says there hasn’t been just one universe. There’ve been many universes, one after another. Scientists tell us how many billions of years the stars in our universe have been around, and we haven’t even gone through the whole cycle of this particular universe. And there’ve been many before us. As the Buddha said, those who can remember past lives back forty eons — in other words, forty universes — have a short memory. His memory extended far beyond that, to the point where he said that trying to find a beginning point for all this, eve

"Remember the Buddha’s analysis of what a world is: your six senses. And remember that samsara is not a place. It’s an activity. It’s made out of your actions. That’s where the danger lies — in your actions — but it’s also where the promise lies. If we were just physical things defined by the world, there’d be no way we could use the processes of the physical world to get out of the physical world. But because the world is made of our actions, we can use the processes of actions to get out of this web of actions that we’ve woven for ourselves. This is where the fact of the complexity of kamma actually works to our advantage. It does have a disadvantage in that often we’re very confused as to what’s going to be helpful. Something looks good and looks okay and we do it and then we find out quite a while later that it wasn’t good at all in the long term. But the complexity of kamma also gives us freedom of choice. And we have the Buddha and we have the Dhamma to give us some basic in

"The Buddha never taught bare attention. He taught appropriate attention. This is an important distinction to bear in mind. If we think that the heart of the meditation is just simply bare attention, it causes all kinds of misunderstandings – such as the idea that meditation is simply a process of watching whatever comes up and not doing anything about it. Or even deeper, there’s the idea that if all you need to do is bare attention, why bother reading the Buddha’s other teachings at all? Just try to be as passive as possible. You don’t need to study. Just practice passive awareness and that will take care of all your problems. Sometimes people say that bare attention is the unconditioned, that a moment of bare attention is a moment of awakening. If you believe that, you close all of the paths to awakening. Because if you don’t see the difference between the path and the goal, you’re never going to get the goal. You have to work on the path and then you have to let it go at some p

"This same principle [of karmic cause and effect] 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 own good and that of others. Whether or not you live to see the results in this lifetime, you’re convinced that the good you do is never lost. In this way, you develop the courage needed to build a store of skillful actions — generous and virtuous — that forms your first line of defense against dangers and fear." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Freedom from Fear"

"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 things that cause suffering, and everybody would be better off if we learned how to stop. It would be better for us, better for people around us." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Healthy Attitude Toward Happiness"

"A chant we have regularly — that we’re the owners of our actions, heir to our actions — is basically a reflection on the teaching of karma. Ajaan Fuang once said to me, “That’s the one thing you’re asked to believe: the principle of karma,” which is the principle of action. This means, one, that action really does take place. It’s not an illusion. There were actually people in the time of the Buddha who taught that action was illusory, that the only real things in the world were substances that didn’t change, and because action was movement and change, it didn’t really exist. The Buddha said, “No, that’s not the case. There really is action.” Two, you really are responsible for your actions. It’s not some outside force like the stars or who-knows-what acting through you. You do have the choice to do things. Three, actions have results, and the quality of the results depends on the quality of the intention underlying the action. This is a very empowering teaching. It’s not a dif

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

"So karma’s not one of those teachings that just happened to get attached to the teaching, like a leech from India that somehow latched onto the boat of Buddhism. It’s actually central to everything we do, because the Buddha is teaching a course of action. Putting an end to suffering is something you do . And so he has to explain what action is, what it is possible for human beings to do, and how an understanding of action is really very helpful in acting skillfully." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mindful of Karma"

"So pay careful attention right here. As for things outside, you can let them go. Nothing is as important as watching your own mind right now. We watch the media and they tell us that the important things in the world are things that somebody else is doing someplace else. That’s not the message of the Dhamma. The message of the Dhamma is that what matters most in the world is what you’re doing right here right now. So what are you doing? You want to make sure that your mind is acting on skillful intentions. And the intention to get it in concentration is a skillful intention right there. Try to maintain that intention. This is what the Buddha calls right effort, because the path to happiness does require effort. It’s not going to just happen on its own. As the Buddha said, wisdom begins with realizing that you have to ask an important question, “What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term welfare and happiness?” The wisdom there is, one, realizing that there is such a thing as