Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"Although the Buddha does mention that large gifts can create a great deal of puñña , he’s quick to add that the goodness of even great gifts of generosity to highly attained individuals is no match at all for the goodness that comes from observing the five precepts: abstaining from killing, stealing, illicit sex, lying, and taking intoxicants. The goodness of observing the precepts, in turn, is no match for the goodness of developing a heart of goodwill [mettā] . In other words, the karma of virtue and vice, both inner and outer, is much stronger than the karma of generosity, so there’s no truth to the idea that the puñña of generosity can buy your way out of the results of a life of corruption or crime. A better way to compensate for any past misdeeds would be to recognize them as mistakes, to resolve not to repeat them, and to devote the heart to the practice of virtue and goodwill. These, the more powerful forms of puñña, are not for sale. In fact, they’re open

"Kamma is one of those teaching that’s sometimes hard to relate to, both intellectually and emotionally: intellectually because it’s related to the issue of conviction, or saddhā . We hear the word conviction — or even worse, saddhā is often translated as faith — and we think that we’re being asked to commit to something that we’re not really sure about, that we don’t have any means of knowing. But that’s not what conviction means in the Buddha’s teachings. It means you’re going to take something on as a working hypothesis. You’re committed to the sense that you’re really going to really try to test it, but no, you’re not being forced to give your emotional assent to say, “Yes, despite my lack of evidence I’m being forced to say this must be true.” Instead, you’re advised to say, “I’m going to try it out. It makes sense. It’s asking me to believe that my actions matter and that I have a choice in my actions that’ll give results. But I’m free enough to learn from past mistakes so

"Think about the teaching on karma. Everyone treats it as if it were kindergarten Buddhism. Some people actually treat it as if it weren’t really Buddhist: something that got picked up by the tradition from its surroundings in India, something that got thrown into the baggage by mistake when it flew over here from Asia. But that’s not the case. The teaching on karma is actually radically central to everything the Buddha taught. Your intentions are the big issue in life, the big issue in the practice, and they come one by one by one. You can watch them one by one by one, and you can see that they have their impact. You learn how to judge them by evaluating that impact and connecting the dots: It’s the kind of intention that gives this or that kind of result. The next time you see it, then if it’s a bad result, watch out and try to avoid it. If it’s a good result, remember it and add it to your range of skills. You still have to watch it carefully, just to be sure, but meanwhile you

"So remember, your actions are important, and you can make skillful choices now. Now, as you live in this human life, we can’t guarantee that once you’ve started on the path everything will be a path of roses. We all have our past kamma, the things that come at us in life from our past actions. But again, it’s what you’re doing right now that’s going to make all the difference, so you want to focus on: What are your capabilities right now? Where are you holding onto things that are making you suffer? That was the Buddha’s definition of suffering. It’s not something that’s happening to us. It’s something we're doing." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Encouragement"

Question: When you are in mindfulness, are you remembering and by this act soliciting the past, or are you firmly in the present? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: With mindfulness, you are trying to bring only what you need to know from the past. Through the quality of alertness, you focus on the present. Try to bring the two of them together, so that you remember what you need to know from the past so as to shape the present moment well. Remember, too, that the present is not just given to you. It’s also something that you’re shaping in the present moment as well. Past kamma gives you the potentials for the present moment, but your present kamma is actually what shapes your experience from those potentials. ~ "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"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

"A lot of us, when we first hear the teachings on karma, think about the bad things we did in the past, which is one of the reasons why karma is a very unpopular teaching. Things that were past, we hope to leave past. But karma says, “They may still have their fangs.” Of course, “karma” doesn’t mean just bad karma. It also means good karma. In fact, the Buddha, when he introduces karma, introduces it in a very positive way, connecting it with generosity and gratitude, both of which are really good parts of human life. The Buddha says that generosity has meaning because our actions have meaning. They have meaning in the sense that we choose to do things. That means that people have meaning, too. When we give meaning to other people, we give meaning to ourselves: that it’s worthwhile helping someone else, either materially or in terms of our knowledge or in terms of our time. If we didn’t have freedom of choice, all of this would be meaningless. We’d be just mechanical robots, pre-

Question: What is the power of your last wish or last intention before the moment of death? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The strength of your last mind state really depends on the totality of your kamma. Other things you have done prior to that moment may actually outweigh the power of that mind state. For instance, if you have any particularly heavy kamma — and “heavy” in this case means either very, very good or very, very bad — that will be more powerful. If there’s anything that you’ve done habitually during life, that will also have more power than your last mind state — which means that you’ve got to practice until it becomes a habit. If you’ve been habitually practicing, that will help push you through. But the important principle to remember is that every skillful intention counts, even if everything around you and inside your body is falling apart. It’s never too late to make a skillful choice. ~ "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

Question: If any unskillful thought arises and you acknowledge it as unskillful, does it still have negative kammic effects? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: No. Question: In other words, does the arising of unskillful thoughts cause bad kamma or is it just our reaction to them? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s our reaction to them that can cause bad kamma. The fact that the thought arises is the result of old kamma. What you do with it is your new kamma. If you simply acknowledge it and it goes away, or if you think skillful thoughts that counteract it and make it go away, then the new kamma is good new kamma. ~ Good Heart, Good Mind: The Practice of the Ten Perfections

Question 17. Does forgiveness have any effect on kamma? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It can’t erase the effects of old bad kamma, but it can help prevent new bad kamma. When people wrong you, it’s always wise to forgive them. Although this won’t negate the bad kamma of their actions, it does remove you from what the Buddha called vera, or animosity: the kammic mud fight of trying to settle old scores. You console yourself with the thought that, if you didn’t have that kind of kamma in your own background, you wouldn’t have been wronged that way in the first place. In fact, in light of rebirth, you don’t know how long the back-and-forth of that kind of kamma has already been going on. If you tried to get back at the people who’ve wronged you, you’d simply be continuing the mud fight, creating more of that kamma, which would tend to lead to another round of the same sort of thing. Do you want that? If not, forgive the other side. This doesn’t mean that you have to love them. You simply promise

"We could view samsara as a big mud fight. I splash mud on you. You splash mud on me. And then I splash mud on you back because you splashed mud on me. It goes back and forth like this and it never ends. So the idea of trying to straighten everybody out — or trying to settle the score — again makes no sense. There’s that famous story of Somdet Toh. A junior monk came to see him once, complaining that another monk had hit him over the head for no reason at all. He hadn’t done anything to harm the other monk. The other monk was just a really bad guy who came up and hit him. And Somdet Toh said, “Well, you hit him first.” The junior monk replied, “No, no, he came up and hit me first. I didn’t do anything to him at all.” Somdet Toh kept insisting, “No, you hit him first.” And so the young monk went to complain to Somdet Toh’s superior, who must’ve been the supreme patriarch. He went to Somdet Toh to question him about this: “Why did you keep insisting that the innocent monk had hit

"When you get to the four noble truths, the duties expand. Now we have cause and effect, skillful cause and unskillful cause and their effects. The unskillful cause is craving. The effect or the result of the unskillful cause is suffering. The path is the condition. It doesn’t cause the end of suffering but it takes you there. That’s why the Buddha called it a path. That’s the skillful action. And the skillful result is that you put an end to all your suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Duties"

Question 15. Is it possible to burn off old kamma — say, by simply putting up with pain? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: No. In the Buddha’s time, an ascetic group called the Nigaṇṭhas believed that they could burn off old kamma by not reacting to the pain of their austerities, and the Buddha reserved some of his sharpest ridicule for that belief. As he said, the Nigaṇṭhas should have noticed that the pain they experienced during their austerities ended when they stopped the austerities, which meant that the pain was the result not of old kamma being burned off, but of their present kamma in undertaking the austerities [MN 101]. Still, it is possible to weaken the results of bad past kamma. The Buddha compared past bad kamma to a big lump of salt. If you put the salt into a small glass of water, you can’t drink the water because it’s too salty. But if you toss it into a large, clean river, it doesn’t make the water of the river too salty to drink. The river here stands for a mind that has develo

"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 come to the practice is that there is no closure. And the more the mind insists on trying to find closure, the more it weighs itself down and keeps itself entangled in that ongoing wandering on. So when we think about the whole issue of past lives, it’s good to think of it as a general principle, without getting into the details. It’s useful because it’s one way of getting out of our own individual stories right now, the narratives we bring from this lifetime, concerning our parents, our relationship to them, our relationship to friends, people who’ve done us wrong, people who’ve mistreated us, how we’re going to respond to that." ~ Thanis

"Mundane right view, of course, is about karma and rebirth: teachings that the West has hated for so long. This hatred goes back to the eighteenth century, when people began to learn about Buddhism and right away began denouncing karma and rebirth as morally abhorrent. That was because they didn’t understand them. They felt that karma and rebirth were teachings to justify the status quo. If you were suffering, it was because you deserved to suffer: That’s how they interpreted the teachings. But that’s not what the Buddha meant by those teachings at all. His vision of karma and rebirth was much larger than that. On the one hand, it’s because we do choose our actions — and our actions are under our control — that all the virtues we can think of really are worthwhile. If everything were predetermined, the fact that you were good or bad wouldn’t be your responsibility. It’d be something or somebody else’s. But you have your choices — you’re the one who chooses. So when you choose well

"It’s not as if you throw everything away, or that you deny the importance of your past experience. It’s simply that you learn how to convert it to a new use. Memories of the past that made you miserable, you can take them apart: Where’s the perception? Where is the fabrication? Where’s the allure? Why do you go for them? What gets accomplished by them and what are the drawbacks? As you take these things apart, you begin to get a new perspective. You’ll think in terms of the principle of kamma — this is a huge back-and-forth that’s been going on for who knows how long — and then the desire to get something brought to closure, to get something resolved, starts to seem meaningless. That’s when you’ve used that particular story, that particular narrative, for the sake of the Dhamma: when you develop that sense of samvega ." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "True for What Purpose?" (Meditations11)

"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 it stop you from creating new kamma, but it also frees you from many of the effects of past kamma. The pains may be there in the body, but the mind doesn’t have to suffer from them. And that’s what matters. They’re like a big rock. The rock may be h

"The six sense media (āyatana) are old kamma in that they themselves and many of the objects that impinge on them are products of past actions. However, this is not true of all the objects of the senses, for when a person does a present action, the action and its immediate results impinge on the senses as well. At the same time, one’s experience of the input from the senses goes through many stages of mental filtering, as some sensory contacts are highlighted or elaborated on, while others are ignored or suppressed. This filtering is a form of present kamma, too, which means that all kamma — past or present — is experienced through the agency of present kamma." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Paradox of Becoming"

"There’s a passage where the Buddha talks about the skillful and unskillful ways of teaching karma and of thinking about karma. An unskillful way is to say that everybody who does evil is going to go to hell; everybody who does something bad is going to suffer. You look back and you realize that you, like everyone else, have done some bad things in your life: the times when you acted on less than noble or less than your best intentions. If you simply brood over your big mistakes, you put yourself into a spiral that goes down, down, down. It doesn’t help you at all. What you should do is to remind yourself that even though there’s past karma, there’s also new karma, a fresh slate. You can choose freely right now to act as skillfully as possible. Whatever you’ve done in the past that was unskillful, just put it aside. Make up your mind that you’re not going to make that same mistake again. And then move on. It’s not that you deny your mistakes. You freely admit them. It’s not that y

"Dangers in your own mind: Ultimately, those are the ones that are really dangerous. Other people can hurt you, they can even kill you, but the results go only as far as this lifetime. But through your actions — your thoughts, your words, and your deeds — you can do yourself a lot of damage that goes beyond just this lifetime, so you need a source of safety that’s nearby." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Near to the Buddha"

"When a Buddhist takes refuge, it is essentially an act of taking refuge in the doctrine of karma: It’s an act of submission in that one is committed to living in line with the principle that actions based on skillful intentions lead to happiness, while actions based on unskillful intentions lead to suffering; it’s an act of claiming protection in that, by following the teaching, one hopes to avoid the misfortunes that bad karma engenders. To take refuge in this way ultimately means to take refuge in the quality of our own intentions, for that’s where the essence of karma lies." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Going for Refuge"

"Everything you do, and say, and think, has an impact on how you experience the world. If you can train your actions in this way, the world will seem very different. You cause less suffering for yourself and less suffering for others as well. Because the stronger you are inside, the less you have to lean on other people, the less you have to impose on other people, the less you create burdens for other people. So it’s not as if working on your mind is a selfish activity. You’re working on things that other people can’t touch. They can’t reach in. You may have had this experience: You’re with somebody who’s really suffering and yet you can’t reach into them to help them. A very strong sense of helplessness comes when you realize, “This other person is suffering in a way that I can’t touch.” You see a baby crying, and no matter what you do, the baby just keeps on crying and crying. Or you see an old person who’s demented, and you can’t reach that person. Each of us has that inner a

"Right here the only thing that’s important is what you’re doing right now. So pay careful attention to that. When all is said and done, it’s your own actions that determine whether you’re going to be happy or not. And whether your happiness is blameless, whether your happiness is solid depends on what you do. So be right here so that you can watch what you’re doing, in a position where you can make sure that you do it well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Not Pushed Around"

"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 s

"With goodwill [mettā], there’s no poison in goodwill at all. It teaches you to overcome your likes and dislikes, and to wish for the well-being of all, regardless of whether you like the person or not, regardless of that person’s past. Think of the case of Angulimala. He had killed hundreds of people, yet the Buddha saw that he had potential. Rather than just leaving him to his fate, the Buddha was able to teach the Dhamma in such a way that Angulimala wasn’t going to have to suffer in the lower realms. A lot of people were unhappy with that because, literally, he was getting away with murder. But then you take their desire to see him punished, and you compare that with the Buddha’s goodwill to see him escape, regardless of what his past was: That’s what goodwill means. A lot of harm is done in the world by people who want to see justice done through punishment. But if you can find a way that people can learn how to behave skillfully and stop doing unskillful things, that’s much

"You watch yourself in action. And this, of course, starts with the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula. I know a lot of people who’ve commented they really wished that their parents had been like the Buddha, teaching them the way the Buddha taught Rahula. He’s basically saying to try to avoid mistakes, but if you find that you’ve made a mistake, this is what you do so you don’t have to make it again — probably some of the most valuable advice you can get. If you’re planning to do something, ask yourself, “What have been the results of my doing this in the past?” If doing it led to harm, you say, “Nah, I don’t want to do that again.” That’s a skillful decision. The Buddha here is teaching compassion. But he’s also teaching you to remember your actions. It’s a training in mindfulness and the ability to see connections: “I did x, and y happened as a result.” We don’t always see those connections, either because we don’t want to see, or because the cause and the effect were separated

"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"

"As the Buddha said, you would have a hard time meeting up with someone who hadn’t been your mother in some previous lifetime, or your father, or your sister, or your brother, or your son, or your daughter. You’ve had so many different relationships, and they’ve scattered out. You can come across a complete stranger and tell yourself, “Hey. This person was my mother sometime, but now you look how strange we are to one another.” You begin to decide that maybe these relationships are meaningless, aside from what good we can develop, and what good we can help one another develop. But even then, we have to part ways. When we part ways, there’s a lot of sorrow. The tears you’ve shed over the loss of a mother, the Buddha said, are more than the water in the oceans. The tears you’ve shed over the loss of a father are more than the water of the oceans, and so on down with all those different relationships. Yet we keep coming back for more. The mind is looking for happiness, but it’s look

"So you’ve got to reflect on your actions. You’ve got to reflect on your thoughts, words, and deeds, on how they have an impact on you and how they have an impact on others. Keep your attention focused there more than outside. Our media nowadays tend to focus on everything outside. We almost live in the screens of our hand-held devices or our computers or whatever. And the important people seem to be the ones who are in the screens. But they’re not. The important person is the person holding the screen. What is this person doing? What is this person saying? What is this person thinking? That’s something you can actually have an impact on. And the impact is not felt only by you; it’s felt by all the people around you. So you have to be very, very careful. This is what the principle of heedfulness is all about. Your actions do have consequences. So instead of having the energy run out your eyes and ears or whatever, try to keep the energy focused inside so that you can act and speak

"Perhaps one of the reasons we’re so messed up in the West is because our culture is designed so that goodness of heart doesn’t really count for much. Our society is designed to take advantage of good-hearted people. They’re not the ones who rise to the top. And because we believe that rising to the top is what matters, goodness of heart doesn’t seem to count for much. And the Buddha wants to reestablish that it does." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Buddha's Basic Therapy"

"There’s a story where Somdet Toh was approached by a young monk complaining about another monk who had hit him. And Somdet Toh told him, “Well, you hit him before that.” The young monk replied, “No I didn’t. He just came up and hit me out of nowhere.” And Somdet Toh kept saying, “No, you hit him first.” So the young monk went to complain to the abbot of another monastery. The other monastery’s abbot came over and asked Somdet Toh what he was talking about. Somdet Toh said, “Well, obviously, he hit the other monk sometime in a previous lifetime.” In other words, if you try to trace things back to where a problem started, you go crazy. Because it just goes back and back and back, and there’s no sense of who was the original instigator. Which means that when you’re thinking about issues in the past, you just have to let them go. Just say, “Whatever it was, it was a karmic back and forth. Do you want to still continue it?” There’s another story — it’s in the Commentary — of two women