Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"In the five reflections, the reflection on karma is the one that gives hope. You realize that you’re in charge of your actions. You’re not simply a victim of fate or of the stars or of some other being acting through you. You’re the one who’s making the choices. That’s what gives you hope. But it’s hope coupled with heedfulness. You’ve got the power to do good with your actions, but also the power to cause harm. The principle of karma is a double-edged sword. If you’re not careful, you can use it to cut your own throat. This is why the Buddha recommends reflecting on the principle of karma as a way of inspiring heedfulness." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Sublime Attitudes" (Meditations2)

"We develop skillful qualities in the mind. Yet sometimes the teachings on inconstancy [anicca] seem to undermine the developing side. You think about developing something in the mind, and something inside you says, “Well, it’s going to be inconstant anyhow. No matter what you do, the results will be inconstant, so why bother?” That’s a wrong use of the teaching. It’s like that time when the young monk was asked, “What are the results of action?” and he said, “Stress. Pain.” The person asking him, a wanderer from another sect, said “I’ve never heard Buddhist monks talk that way. You’d better go check with the Buddha.” So he does, via Ānanda. And the Buddha says, when you’re asked about action, you don’t talk just in terms of stress. You talk about the three kinds of actions: actions that lead to pleasure, that lead to pain, and actions that lead to neither pleasure nor pain. A nearby monk happened to overhear this, and said, “Well, maybe young monk was thinking about the prin...

"You’re shaping the present moment out of the raw materials that come from your past actions. But your shaping of these materials actually comes prior to receiving the materials. You already have the skills or lack of skills that are going to determine, when you get the raw materials, what you’re going to do with them and how much suffering or lack of suffering you’ll experience. So here, as part of the path, we’re developing better skills." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dispassion Isn't Depression" (Meditations10)

"I don’t know how many times I’ve run into people who say that they’ve learned from their meditation that there is no agency, there is no choice. There are meditation methods that try to drive choice underground: You get to the point where you deny that you have choice, that you’re simply there on the receiving end of what happened from the past. But that’s not in line with what the Buddha taught. He said that if you think that the present moment is totally determined by the past, you have no freedom at all. If whatever you do is determined by the past, you have no choice as to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to steal. It would be a meaningless life. There would be no meaning in the path. And, he said, it would leave you unprotected and bewildered. “Unprotected” in the sense that you wouldn’t have any way of arguing against your urges to do something unskillful. And “bewildered” because you’d say, “What did I do in the past that made me compelled me to do this?” Because you...

"All too often, the Buddha’s teachings on karma are viewed as a holdover from his culture — that without really thinking, he just picked up an assumption that everybody else shared and tacked it on to his teaching. The reason people say this is because they don’t want to have to take on the teaching in karma — which is a shame, because it’s central to the Buddha’s teaching. As he said, it’s the beginning of right view, and it’s totally in line with his teachings on the four noble truths. If you check through the Canon, you find there are only two sets of teachings that he says are categorical, in other words, true across the board. One is the distinction between skillful and unskillful action — the word here is “karma” — and the fact that skillful actions should be developed, and unskillful ones abandoned. The other categorical teaching is the four noble truths. And the two teachings are connected. Craving is an unskillful action because it leads to suffering; all the other factor...

"Another argument against karma is that given the doctrine of not-self, how does karma make sense? If there is no self then who's doing the action? Who's receiving the action? What's there for continuity? That's getting the context backwards. The Buddha started with the teaching on karma first and then came up with the doctrine of not-self in the context of karma. In other words he said people act — you can see that for sure. Then the question of how does the doctrine of not-self fit in to the way people act? And it turns out that the Buddha said that our sense of self is something that we do — it is a type of karma. You create your sense of yourself. You create the sense of what you are. Your create your sense of what belongs to you. It’s a type of action and the question is: Is it a skillful action? Is it going to create suffering or is it not going to create suffering?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "War on Karma" (51min mp3 audio)

"Remember that the important principle underlying kamma is based on the causal pattern that the Buddha discovered during his own awakening: that our present experience is composed of the results of past actions, our present actions — in particular, our present intentions — and the results of our present intentions. He also realized that the fact of having a present experience comes from our present kamma. Without present intentions, the results of past actions — and, of course, the result of present intentions — wouldn’t appear in our experience. This is because, as he explained in dependent co-arising, our experience of our present intentions comes prior to our experience of the past kamma known through the senses. Some of the lessons to be drawn from this are that we are free to make choices in the present, but there are also patterns that we can learn from. In other words, by paying careful attention to our choices and their results, we can learn from them to become more and mo...

"The Buddha said a teacher’s first responsibility to his students is to give them a sense that there are some things that should be done, and other things that should not be done. There were people in his time who taught that everything you experience right now is either the result of past action or the result of the will of a creator God or it’s totally random. In each of those cases, he said, you’re leaving people defenseless, unprotected, bewildered. He uses that word “bewildered” as our normal reaction to suffering. You’re leaving people bewildered because you give them no idea of how to escape from the suffering they’re experiencing right now. You give them no basis even for thinking that there is such a thing as what should be done and what should not be done. After all, if everything you experience is based on past actions, then you could be a killer of living beings, you could be a thief, you could engage in breaking any of the five precepts, and you couldn’t do anything a...

" “I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, whatever I do for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir.” So we do have the power of our actions. This was so important in the Buddha’s teachings that even though he wasn’t the sort of person who would go out and start arguments with people, there were times when he would go to argue with people who were teaching that what you’re doing right now didn’t have an impact right now. Three different groups of people stand out: 1) those who taught that whatever you experience right now is the result of past actions; it’s your vipāka, so you’ve got to put up with it; 2) those who taught that whatever you experience right now is the result of some creator god having created the world, so you’ve got to put up with it; and 3) those who taught that whatever you experience right now is totally random, there’s no pattern of cause and effect that you can understand or master to make a change in things. So put up with it. As the Buddha ...

"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 ...

Question 16. Can rituals put an end to old kamma? Can prayer? Can an awakened being end my old kamma for me? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: No, no, and no. The four qualities for weakening old kamma listed under the previous question are skills. Skills of this sort can’t be mastered simply by following a ritual formula, nor can anyone else — regardless of that person’s level of awakening — master them for you. You have to master them yourself. As for prayer, you can — as a way of focusing your intention — make a determination to master these skills, but prayer on its own won’t be enough to do the job. As the Buddha said, if results could be obtained simply through prayer, who in the world would be ugly, in pain, or die young? [SN42:6,AN4:99] ~ Karma Q & A, a Study Guide

"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"

"In terms of distress with reference to the world, the number one issue that’s hardest to put down is the sense that you’ve been wronged. There’s a very strong sense of self that grows around that and a very strong sense that if you don’t keep that in mind, you’re going to miss out on some justice, so you’re the one who has to keep the issue alive. You have to realize that whether the wrong was deserved or not, it’s an issue that you have to chalk up to karma. You may have done something like that a long time ago. It’s so long ago that you’ve forgotten and it doesn’t seem right that something you’ve forgotten so long ago should come back and hit you, but that’s how karma works. Sometimes things take many lifetimes before they show up. So it’s not a case of whether you deserved it or didn’t deserve it. It’s simply that there was a cause and this was the result. And there’s no need to feel that you have to keep it in mind in order to have justice done, because again, karma will work...

"In dependent co-arising [paṭiccasamuppāda]: As we will see, present kamma consists of fabrication [saṅkhāra] and the sub-factors [perception, feeling, intention, contact, attention] coming under the factor of “name” in name and form [nāmarūpa] . Past kamma is the experience of the six senses [SN35:145], which comes after the factors of fabrication and name [SN12:2]." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"Learn to look at what other people say as the result of your past actions; what other people do is the result of your past actions. In other words, the karma you’ve done in the past is coming back at you. It’s a sobering thought to think: Your past actions were done with the desire for happiness, and now you’re experiencing the skillfulness or lack of skillfulness in your past actions, in your past desires for happiness, your past efforts to bring about happiness. When you have that attitude, it’s a lot easier to live with other people. If they do something outrageous, you realize that you probably were a real character sometime in the past. And let it go at that. Your focus right now should be on what you’re doing and saying and thinking in the present moment." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Your Own Karma"

"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...

"When the Buddha explains issues of karma, he doesn’t use mechanical images. His images are all fluid. We all have unskillful decisions, unskillful intentions that we’ve acted on in the past, but it doesn’t mean we have to suffer from them. They will have their effects but their effects are going to be mitigated or amplified by your present karma. It’s as if we have two rivers coming together. If you’ve ever been at the spot where the Little Colorado joins the Colorado, you see two very different kinds of water. The Little Colorado is very muddy; the Colorado is clear. And right at the spot where they join it’s a mixture of the two. But as you go downstream, the muddiness disappears and the water is all clear. That’s because the Colorado is bigger than the Little Colorado; the muddiness is overcome by the clarity of the water the larger river. This is what you want to do in your meditation. You want to make sure that your present karma is a bigger river of clear water. It’ll take ...

"The Buddha once said that the results of action are an imponderable, which may sound strange given that his teaching on action is so basic to all his other teachings. The main principle is simple: You do, or say, or think something with a skillful intention, and the results are going to be good; you do, or say, or think something with unskillful intentions, and the results are going to be bad. That’s simple — but the problem is that that simple principle gets iterated many, many, many times. And that makes its results complex. How many times in the course of the day have you done something, or said something, or thought something? You can’t count all the actions, and that’s just in one day. And it spreads out over lifetimes. You begin to realize that you’ve got a lot of things going on here. Some of the actions will give results quickly; others will give them slowly. Others are ready to give the results, but you’re not watering them, so they don’t give the results. ...

"They’ve been making a big deal recently about the fact that psychologists are now studying happiness. Well, Buddhism has been studying happiness for 2,600 years. And it focuses on the most important thing that most psychologists tend to ignore, which is that the way you look for happiness is going to have strong ramifications. The actions you do, the things you do and say and think in order to attain happiness: If you’re not careful, they can lead to some very unhappy results. They can turn around and devour you. No intention is free from ramifications. In other words, anything you do with a dishonest intention is likely to lead to an experience of suffering. Even though it may yield happiness in the short term, there are long-term ramifications. You can’t get away from that fact. The way most people live nowadays is based on the premise that it doesn’t matter what happens down along the road. “That’s in the future. I want happiness right now. I want it fast.” So peo...

"We live a life full of the power of kamma — old kamma and new. You can’t do anything about old kamma. You have to accept it like a good sport. That’s why you practice equanimity. But as for the new kamma you’re creating right now, you can’t practice equanimity with that. You have to be very concerned about what you’re putting into the system because you realize that this is the only chance you get to make the choice. Once the choice is made and it gets put into the system, then whatever the energy — positive or negative — that’s the sort of energy you’re going to have to experience. So pay attention: What are you putting into the system right now? This is the important thing to focus on. Whatever other people do to you, whatever arises in your body in terms of pains, illnesses, aging, death, or whatever: That’s old kamma that you simply have to learn to take with good humor, with a sense of equanimity. As for what you’re putting into the system right now, that’s ser...

" “We’re related through our actions” The connections we have in life with different people are created by our actions: things that we’ve done together with other people or to other people or for other people. These create the connections that we have with the people around us. Interconnectedness is a very popular teaching in Buddhism, especially nowadays, but it’s funny that people like to talk about interconnectedness without the teaching on karma. They turn to dependent co-arising as a model for interconnectedness, this web of connections where one factor can’t exist without a whole lot of other factors, but they neglect to realize that dependent co-arising is a teaching on how ignorance is connected with suffering, how craving is connected with suffering. It’s the kind of connectedness you want to cut, not the kind you want to celebrate. Connectedness through karma can go either way — the connections can be good, or they can be bad. So you want to foster the good ...

"Sometimes there’s the question of where the suffering came from in the past, but that’s not the big issue. The fact is that we continue producing it over and over and over again right now. That’s the issue, and that’s also where we can attack things. You can’t go back and attack the past, you can’t go back and change the past, but you can change what you’re doing right now. This is important." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma-ism"

"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 stay away from it. That’s a decision we can make — and a decision we can stick by." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Happiness Comes from Your Actions"

"What’s attractive about having conviction in the power of your actions is that there’s nothing unreasonable about it, and it places power in your hands. The Buddha teaches a path of action to put an end to suffering, so to follow that path you need to make certain assumptions about action. • The first assumption is that actions are real and not illusory . • Second, your actions are the result of your choices . They’re not just the result of some outside force acting through you. In other words, they’re not determined simply by the stars or your DNA. You’re actually making the choices. • The third principle is that actions do have effects . You’re not writing in water, where everything you write immediately disappears. When you do something, it will have an effect both in the present moment and lasting through time into the future. • The fourth principle is that the effects of your actions are tendencies . They’re not strictly deterministic; they don’t lead to ironclad o...

"When we think about karma, we tend to think about things you did in a past lifetime that are totally unknown, and they just come in and smack you up against the head without any warning. But that’s not how the Buddha taught it. He taught it more as a process by which we can shape our experience right here, right now, and learn how not to suffer from good or bad things that are coming up." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Lessons of Equanimity"

"That accusation that Buddhas shouldn’t suffer pain: I know some people who believe that anyone who’s spiritually advanced should not have disease, should not have pain. And that’s totally deluded. Some diseases come from present karma, but a lot of them come from past karma. And everybody, no matter how awakened, has past karma. So it’s simply a fact of life that even fully awakened beings, will face disease. They’ll face pain. The Buddha himself points this out in the difference between the ordinary person experiencing pain and the awakened person experiencing pain. They’re the same in that they both are subject to pain. The difference is that the ordinary person shoots him or herself with extra arrows. The physical pain is one arrow, which is actually manageable. It’s all those extra arrows: when we get upset, we get distraught, worried about the body. Those are the arrows that cause extra suffering to the mind and also add pain to the body. So our responsibility when we’re sic...

"I’ve been reading recently about how some modern Dhamma teachers don’t like the idea of kamma. They say it’s laying blame on people for the sufferings they meet with in life. But the Buddha was never interested in laying blame. He was more interested in analyzing a problem and seeing what you were doing to cause the problem so that you could stop doing that and actually solve the problem. The purpose of his analysis is to show how you’re responsible for things so that you can be responsible for the solution. If you think you’re not responsible for the cause, you try to throw things off on other people, and nothing gets accomplished. That’s the ordinary nature of the world. It’s always been that way: people blaming other people for their problems. The blame gets thrown around, and the problems never get solved. But here we are, watching what arises in the present moment because we can do something about it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Power Is in Your Hands"

"When the Buddha talked about rebirth, what distinguished his teaching from everybody else in his time was that he never tried to define what it was that took rebirth. That was how people at the time decided whether rebirth happened or not: They said you are x, and either x was something that was going to die with the body or else it might not die with the body. So they reasoned things out. But the Buddha never tried to define what you are. After all, it’d be something for which you were not responsible — if this were what you already were made of and you willy-nilly would or would not get reborn. Instead, he taught that rebirth is a choice that you make, and it’s a process, a series of processes shaped by your choices. The big processes are craving and clinging. If you can’t get any control over your craving and clinging, then rebirth is going to be very difficult. It could lead you in all kinds of directions. Because at the moment of death — when the body is weak, the mind is fr...

"This teaching on kamma: We tend to think of it as being a teaching about past lives and future lives, and really irrelevant for our practice. But the whole thrust of the teaching is, “What are you doing right now?” Or as the Buddha says in one of his questions for daily reflection, “What have I become as days and nights fly past?” Look at what kind of person you’re becoming, given the habits you’ve been picking up, the habits that you’ve been training yourself in — regardless of whether you consciously regard yourself as being in training in that particular habit. A habit of laziness, a habit of carelessness: We don’t think of ourselves as training ourselves in those directions, but if it’s a choice that you keep making over and over and over again, that’s the training you’re giving yourself. So ask yourself: “What kind of training am I giving myself right now, right now?” What kind of training would you like to give yourself in the best of all possible worlds? Well, do that. ...

"You not only protect yourself as you’re sitting here meditating, but you also develop the skills you’re going to need as you approach death. At that point, what you’re facing in the future is going to be very worrisome: the fact that you’re going to leave this body and you don’t know where you’re going to go. It’s all too easy to start thinking about the unskillful things you’ve done in the past, which is precisely the wrong time to be thinking about those things. You may not have someone hovering around you to remind you of the good you’ve done, so you’ve got to learn how to hover around yourself, to remind yourself of how to pull out of this particular hindrance so that it has less and less power over the mind. Even as the body is weak, make sure that your habitual reaction to thoughts of worry is quick, skillful, and strong." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Restlessness & Anxiety" (Meditations11)

"Mindfulness of death prepares you to find the deathless. It depends on remembering that we’re not simply aware of the fact that death is going to happen, but we also have a particular take on how it’s going to happen: the Buddha’s instructions on how to anticipate what’s going to happen. The mind will be swept along by its cravings depending on its kamma, the kamma you do as you go through the day and the kamma you’re doing as you approach the moment of death. Your daily habits, your meditative skills — these are the things that will determine whether you suffer or not. This way, you’re prepared emotionally, but you’re also prepared in terms of the skills you’ll have to bring to bear. When you approach mindfulness of death from this perspective, then you’re going to get the most out of it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mindfulness of Death" (Meditations11)

"It’s amazing how many habits carry over from life to life to life. I think I’ve told you that story of King Asoka. There’s a belief that Ajaan Lee was King Asoka reborn. When I learned that, I got a biography of King Asoka that included some translations of the King Asoka edicts in the back. So I translated some of them into Thai for Ajaan Fuang to listen to. There was one where Asoka says to his government workers, “If you want to satisfy me that you’re quick enough in responding to my desires, you have to know what I want before I do.” Ajaan Fuang laughed at that and said, “Two thousand years. He didn’t change.” If you look at your actions now, you’ll probably see a lot of patterns that are responsible for the way you are now, even though the actual action that got you here — in this particular set of circumstances — may have been an action from the distant past. But the patterns carry over. Think in terms of the seven treasures, of the noble treasures the Buddha set out. Whic...

"One of the lessons of right view is that the important issue in life is not the pleasure that you’re sucking out of life, but the things you’re doing and the consequences they’re going to have down the line. You have to take those things very seriously. Because, as Ajaan Suwat liked to say, “Those sensual pleasures you had last week: Where are they now?” They’re totally gone; but you are left with the kamma. If you don’t believe in kamma, just look at the habits you’ve developed. You get into these old ruts: these old ways of thinking, these old ways of behaving. The more you indulge them, the harder they are to get out of. That’s what you’re left with: the habit, which is accompanied by a large sense of lack. You’re left with the action. So you have to see this very clearly, and realize that it’s causing a lot of suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Clinging, Addictions, Obsessions" (Meditations8)

"Samsara literally means “the wandering-on.” It’s an activity. A process. And you don’t just wander. You create the worlds that you wander into. They involve feeding, and that’s addictive. So samsara is basically a bad habit, where you have an idea: You’d like to have this kind of pleasure, but no matter what it is, it’s going to cost a certain amount of suffering both for yourself and for other people in the worlds you create around that desire. This is why stopping the process, stopping the addictive habit, is actually good for yourself and for those others. And this is why samsara and nibbana can’t be the same thing, because samsara is an addiction, and you can’t stop the addiction — the stopping is nibbana — while still indulging in it. Stopping your own addiction is good for others for two reasons. On the one hand, you’re giving a good example. On the other hand, you’re taking one more person out of this addictive process, one more person out of the feeding chain. So the idea...

"These are important skills: learning how to recognize how you fabricate an emotion and how you do it unskillfully; and how you can deconstruct it and construct something more skillful in its place. It may sound artificial, but the whole process of constructing an emotion is artificial in the first place. It’s something fabricated. There’s an element of intention and, in many cases, the intentions have become so habitual that they seem automatic, because of the strength of the perceptions and the strength of the breath or that particular way of breathing around greed or aversion or delusion. You tend to think, “Well, this is what I really feel.” But it’s just a habit, and as with any habit, if you see that it’s harmful to you, harmful to the people around you, you want to learn how to undo it; replace it with other habits." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Deconstruct Your Emotions"

"If Buddhist groups are to bring reconciliation to modern society, they have to master the hard work of reconciliation among themselves. Only then will their example be an inspiration to others. And even if their impact is not enough to prevent a general descent into the madness of fascism, terror, and war, they will be planting seeds of civilization that can sprout when the madness — like a fire across a prairie — has passed." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reconciliation, Right & Wrong"