Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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"