Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"They’ve got us thinking that we’ve got to be hooked into the news cycle in order to be informed about the world. But your world is shaped primarily by what you’re doing right now, so you want to make sure that you’re doing it really skillfully. Your life will be affected by other people’s actions, that’s for sure, but the really important actions are the ones you’re doing. As the Buddha said, you don’t go to heaven or to hell because of other people’s actions. Even within this lifetime, people can mistreat you but if your mind is well trained you don’t suffer. People can treat you well but if you’re mind isn’t trained, you’ll suffer. It’s the training of the mind that makes all the difference. So try to focus your attention here and keep it here as continuously as you can." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Informed About Your World"

"You see someone else doing something that gets you upset or something that offends you. Don’t focus on the other person; focus on the action in and of itself, as part of a causal process, and then turn around and look at yourself. If, in your mind, you create other people out there, you create a lot of problems. But if you simply see life in the community as an opportunity to watch the principle of cause and effect as it plays itself out, the problems vanish." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Admirable Friendship" (Meditations1)

"Another complaint people have about karma is the idea that if somebody is suffering, they deserve to suffer so you’re going to leave them that way — which is not the case. Again, nobody deserves to suffer; actions just have results. But the state of mind with which the action is done and the state of mind with which you receive the results can make a huge difference. If it seems hard-hearted to say that other people are suffering because of their karma, you have to ask yourself: Is your compassion so pure that you can only give it to pure people? We’re all in this together; our compassion has to spread to everybody — good and bad, those who have good things, those who have done bad things to us. We’ve all done both good and bad things. Karma’s a great equalizer, in the sense that the basic principle underlying it applies equally to everyone. At the moment, there are inequalities. Some people are very happy. Some people are very fortunate, others are not at all. But we’re all livi...

"We were talking a while back about the precept against killing and someone said, “Well, I guess the Buddha made this precept because life is sacred.” And I said, “No. No, the Buddha never said life is sacred.” That idea came from wanting to understand the precepts without ever having to think about kamma. Kamma underlies everything the Buddha taught. Virtue, concentration, discernment: These things are all kamma. The path is a kind of kamma. And you have to understand it that way. As for the rationale behind the precepts, as the Buddha said, “Do you want to be killed? Do you want to have people steal your things? Do you want to have people have illicit sex with people who are dear to you? Do you want to be lied to? Do you want to live in a society where people are drunk?” “Well, No.” “Well, then don’t do those things.” “Do you like to be spoken to in a harsh and malicious way?” “No.” “Then don’t go do those things.” The precepts are there to keep you from creating the kind of ...

"You don’t encourage people to engage in killing or stealing or lying, no matter how you glorify the ends to which that behavior could lead in the short term. And if you can think up some skillful way to stop unskillful behavior, you try. But your primary responsibility is what you’re genuinely responsible for, i.e., your own choices, what you do and what you choose to tell other people to do. Make sure that those choices are skillful." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Justice vs. Skillfulness" (Meditations8)

"Sometimes what you’re experiencing is the result of past kamma, which you can’t do much about, and sometimes it’s the result of what you’re doing right now, which you can do something about. That’s what the meditation is all about. It’s your kamma in the present experimenting with different ways of dealing with pleasure, different ways of dealing with pain, to see what approaches give the best results." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Judging Your Meditation"

"When you’re dealing with other people, there are going to be a lot of things you don’t like. You can’t let your likes and dislikes get in the way of your doing what’s skillful. If you treat the people you like well but treat the people you dislike in a shabby way, that becomes your karma. It’s not good for you. So you have to remember, you’re not treating people well because they deserve it. You’re treating people well because it’s part of your training. It’s part of your safety, your protection. The Buddha talks again and again about goodwill [mettā] as a form of protection." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Help Others, Help Your Mind"

"When our actions don’t measure up to certain standards of behavior, we either (1) regret the actions or (2) engage in one of two kinds of denial, either (a) denying that our actions did in fact happen or (b) denying that the standards of measurement are really valid. These reactions are like wounds in the mind. Regret is an open wound, tender to the touch, whereas denial is like hardened, twisted scar tissue around a tender spot. When the mind is wounded in these ways, it can’t settle down comfortably in the present, because it finds itself resting on raw, exposed flesh or calcified knots. When it’s forced to stay in the present, it’s there only in a tensed, contorted, and partial way. The insights it gains tend to be contorted and partial as well. Only if the mind is free of wounds and scars can it settle down comfortably and freely in the present and give rise to undistorted discernment. This is where the five precepts come in: They’re designed to heal these wounds and scars....

"We’re always worried about our relationships to people outside, but our relationship to ourself is very unskillful and that’s a lot more basic, and a much bigger problem. How do you relate to your own thoughts? How do you relate to your perceptions? Learn how to relate in more skillful ways." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Overcoming Complacency"

"So look around. Look for the opportunities. After all, if people can be opportunistic about wanting to do evil, why can’t we be opportunistic about wanting to do good, to create goodness in ourselves and leave some goodness around the world around us? That’s one of the paradoxes of the practice. There was a reflection in Ven. Ratthapala’s teachings to the king. “The things you have, the wealth you have now, is it really yours?” This was what was meant by the Dhamma summary that the world has nothing of its own. The king said, “Well, I have lots of wealth of my own,” and Ratthapala responded, “But can you take it with you when you go?” Well, no. But with goodness, you take it with you by leaving some goodness behind — in your relationship with other people and the way you deal with your mind. The inner and the outer goodness are connected. Any goodness you leave behind by being unburdensome, by being content, also goes with you as a strength in the mind. So it’s not a matter of ...

 "We have this inbred difficulty of looking at our own actions, but that’s precisely what the meditation is: looking at your own actions. It’s not so much self-purification as action-purification. It requires that you see your intentions and the actions and their results. Often these are things we don’t like to look at. Sometimes it’s just simple dishonesty. Other times we don’t like to look at these things because we don’t know how to handle what we see. How can you look at your mistakes without getting all tangled up in self-hatred, self-frustration? This is where the right attitudes come in. Look at those instructions the Buddha gave to Rahula. He said that when you see an action that you’ve done has caused harm, you should feel shame and loathing — not shame and loathing for yourself, shame and loathing for the action. That’s an important distinction. Shame around the action means that you realize you’re a better person than that. You shouldn’t have done it. It doesn’t mean th...

"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"

"We can look at each other and give rise either to desire or dislike, but that doesn’t accomplish anything. It simply pulls us down. No matter how much you feel that your desire to straighten other people out is a good desire, you’re looking in the wrong place. Remember the acrobats. You have to maintain your balance and in doing so, you help other people maintain theirs. If you’re reaching over to straighten out their balance, you’re leaning over. And of course, when you’re leaning over, it causes other people to lean over as well, and everybody falls down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Look at Yourself"

"The purpose of the practice is not just to accept what’s happening and to simply let it happen. When you look at the Buddha’s teachings on karma, you realize that what we experience in the present moment is not something that’s beyond our control. We do have a role in shaping it. That’s what allows for a path of practice. If we didn’t have that role in shaping it, we’d just have to accept things, like a TV show. Wherever the writers decide the show is going to go, you have to accept that. You can’t yell at the screen and tell the characters to do something else, or go back and rewrite it. Actually, experience is more like an interactive game. You have some control over how things are going to go. You have some choices that can steer the action in new directions. The whole point of the practice is to learn how to make those choices wisely, to make wise changes in your mind. That’s what we’re doing as we meditate: We’re here changing our minds." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu ...

"You have to learn how to judge your actions and not come down on yourself for being really bad when you see that you’re making poor judgments or you’ve done something unskillful. You’ve got to develop the attitude of a craftsperson. You’re sitting at your bench, working on building a piece of furniture, and you just realized that you planed the wood a little bit too deeply. So what do you do? Do you throw the wood away? That would be a waste. Do you start yelling at yourself? That wouldn’t accomplish anything. You figure out how to correct for the mistake. And then you move on. Perhaps it’s because we have so few manual skills nowadays that we haven’t developed this faculty of judging a work in progress. But here’s your opportunity to develop it. Remember the basic principles. You’re judging the actions, not yourself as a good or bad person. And the purpose of the judgment is so that you can apply what you’ve learned the next time around. If you’re going to be noticing how other ...

"As you meditate, you learn the lessons that help you wise up after realizing you’ve been foolish. Strengthen these lessons by looking at your intentions, attention, and perceptions, and realize that these govern your actions. Remember: What you do is what matters. There’s a clear distinction between skillful and unskillful. You don’t want to act in unskillful ways. You’ve seen the harm. This is the wisdom of wising up: recognizing when you’ve been a fool in any way. The lessons implicit in that wisdom include believing that choices are real; they have real consequences; those choices depend on views, which in turn are based on perceptions, attention, and intentions, what you would like to achieve through your actions. These are all important lessons. This is why the Buddha focuses on these elements as being crucial to what shapes your life so you can start shaping it in a wise way." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Wisdom of Wising Up" (Meditations6)

"If you don’t have any mindfulness — i.e., if you can’t remember what you did — you’re not going to be able to figure out how this feeling of pain or this feeling of pleasure is related to actions you did a while back and have forgotten about. So you try to keep in mind what you’ve been doing. If you see any suffering coming up in your experience, try to trace it back. “What action is this related to? What kind of attitude is this related to?” The fact that there’s pain in the body is a normal part of life, but the fact that there’s a pain in the mind is unnecessary. It doesn’t have to be there. So what’s causing the pain in the mind? If you can trace it back to an action — physical, verbal, or mental — then you’ve got a handle on things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Virtue Contains the Practice" (Meditations6)

"This is how you purify your thoughts, words, and deeds, through looking at your actions in terms of their intentions and the quality of the results. If you see that you’ve made a mistake, then resolve not to make it again. This is where the purity comes in. Purity requires not having firewalls in your mind. It means seeing the connections between what you intend to do and the results you get, realizing that you can change your ways if you’ve made a mistake." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Walls of Ignorance" (Meditations2)

"We’re people who’ve known mistakes in the past, done mistakes in the past, done some really stupid things in the past. We want to admit that and then move on to something better. That’s what the meditation is for." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "You Can Do It"

"Ill will you wash away with goodwill [mettā] . Stop to think when you’re wishing goodwill for someone: What are you wishing? You’re wishing that they understand the cause for true happiness and they act on them to the point where they get results. Is there anyone out there for whom you cannot feel that? You might be able to think of a few people. You’d like to see them squirm a little bit before they finally get on the path to true happiness, after all the evil they’ve done. But the Buddha didn’t condone that attitude. There was the case of Angulimala, who’d killed hundreds of people. The Buddha had compassion for him, was able to teach him the Dhamma, and Angulimala was able to escape a lot of the bad karma that would have come to him if he’d continued his ways. A lot of people, however, were not happy for him. They wanted to see him suffer first. They would throw things at him when he was on his almsround. But you want to ask yourself, “Do you want to be the type of person who ...

"In the second watch of the night of his awakening, the Buddha gained insight into how beings pass away and are reborn in line with their actions [MN 19]. This insight was the source both of the content and of the method of his teachings on skillful and unskillful kamma. He saw that beings fared well on the basis of skillful kamma, and poorly on the basis of unskillful kamma. Their choice of skillful or unskillful kamma, in turn, was influenced by their views and by their level of respect for noble ones. This last factor indicated that skillful and unskillful kamma were not inspired solely by internal factors. If beings could be induced to develop respect for the noble ones, they could learn from those noble ones to develop right view and skillful kamma. This meant that they could be taught." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Skill in Questions: How the Buddha Taught"

"This is where our culture at large is really lacking. The basic assumption is that there has to be a lot of strife and a lot of conflict. The newspapers thrive on conflict. If everybody were at peace, you couldn’t sell a newspaper — except for the Sudokus and the comics — and so they try to stir up as much controversy as possible. They thrive on that. There are other people, too, who profit off of conflict, who try to keep it all stirred up. The image they project is that we can’t live in peace with one another. It’s either them or us. In this kind of culture, the idea of a happiness that spreads around, a happiness that’s shared, gets trampled. The people who do good are the fools: That’s the attitude of the culture. You’ve got to fight for yourself. It’s interesting that many people who don’t believe in biological Darwinism do believe in social Darwinism. The people who fight are the ones who will get ahead: That’s the attitude. It’s a very unhealthy culture. So you can’t expec...

"The more you make a practice of choosing the wise or the skillful course of action, speech, or thought, then the greater that sense of clarity becomes. The more clarity there is in the mind, the wider range of choices you realize you have. When the mind isn’t really clear, you can’t even think of what the skillful thing would be. But if the mind is clear, you see it. The more clarity, the wider your range of choices." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Where Brightness Is"

"One of the really fine things about Buddhism is that it was founded by someone who knows what it’s like to make a mistake. Even in his last lifetime, the Buddha made a huge mistake — six years of tormenting himself. And all those previous lifetimes! You look in the Jātaka stories and it’s not as if the Buddha was always perfect. He was making mistakes and having to learn from them. So unlike a religion that’s supposedly founded by a God who’s never been a human being, who’s never had to admit a mistake, the Buddha knows what it’s like to make a mistake and to have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and move on. Those instructions he gave to Rāhula are really useful in this regard. He said that if you see you’ve made a mistake, admit the mistake, talk it over with someone else, and then simply resolve not to repeat that mistake. You don’t have to carry the guilt around with you, just the memory that that was a mistake. Then you move on. The Buddha gave similar instructions to...

" The mundane level of right view teaches the principle of kamma: that we experience happiness and sorrow due to a combination of our past and present intentions. If we act with unskillful intentions — based on ill will, cruelty, resentment, or passion, either for ourselves or for others — we’re going to suffer. If we act with skillful intentions, we’ll experience happiness. The fact that happiness and sorrow are dependent on present, and not just past, intentions is what allows the brahmavihāras to be effective in the first place. If everything depended on our past actions, we — and all other beings — would simply be passive victims or beneficiaries of forces over which we had no present control. But because our present intentions play a crucial role in determining whether we are to experience mental pleasure or pain now and into the future, the attitudes that influence our present intentions in a skillful direction can have a real effect in leading to happiness. The extent to w...

"In the Thai tradition, they talk about a mind without moods as a mind at normalcy. This may sound strange to begin with, because for most of us our normal state of mind is to be under the sway of our moods. But here we’re speaking about a different kind of normalcy. It’s related to the normalcy of the precepts. The word for virtue or precept, sila, is often also translated as “normalcy” in Thai. You’re at normalcy when you’re not killing, not stealing, not engaging in illicit sex, not lying, not taking intoxicants. It’s a healthy normalcy." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "At Normalcy"

“There are, headman, some contemplatives & brahmans who hold a doctrine & view like this: ‘All those who kill living beings experience pain & distress in the here-&-now. All those who take what is not given… who engage in sexual misconduct... who tell lies experience pain & distress in the here-&-now.’ “Now there is the case where a certain person is seen garlanded & adorned, freshly bathed & groomed, with hair & beard trimmed, enjoying the sensualities of women as if he were a king. They ask about him: ‘My good man, what has this man done that he has been garlanded & adorned... as if he were a king?’ They answer: ‘My good man, this man attacked the king’s enemy and took his life. The king, gratified with him, rewarded him. That is why he is garlanded & adorned... as if he were a king.’ “Then there is the case where a certain person is seen bound with a stout rope with his arms pinned tightly against his back, his head shaved bal...

"The noble eightfold path — including right mindfulness and right concentration — is a type of kamma: the kamma leading to the ending of kamma (AN 4:237). This kamma is not a matter of doing nothing or of denying what you’re doing. Instead, it involves mastering skills — the skills of meditation — and being clear about what you’re doing while you’re doing it. Only then will you understand action, and only then can you go beyond it. The goal can’t be reached in any other way." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Meditators at Work"

"Reflection on karma is often useful as well. There are certain issues in life where we feel that we’ve been unjustly treated, and it’s good to remember that karma has been going on for a long, long time. And the back and forth that we’ve had with one another has been so, so long and so complex that there’s really nobody to keep tally. And it wouldn’t be worth it anyhow. Putting the individual events of your life into that much larger framework sometimes help take out a lot of the sting. You can step back from them and view them with a little bit of distance." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath Energies"

"There were people in the time of the Buddha who said that actions didn’t exist at all. The only things that really existed were unchanging elements. Everything else was an illusion. The Buddha, though, said No. Actions really exist. They’re shaped by your intentions and they’re going to give results in line with those intentions. Those results can happen either in this lifetime or in future lifetimes, but the possibilities of future lifetimes are shaped by our actions now. Now, the Buddha didn’t say he could prove that to anybody ahead of time. At least he couldn’t give an empirical proof. But he did give pragmatic proofs. One is that if you accept this teaching, you’re much more likely to behave in skillful ways. You can reflect on your behavior, and there’ll be a sense of well-being that goes with that reflection because you can see that you haven’t harmed anybody. A second pragmatic proof is that it doesn’t make any sense to cut yourself off from possibilities. I...