Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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"

"So goodwill [mettā] is where everything starts. Think about it: Why would you want anyone else to suffer? You might think about the evil or cruel things they’ve done in the past, but even then why would you want them to suffer? To learn a lesson? Well, they’re going to learn their lesson because the principle of karma is going to take care of that — that’s why the teaching on equanimity is there — so you don’t have to go out and be God’s vengeful sword to make sure that everyone gets their just punishments. Your only job is to make sure there are no limits on your goodwill. When people have done horrible things, you don’t have to like them; you don’t have to condone their behavior. That’s not what goodwill means. Goodwill means that you don’t wish anyone harm. If they’re doing horrible things, you have every right to stop them if you can — after all, in doing horrible things, they’re creating bad karma, more suffering for themselves. Just make sure that you don’t harm them in tr...

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

"Look at everything, even your sense of who you are, as types of action, and then look at whether they’re skillful or not. This is where that reflection on karma can take you. That fifth reflection may sound very simple, very basic — some people call it kindergarten Buddhism: You do good, you get good results; you do bad, you get bad results. But it’s exploring that basic principle that can take you all the way." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Up for the Challenge"

 "Reflect on that passage in the chant we recited just now: “Cultivate a limitless heart.” A limitless heart is expansive and doesn’t see things just from a narrow perspective. It has to take a wider perspective. In other words, our individual issues are not the only issues in the world. The people around us have issues, too. And we have to have some compassion for them. At the same time, they can be very irritating people. For that we need a heart limitless not just in its compassion, but also in its endurance. How do you develop that? Well, paradoxically it’s by focusing on little things and having the right attitude toward little things. To begin with, some things are little but you tend to see them as big — bigger than they really are. It takes some effort to see that they’re actually little and minor and that your heart is much bigger. Think of that passage in the sutta where the Buddha says to make your mind like earth. Someone can come and spit and urinate on the earth and...

Question: At our death can we be reborn, find again the people who are dear to us, who have died and are in another life? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Yes, we can. As I explained yesterday, it’s through our kamma that we are related. The people to whom we are dear, or are dear to us: We have lots of kamma with them, so we’re likely to meet them again. ~ The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma

"You can’t be responsible for other people’s actions. In other words, you can’t go through life making other people happy, because their happiness will depend on what they do. So, you focus on where you are responsible, on your own actions, and in that way, you give a good example to others. If they’re willing to follow the example, that’s how they become happy." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Good Heart, Good Mind: The Practice of the Ten Perfections"

"A good action, an action motivated by a skillful intention, leads to good results. It’s impersonal. Unskillful actions motivated by unskillful motivations lead to pain. Each of us has a lot of actions in the past, so there’s bound to be good mixed with bad. You don’t have to wear off the bad kamma before you can enjoy the good. You simply learn to make the best use of both pleasure and pain when they come along." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Empathetic Joy"

Question 14. Can you get out of the consequences of unskillful actions by getting other people to do them for you? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: No. In fact, one of the worst ways you can harm others is to get them to act in unskillful ways, because those actions then become their kamma. And the fact that you got them to harm themselves would be bad kamma for you. ~ "Karma Q & A, a Study Guide"

Question 9. When people talk about kamma, why do they tend to focus on the punishments and hardships coming from past kamma? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Because they ignore the positive role that present kamma can play in shaping your life. They think that past kamma is deterministic, leaving you helpless in the face of misfortune in the present moment — which is not how the Buddha taught kamma at all. In fact, when he introduced the topic of kamma to his listeners, he focused on how it empowers you in the present moment, at the same time allowing for qualities we all know to be good — like generosity and gratitude — to actually make sense [AN 10:165]. Here’s why: • In terms of empowerment, the Buddha’s teachings on kamma and causality explain why we can develop skills that lead to the end of suffering. On the one hand, because certain actions tend to lead to certain results, we can learn from past actions the general pattern as to what would and wouldn’t work in leading to more happiness. ...

"In most people’s eyes, the idea of being kind to yourself means indulging yourself, like the wisdom, quote unquote, on wrappers of Dove chocolate: “Go ahead, be kind to yourself. Have another chocolate.” From there, the idea of being kind to others becomes basically indulging them, doing things they like. But if you think in terms of karma, kindness is something else. Being kind to yourself means looking at your thoughts, looking at your actions, and figuring out where they’re still lacking in skill, so that you can do something about it. A lot of us don’t like to do this. We feel we’re coming down hard on ourselves if we look at our shortcomings. But this is why the Buddha prefaced his instructions to Rahula on how to meditate with the teaching on making your mind like earth. People spit on earth, but earth doesn’t react. Make your mind like water. Water is used to wash away dirty things, but the water doesn’t react, doesn’t shrink away. Make the mind like wind. Wind blows dirt...

"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: Is it valid to send mettā [goodwill] to a person no longer in this world, one to whom I felt resentment and who had resentment toward me? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: This is a very good practice to do. It’s one way of bringing your own mind to some peace. You have to remember that when people die, they don’t go out of existence. They get born again. So, they’re always there someplace for you to spread mettā to. Now, whether that person rejoices in your mettā or not, that’s that person’s business. But if you can spread goodwill to someone you used to resent, that takes a huge burden off of your mind. ~ Good Heart, Good Mind: The Practice of the Ten Perfections

"There are times when you have a sense that the Buddha was more concerned about us than we are about ourselves. All too often, when we think about doing something, we don’t really calculate the long-term consequences. We just go for what we like. And then we find ourselves creating suffering for ourselves. As he said, he saw the world on fire, people setting fire to everything they touched." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill Starts with Gratitude"

"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"

"Our sense of self does have two roles. On the one hand, it’s the experiencer. You’re the one who’s experiencing the pain, experiencing the results of your own actions, the results of other people’s actions. But you’re also the agent. You’re shaping your experience. So when you find yourself in a bad mood, it’s not against the principle of acceptance to try to work your way out of it. After all, what are you accepting? Are you simply accepting the fact that you’re a passive victim of things? The Buddha never asks you to accept that. He just wants you to accept the fact that you have a role in shaping your experience. That’s the essential element in his teaching on conditionality. There are some influences that come in from the past, but there are other things that you have the choice to shape in the present moment. As for what’s happened in the past, you can’t change that. And the effects that you’re feeling from things that happened in the past, you can’t change that. But you do ...

"The second principle to keep in mind is that, in the Buddha’s teaching, there’s no question of a person’s “deserving” happiness or “deserving” pain. The principle of kamma is an impersonal one: that there are actions leading to pleasure and actions leading to pain. In this way, it’s not a respecter of persons; it’s purely an issue of actions and results. Good people may have some bad actions squirreled away in their past. People who seem horrible now may have some wonderful actions in theirs. You never know. The Buddha didn’t create the principle of kamma, or say that it’s good or just. He simply pointed out the way actions produce results. So there’s no question of a person’s deserving or not deserving pleasure or pain. There’s simply the principle that actions have results and that your present experience of pleasure or pain is the combined result of past and present actions. You may have some very unskillful actions in your past, but if you learn to think and act...

"Then there’s relinquishment. Here it’s a matter of thinking about situations where there’s someone you think deserves to suffer. They’ve acted in unskillful ways, and it seems wrong that they’re not meeting up with some sort of punishment. It seems that justice hasn’t been done. You have to relinquish that kind of thinking. The ideal way for people who have been misbehaving to change their ways is for them to have a change of heart. Now, it may happen that they will meet up with the results of their bad kamma, but ideally they would be in a position where they had developed thoughts of goodwill themselves, learning to be virtuous and discerning. They would have developed their minds to the point where they're neither overcome by pleasure nor overcome by pain. That would be the ideal situation—as in the case of Angulimala. The Buddha didn’t say to Angulimala, “Okay, come back after you’ve reaped the results of having killed so many people, then we’ll talk.” He saw that Anguli...

"We all know that life is going to end at some spot and the question is, what comes next? So you want to develop the qualities of mind that will help ensure that, whatever comes next, it’s something not to be afraid of, but something actually to look forward to. Not in the sense that you want to die, but at least you feel secure about where you’re going after death." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Try This at Home"

"I remember that when I first learned about the hindrances and how ill will doesn’t mean negativity or dislike — it means actively wanting to see somebody suffer — I couldn’t see in my own case that I wanted to see anybody suffer. But then I reflected: During my first year in particular, when I was meditating on the top of the hill there at Wat Dhammasathit, the thoughts that would destroy my concentration more than anything else came from thinking back on some injustice, where somebody had done something wrong or was doing something wrong and getting away with it. I could get worked up about that for hours at a time, with a strong sense of righteous indignation — and that’s a lot of what ill will is. You don’t like what’s happened, and it seems wrong that there’s no punishment, that people are getting away with things you can clearly see they shouldn’t be getting away with. But that, the Buddha says, is wrong view. Remember that the right attitude to have toward somebody who has ...

"This is where true happiness is going to be found: in learning how to train your actions. Any loss of that conviction would be fatal to a pursuit of happiness that could be reliable, trustworthy. So that’s going to be a serious loss. Fortunately, the things that would be a serious loss are things that are under your control. You can maintain your virtue. People can offer you all kinds of rewards for breaking the precepts, but you can say No. You can maintain your right view. As for loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of your health, that’s going to happen at some point anyhow, sooner or later. You lose these things; you get them back. You get them back; you lose them again. But with loss of right view, loss of your virtue: If you lose that, you’re going to be acting on wrong view, acting in unskillful ways, and that’s going to be for your long-term harm. That’s why it’s a serious loss. But it is under your control. You can prevent that. So you work on that — you’re firm in ...

"The Buddha says there are five kinds of loss, three of which he says are not serious. When we listen to his list of things that are not serious, we find that a lot of things on that list are ranked by the world as very serious: loss of wealth, loss of your health, loss of relatives. But as the Buddha said, you don’t go to hell from losing those things. And when you lose them, you get them back — as you have, many, many times in the past. What’s serious, he says, is loss of virtue and loss of your right view. These are areas where the world says, “Oh, those things are not important.” So you can see the Buddha’s values are very different from most people’s. He looked at things from the perspective of the really-long-term. If you lose your virtue, you’re going to create the kind of karma that could pull you down for a long time to come. If you lose your right view, you’re tempted to do anything at all because you feel that your actions have no consequences, they’re not real, so you ...

"You can think of situations in which people are trying to force you to do something that’s unskillful, and they’re going to punish you if you don’t. If you refuse, you have to put up with the punishment. But at least you’ve preserved the quality of your intention, and you have to believe in that. You have to have faith in that. In the long term, it’s going to be for the good. Because what you do now, of course, is what’ll create influences now and on into the future. Sometimes the influences are not immediately all that visible, but they will have influence in the future. It’s because of this principle that we’re training the mind. This is why we meditate. We may be coming to meditation for other reasons, but when you meditate for the long term, though, this is why you stay: You realize that the quality of your intentions shapes your life, so you have to look into the quality of your mind in the present moment. We’re trying to bring the mind to the breath to give it...

"We suffer not because of what other people do, and the path to the end of suffering doesn’t lie in straightening other people out. We suffer from what we’re doing, and the path lies in straightening out ourselves. So that’s where our focus has to be. That’s where we have to be centered. This means we shouldn’t try not to be self-centered. We have to be self-centered in a wise way, a skillful way." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "How to Be Self-Centered" (Meditations11)

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

"The important question [as far as the Buddha was concerned] is not “Who am I?” but “What should I do — and what will be the results?” That’s a question that can be answered — and answered in ways that really do make a difference in your life and can get you out of the confines of the world entirely." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No One in Charge" (Meditations9)

"You wonder what the Buddha would think about teachings that are said in his name nowadays: that you don’t do the practice; that there’s no “you” there to do the practice, it’s just conditions happening. That sort of thinking defeats any sense of your worth as a person, or of the worth of your choices. The Buddha was very clear that what you choose to do right now — what you choose to focus on, what you choose to think about, which intentions you choose to act on — is of prime importance. He started Rahula, his son, on the path of the Dhamma by having him look at his actions to see the extent to which his actions do have an impact, and trying to make that impact harmless. That theme carries all the way through the practice." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "You Are Not Redundant"

"So the realization that you’re taking certain things on faith, but you don’t really know them: That’s meant to be a spur to continue with the practice. Whatever doubts you might have are not considered a vice or something to be denied, for that would create lots of dishonesty in the mind. Instead, you acknowledge them and take them as an incentive to practice further until you get to the point someday when you really know for yourself. For sure. It’s in this way that the Buddha’s teachings on kamma and rebirth are not an insult to your intelligence. Instead they’re a spur to use your intelligence even further so that you can get yourself out of the ignorance into which we are born and into the knowledge of a happiness that doesn’t die." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Kamma & Rebirth" (Meditations4)

"So try to sensitize yourself throughout your life to the choices you’re making. And realize that your happiness depends on making skillful choices, a process that you can learn. If your life has been unskillful up to this point, and you’ve got lots of burdens and issues in your life, you can make choices to deal with those burdens skillfully. You can make a choice, change your habits. That’s the good part of this process of fabrication: Nothing is ever permanently engraved in stone. After all, even stone washes away and disintegrates. But in the meantime, because there is this constant process of fabrication, you can focus on the present moment. You don’t have to worry about first causes or what happened way back in the past. Just notice what you’re doing right now, how you’re reacting to and shaping the raw material of life right now. Learn to do it more and more skillfully. And you find that it can take you a lot further than you might imagine." ~ Thanissaro B...

"There are a lot of things in life that, if you thought, “This is your one lifetime, this is your one chance,” would strike you as very unfair. It would be hard to live with the idea that, say, someone smeared your name and you couldn’t get it un-smeared. Other people who don’t seem to have any right to power have taken over a lot of power. But if you take the long view of things, you realize that this is going to pass, and this is not your only chance. It makes it a lot easier to live with the things you can’t change, and focus on the ones you can." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Patience & Hope"

"It’s good to appreciate the fact that there are people out there who want to do good. There are people out there who find happiness in doing good. And that should make us happy." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Appreciation"

"You have to learn how to develop some equanimity around areas of the world where you look at them and say, “That’s really sad that that’s the way things are.” But you have to look at how much effort you would have to put in to change those things and ask yourself, “What would actually happen if I did make that effort? What would be the unintended consequences?” Some things in the world you can change without any bad side effects, but there are a lot of things in the world that you have to let go. You have to allow them to be. Because otherwise there’s no way you’re going to be able to train your mind. And your mind is the only thing where you really can take charge and you really can be responsible." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Perfecting the Mind in an Imperfect World"

"As for the forms of doubt and uncertainty, one is the sense of insecurity that comes when you know you’ve done some wrong things and there’s the possibility after death that you’re going to be punished for them. It’s not necessarily the case that there’s somebody up there keeping records and they’re going to catch you and say, “Hey, look, you did this wrong, you did that wrong, and we’ve got these laws and we’re going to carry you off and punish you.” It’s simply a fact of action: You do something unskillful and it’s going to come back in an unpleasant way. For a lot of us, we don’t know this for sure, but there’s always the possibility. You can start thinking about things that you did in the past, where you harmed other people, and there’s always that uncertainty. I’ve noticed that when people hear the teaching on karma for the first time, that’s the first thing they think about: “Oh my gosh, I’ve got all these horrible I did in the past. You mean I can’t get away with them?” ...

"Make it your sport to see: What’s the most skillful thing to do in this situation? What’s the most skillful thing to think? What’s the most skillful thing to say? And instead of getting upset with yourself or depressed or upset at the situation when things don’t turn out the way you expected them to, just learn from it, chalk it up to experience. Next time it comes around, try again." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Path of Action"

"Anger often presents itself as being justified, that someone has done something outrageous or said something outrageous. It’s beyond the pale. It can’t be. You can’t stand it — and that right there is the crux of the problem: your own lack of endurance, your inability to see the larger picture. Given that people will do things you don’t like, how can you live in this world in a skillful way, not letting your anger to take over?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Anger"