Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"Which sense of well-being are you going to choose: the well-being built on the shaky ground of already being a good person, or the well-being of having the attitude that you’re always willing to learn? The first attitude is the one to drop. The second attitude is the one that offers hope, that’s based on a much more solid foundation, for there’s always the possibility to keep learning and learning and learning. When you’re dealing with difficult things from the past, have the attitude that, “At least I’m going to learn from this.” That shifts the foundation onto something much more solid." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Self Esteem" (Meditations3)

"You’re not here just stuck in a bad situation where there’s nothing you can do about it. Even though there may be limitations on what you can do, you always have the opportunity to do the skillful thing, say the skillful thing, think something skillful. And that will be your food down the line. Even though the refreshment and the nourishment and the rapture may not be coming immediately, the simple fact that you’re convinced that there will be something good coming down the line gives you energy right there. Because the mind is not like the body. The body can’t feed off of anticipation but the mind can . And that’s what gives it the strength to keep going. So conviction is an important way of nourishing the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Feeding Off the Future"

"So keep your meditation a private affair. After all, the suffering you’re causing yourself is a private affair, something nobody else can see. Even when we live together day in and day out, each of us is making a lot of decisions that nobody else here will know. We may see some of the outside effects, but the actual experience of suffering — your suffering, your pain: You’re the only person who can feel it. And you’re the only person who can know which little decisions you make from moment to moment to moment. That’s what you want to learn how to observe. So try to develop your inner sensitivity as much as you can, so that you can make sure your decisions are going in the right direction. The intentional element here is to try to minimize suffering as much as possible." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Private Matter" (Meditations4)

"As the Buddha said, appropriate attention [yoniso manasikāra] is one of the most important factors for inducing Awakening. There are lots of other things you could focus on in the present moment. But the Dhamma points you to this question of cause and effect, skillful and unskillful. As for other things, you can let them pass, let them pass, because they’re not the issue. This principle applies to any problem. If you clutter up your mind with too many facts — with no clear sense of which facts are really crucial to solving the problem and which ones are not — the fact that you’re keeping track of so many things actually obscures the problem. So you don’t want to focus on too much in the present moment." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Don't Listen to This Talk"

"Ajaan Fuang once said that it’s a good thing most of us can’t remember our past lives because we could very easily get fixated on all the wrong that was done to us, all the issues that never got settled. And we might want to go back and settle some old scores. Of course, there’d be no end to that. After all, the people whose scores got settled would probably want to settle some scores with us, because the other part of potentially remembering your past lives is remembering all the wrongs you did, the ways you harmed people, that you’d be ashamed to think about now. But just the thought of that possibility leaves us with an important lesson. No scores are fully settled. Things don’t come to closure. This is the nature of samsara: It just keeps wandering on and on and on. No story comes to an end. We watch plays, read books, where events come to a satisfying closure, and part of us would like to see that in our own lives as well. But one of the facts you have to accep...

"Often we think of the teaching on karma as something deterministic or fatalistic. “I’ve got to suffer because of my past karma,” or, “This had to happen because of past karma.” That puts your whole life out of your control. But when you start playing with the breath, you begin to realize that a lot of the shaping of your present experiences is something you’re doing right now. You improvise it. You cook it up fresh every moment. That puts an element of freedom into your life. What we’re doing as we meditate is to explore this freedom we have right here in the present moment to see how far it goes. As the Buddha said, when you explore this area, that’s when you start learning how to put an end to suffering. That’s the best use of your freedom." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Right Learning"

"We do have the power to exert control over our intentions right now. And our intentions do shape our experience of the world around us, the world inside us, at least to some extent: enough to make the difference between suffering and not suffering. What we’re experiencing right now is the result of past intentions, plus our current intentions, plus the results of our current intentions. Even though we may not have absolute control over things, and will ultimately have to let them all go, we do have some control over our actions now. And you want to make the most of that fact." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Limits of Control"

"We often think of kamma as something very diametrically opposed to goodwill [mettā] . How can people be happy if they’ve got bad kamma and deserve to suffer? — that’s what we think, but that’s not what the Buddha taught. The teachings on kamma and goodwill go together. You realize the difference between suffering and non-suffering is a matter, not of past kamma, but of present kamma: your skill in the present moment. The same principle applies to other people as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill & Kamma"

"Your ability to appreciate other people’s happiness is going to help your ability to appreciate your own. It’s not infrequent when people come to meditate that they gain a sense of pleasure from the meditation and they don’t feel that they’re worthy of it. They feel they don’t deserve it. To get past that feeling, they should look back on their own attitude toward not only their own happiness but also toward other people’s happiness. If you resent other people’s happiness, then it’s going to be hard for you to feel that you deserve happiness. The question of deserving gets in the way. When the Buddha was teaching, as in that passage we chanted just now on how to put an end to suffering, there was no question about how this teaching was only for people who don’t deserve to suffer. The path to the end of suffering is for everybody, for all kinds of suffering, “deserved” or not. The question never comes up in his teachings — simply the question that people are doing thi...

"The development of goodwill [mettā], which the Buddha equates with restraint, teaches you that restraint is not a type of confinement. Instead, it’s an act of kindness to yourself and others. In fact, you best show your goodwill for others when you refrain from doing them harm. This realization makes you more inclined to practice the mental restraint needed for strong concentration." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Happiness as a Skill: The Practice of Puñña"

"Your actions are what are real, that have the most reality. The world out there is not the issue. The world that you experience comes from your [intentional] actions [kamma]. Your actions are more solid, more powerful than your experience of earth, wind, water, fire, and all the other elements. That’s a pretty radical statement. This is why the Buddha keeps focusing back on what you’re doing right now because what you’re doing right now is the big shaping force in your experience." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "So Little Time" (Meditations8)

"[The Buddha] doesn’t give a complete theory about how everything happens in the world and can be traced back to particular actions. He teaches karma to the extent that it’s useful in getting the mind to be trained so that it can put an end to suffering. That’s as far as his teaching goes, but that’s pretty far. It’s much better than having a map to everything but still suffering. So use these teachings to take you where you want to go because they can take you farther than you can imagine." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Meditation Karma Checklist"

"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"

" Lies are statements that intentionally misstate the facts of a case. The Vinaya’s discussion of its training rule against lying shows that the intention defining a lie here is not so much the intention to deceive as it is the intention to misrepresent the truth (Pc 1). The distinction is a fine one, but it’s important. In [AN 4:183], the Buddha states that there are cases where a truth should not be told if it gives rise to passion, aversion, and delusion in the speaker. This does not mean, however, that you can misstate the facts of the case in such instances. It simply means that you need not tell the whole truth about an issue. You avoid speaking about the facts that would provoke harm, even if this would cause your listener to misunderstand the situation. AN 4:73 provides an example relevant to this principle: To maintain your integrity, you speak as little as possible of your own good points and of the faults of other people." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Right Speech ...

"Someone asked me one time: How do the teachings on kamma and rebirth make me happy? And how do the teachings on spontaneously appearing beings make me happy? Well, it’s not that the teachings themselves are supposed to make you glad, but when you take them as working hypotheses, you realize that they do open the way to the end of suffering, a path that you can follow to the end of suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Happy about Kamma"

"One of [the Buddha's] big discoveries is the extent to which we fabricate our experience from within, through our intentions. In other words, we’re not just on the receiving end of the material world. We actually shape the world we live in. The whole point of the path is to learn how to take advantage of that fact — so that, on the one hand, we can shape it well — and then shape it really well so that we can get beyond these worlds that we ordinarily shape and arrive at something that’s really reliable, something really solid. Yet it is an inside job. You can get advice from outside, but the actual work is something you have to do. This is very different from the materialist’s idea, which is that the material world is real and what you experience, your consciousness of things, is what they call an epiphenomenon. In other words, it’s just a side effect of the real things, which are atoms doing their thing. And the Buddha’s perspective is also very different from the post-moder...

 "Remember that the mind comes first. And even though it may take time to put the energy out into the world so that the good energy is reflected back, accept that fact as a good sport. What you see getting reflected back is old karma, sometimes very old karma. But have some trust that the big issue is not the old karma, it’s the new karma you’re creating now. As the Buddha said, this is what makes the difference whether you are going to suffer right now or not. You don’t have to go back and wait for all your old karma to be straightened out; you don’t have to be tied down by your old karma. Remember the image of the salt crystal. Your karma from the past is the crystal of salt, but what makes the difference is the quality of your mind right now. Is it the little tiny cup of water or is it the large river? That’s something you can choose . So, when you have that choice available, why not make the most of it?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Power of the Mind"

"The Buddha’s sense of irony, the arahant’s sense of irony, is simply seeing that the world is so dumb: The things that people want most are the very things that make them suffer most. For a long time, before their awakening, the arahants had been doing that sort of thing as well. This is why when they laugh at this tendency, it’s not a harsh laugh. They know what it’s like; they’ve been there themselves. But they were able to step back and see the foolishness. And in seeing the foolishness, that’s when you let go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Infinite Good Humor"

"So our actions are important. There are so many voices in the world telling us that our actions aren’t important: politicians who say that they don’t care about what people think, that they’re just going to do what they want to do; scientists who tell us that nothing we can do can change the general course of nature. Then there’s cosmological time, geological time, in which our efforts seem to be very puny and insignificant. But the teaching on kamma reminds us that cosmological time may apply to the world out there, but the world of your lived experience is shaped by your actions, and this is the world that matters." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Respect, Confidence, & Patience"

"The source, the mind’s desire for happiness, is where your true responsibilities lie. You want to make sure that that desire is aimed in the right direction, toward a happiness that’s harmless and blameless, a happiness that’s true. As long as you stick with those intentions, you can trust that the ripple effect going out from them will be good for everybody touched by those ripples. So right here is where your responsibility lies." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Look after the Source"

"Conviction is conviction in the principle of karma. In other words, believing that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the intentions you act on. That conviction helps get rid of the delusion that somehow you can act in sloppy ways, or act in careless ways, or even act in evil ways, and not suffer the consequences. So many people think, “There must be some way you can get away with that kind of behavior.” And we often see examples of people who seem to have gotten away with it, but if you look at things over the long term, you realize they don’t get away with anything at all. Even as they’re doing that kind of behavior, there’s a lot of dishonesty, there’s a lot of discomfort in the mind that they’ll often deny and cover up. But that activity of denial is a form of suffering. And then, over the long term, there will be more bad results that come back. When we’re convinced of this, this is a strength because it enables us to make the effort to dev...

" “Days and nights fly past, fly past: What am I doing right now?” The Buddha has you reflect on that every day. The first sentence is for reflecting on how fleeting time is. Our lives are rushing — where? Rushing toward death, that’s for sure. When are we going to come slamming into death? We don’t know. So we don’t know how much time we have left, which comes to the second part of the reflection: “What am I doing right now?” You at least know that you have the present moment. What are you going to do with it? For the Buddha, that’s always the big question. What are you doing with what you’ve got right now? His teaching focuses on doing, on action. Everything we know is an action or the result of an action. Even theories are actions. Ideas are actions. Concepts are actions. They’re part of a casual chain. Where are they taking us? Even when you’re meditating, sitting here trying to do absolutely nothing, there’s still an action going on. There’s an intention. So what is your in...

"When you come right down to it, there’s a part of you that’s totally alone as you come into the world, totally alone as you face your sufferings, totally alone as you leave here. Even when you are with other people, there’s an internal dialogue that’s just between you and yourself. That’s what you’ve got to be responsible for. The world would be a nice place if we could provide for each other’s happiness — and we can a little bit — but for the really deep down parts, we each have to be responsible for ourselves. If you constantly worry about this person and that person, no matter how close you are to them, there’s going to be a part of you that gets neglected that you really are responsible for." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Your True Responsibility"

"When looking at people around you, it’s important that you get away from your sense of competitiveness, of this person versus that person. You look, not at them, but at their activities. Otherwise you start comparing yourself to the other person: “This person’s better than I am. That person’s worse than I am.” And that brings in questions of conceit, resentment, and competition, which are not really helpful because we’re not here to compete with each other. We’re here to work on ourselves. So again, look at other people simply in terms of their thoughts, their words, their actions. And see what’s an admirable action, what are admirable words, what are admirable ideas, ones you can emulate, ones you can pick up. In this way the fact that we’re living together becomes a help to the practice rather than a hindrance. The same is true when you notice people around you doing things that are not so admirable. Instead of judging the other person, simply judge the actions by...

 "You look in the newspapers and it seems like everything in the world is falling apart. And it is. So, what is there to accomplish? We train our minds. We’re good to one another, because that kind of goodness isn’t erased by death." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Living Honorably (2015)" (Meditations8)

"It’s this desire for happiness that underlies the whole practice, coupled with an understanding of karma: Without that understanding, the desire for happiness becomes sentimental and sometimes rather unrealistic. But as the principle of karma says, if you act with skillful intentions, the results will be happy, the results will be pleasant. This means we have to act with skillful intentions, intentions that don’t want to cause harm. It’s that desire not to cause harm and the realization that we have to implement it through the principle of karma: That’s the beginning of the practice. It’s the motivation and the understanding." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Desire for Happiness"

"[The Buddha] explicitly warns against taking on too many questions, particularly those that lead nowhere and tie us up in knots: “Who am I? Am I basically a good person? An unworthy person?” Instead, he tells us to focus on our intentions so that we can see how they shape our life, and to master the processes of cause and effect so that they can shape our life in increasingly better ways. This is the way every great artist or craftsman develops mastery and skill." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Road to Nirvāṇa Is Paved with Skillful Intentions"

"There are lots of ways that we can develop doubts and uncertainty about the path. So let’s look at how the Buddha said to deal with uncertainty. First, of course, you ask yourself: What are you being asked to believe? You’re being asked to believe that your actions have an impact. That the quality of the mind with which you act is going to have an impact on the results of that action. That it’s possible to learn from your mistakes. And that you do have freedom of choice. These are all fairly commonsensical propositions. Where the Buddha is asking you to take this a little bit further than normal common sense, of course, is that by following this principle you can go all the way to true happiness, a happiness that won’t change." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Strengthening Conviction"

"By paying attention to the moments when you catch yourself being unskillful, you work with that particular intention. You don’t have to deal with your entire character all at once. Just see what’s happening right here, right now, with that particular lack of skillfulness — because you can deal with individual events. They’re not too much. They’re not overwhelming. And as you develop this quality of being meticulous, you actually accomplish the training." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sweat the Small Stuff"

"Don’t latch on to the results of your actions; latch on to the fact that you’re making the decisions right now, all the time. Once a decision has been made, it’s been put into a larger circle of cause and effect beyond your control; but you do have a chance to make a decision again the next moment, and the next moment, and then the next. Focus on that. Don’t get caught up in the results of past actions. Focus on what you can do now to make the present actions skillful. That’s the focus of the teaching, “We’re the owners of our actions.” " ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Sublime Attitudes" (Meditations2)

"When you’re playing tennis, the first lesson is keep your eye on the ball. You never forget that. Even when you become a great pro, you still have to keep your eye on the ball. In the same way, when you practice, keep your eye on your actions, because that’s where everything will become clear." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reflections on Kamma"

"On the mundane level, the first five factors of [the Buddha's noble eightfold] path [leading to the cessation of suffering and stress] correspond to the faculty of conviction. Right view on this level means believing in the principle of kamma and trusting that those who have practiced properly truly understand the workings of kamma in this life and the next. In the Buddha’s words, this level of right view holds that “There is what is given, what is offered, what is sacrificed. There are fruits & results of good & bad actions. There is this world & the next world. There is mother & father. There are spontaneously reborn beings; there are contemplatives & brahmans who, faring rightly & practicing rightly, proclaim this world & the next after having directly known & realized it for themselves.” What this passage means is that there is merit in generosity; the moral qualities of good and bad are inherent parts of the cosmos, and not ...