Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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"

"Each of us is the owner and doer of actions. And so you don’t want to cause people to do things that will make them suffer, and at the same time you don’t want to do anything that is going to make yourself suffer. It’s a pretty radical view of our relationships. We like to think that we can make other people happy by being nice to them, and there is a certain pleasure they can get when we’re nice to them, but that doesn’t necessarily make them happy. You’ve probably seen many cases where you’ve tried your best to be nice to somebody and they’re not happy. They’ve got their own karma. This is especially clear when people are suffering from a mental illness, when they’re getting old and sick, or when a baby is newly born. You can’t talk to the baby and make things okay. You realize that what we experience is our own actions. We do have an impact on other people, but the major impact is through what we get them to do. So we want to look for happiness in a way that insp...

"As for ill will, sometimes you can justify that by saying that someone really did something wrong, and justice has to be done. They have to be punished. But how many people respond well to punishment? There are some. But a lot of people just get more entrenched in their sense of rightness, that they’ve been treated unfairly. So the best way to resolve issues where someone has behaved in a bad way is not to have ill will for them and not to want to see them suffer. It’s to want to see them recognize that they’ve been doing wrong, and voluntarily change their ways. That way, you can spread goodwill [mettā] to them, because that’s what goodwill means in that situation, without any sense of hypocrisy or pretending or make-believe. It’s something you can genuinely feel. But you have to ask yourself about your ideas about justice, whether they really are just or no more than make-up on top of the plain old desire to see somebody you don’t like suffer." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "H...

" “The world has nothing of its own. One has to pass on, leaving everything behind.” Actually, we don’t leave everything behind. As the Buddha points out, you take your karma. So you try to only take good things with you by making sure you create only good karma. Ajaan Suwat used to comment on how the Buddha would talk about how the aggregates are not-self, the sense media are not-self, not-self, not-self. But then the Buddha would turn around and say, “We are the owners of our actions.” In Thai, the translation is basically both that we’re the doers of our actions and the owners, at the same time. Our actions are ours. So again, you develop the qualities of mind that give you good actions that you can depend on." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The World Offers No Shelter"

"There was a debate recently over the question of whether there are times when it’s justified to go out and kill people if they’re really evil. Well, that’s making your goodness depend on their goodness or badness. It’s not an independent value; it’s not an independent principle. But as the Buddha pointed out, your goodness has to be generated from within. It comes from your wisdom, seeing that regardless of how bad other people are, you’re not going to behave in that way. And that gives rise to a sense of self-esteem." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Loving Yourself Wisely"

"As the Buddha taught it, karma has nothing to do with the popular conception where karma is bad karma or bad fate coming to you. The Buddha taught karma as the power we have here in the present moment to shape our lives and to take advantage of the opportunities that come our way to do something really skillful with our abilities. We do make choices. We are responsible for the choices. So we live in a world where our lives have meaning. If we couldn’t make choices, we’d be just like machines. Or if everything were preordained, predetermined, we’d be like machines. Life would have no meaning at all, just as the running of a machine has no meaning. But the fact that we can make choices and there are choices that have consequences — they shape our world, they shape our lives, they make a difference: That gives meaning to our lives. It offers us the possibility to give as much meaning to our lives as we can. We’re the people who decide what do our lives mean. What are w...

"Start with this simple intention, “May all beings be happy.” Now, you’re not expecting that all beings will be happy, but you want to make sure that at least from your quarter there’s no danger for any beings at all. You’re setting your intentions straight. And that’s really all you can be responsible for." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Right Attitudes"

"If you’re consistent in holding to the precepts, you’re providing safety to everybody. They don’t have to fear anything from you. They don’t have to fear that they’re going to be killed or that their things will be stolen by you or that you’ll engage in illicit sex with them or with the people they love. You’re not going to lie to them; you’re not going take intoxicants and behave in ways that are going to be harmful to them. You’re providing safety for them and, as he said, when you’re providing safety in a universal way like this, you’re going to have a portion of that safety yourself. If you can avoid unskillful actions, it’s like a hand that has no wound. You can pick up poison, and the poison doesn’t seep into the blood. If there is a wound, you’re not safe. So as you hold by the five precepts, you can rejoice in the fact that you’re behaving in a safe way, and this is part of the protection that the Buddha provides: not only telling you that there is such a thing as skillfu...

"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"

"When you’re meditating here, you’re making merit and you can share it. The act of sharing is a meritorious act in and of itself. You might say that it gives you compound interest on top of the good you’ve done. And the question, of course, is: Given the teaching on kamma, how can your merit go to somebody else? The answer is that they have to appreciate it. That appreciation is a meritorious act on their part. They have to be in a position where they can receive it and then feel some appreciation for the goodness you’ve sent in their direction. That becomes their good kamma." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dedicating Merit" (Meditations8)

"[Ajaan Suwat] came from a very large peasant family, and large peasant families usually don’t have much to hand down to their children. He met a forest monk who said, “Hey look, it’s your actions that matter. And the fact that you’re poor now: You may have not been generous in the past, but you’ve got the opportunity now to practice the Dhamma.” So this quality of conviction is what sees us through. When things are going easy, the idea of having conviction doesn’t speak that much to us. But when things get hard: We look at our lives, we look at the people around us, the situation we’re in — and the last thing you need is something that teaches you to just give in. The teaching of karma is precisely what tells you not to give in. It places power in your hands. You have to think, “Well, I may have misused that power in the past,” and learn to accept that fact as a good sport. We all have bad karma in our backgrounds. It’s not the case that you look at a person right now...

"If you appreciate the help that you have received from others and show gratitude for the effort that they put into it, you will also be more likely to provide help to others. So you can see that the Buddha’s teachings on kamma affirm the social virtues of generosity and gratitude. Without these two virtues, human society would be chaos." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

Question: Sometimes I get in touch with the suffering of others and then experience very strong sadness. How do you advise handling that? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The first step is to spread thoughts of goodwill [mettā] to those people. If there is something you can do for them, then do that. If there’s nothing you can do, then you have to move from goodwill to equanimity, which is the thought that all of us have our own kamma, and if you focus on things where you can’t make a difference, then you’ll deplete the energy you could otherwise use to help people you actually can help. It’s one of the hard parts of being a human being that we can’t help everyone who is suffering. So you try to focus on the cases where you can be of help. ~ "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"Just look at your body. Every part of the body has at least one disease to go with it, sometimes more than one. It’s ready to fall apart, even though we do our best to keep it going. And the mind is even more changeable than that. So it’s no wonder that these are the things that grab our attention right away. But, the Buddha says, those aren’t the things to be afraid of. The real thing to be afraid of is that you’re going to do something unskillful — particularly in trying to protect this identity you’ve taken on, to ward off whatever you think is going to be the next big danger to threaten it. There are a lot of really horrible things that people do out of fear. And it turns out the horrible things are the things they really should be fearing more than the other fears they have. This is why a large part of our training as meditators is to learn to see how our ordinary old fears are not nearly as scary as we think. Of course, the dangers are there — there’s instability, there are...

"The causes will take care of the results. It’s not the case that by imagining results you’re going to get the causes to go in that direction. If that were the case, Right Imagination would be one of the steps on the path. But it’s not. What you want to do is develop the path, develop Right View. So concentration, mindfulness — all the elements of the Eightfold Path — are things to be developed. And where do you find the things to be developed? They’re right here, right in front of your nose. That’s where the work is to be done — not in your anticipation of where you’re going to go, but in paying really close attention to the breath right here and now. This is your path." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Laying the Infrastructure"

"So goodwill [mettā] for yourself means not harming others. And then you start thinking about them. They want happiness too, just like you. It’s just that we live in this world where people have lots of different levels of understanding and levels of behavior, and you have to be forgiving. So when anger comes up, you’ve got a tool to deal with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Guardian Meditations"

"Ordinarily, the Buddha was not the sort of person who would look for people to debate with, but there were a couple of issues when he would actually approach other teachers and say, “Do you really teach this?” Then he’d point out how destructive it was to teach those things. There were three cases, one of which was people who taught that everything you experienced in terms of pleasure or pain came from past actions. He approached those people and asked, “Do you really teach this?” They said, “Yes.” Then he sorted out the implications: “Well, in that case: People steal, people kill, have illicit sex, they lie, they drink because of something that’s totally beyond their control — what’s happened in the past.” He says, “When you teach people that, you’re leaving them unprotected and bewildered.” Now, that statement connects to two other teachings, one having to do with the problem of suffering. As he says, people are bewildered because of their suffering, and they sea...

"Remind yourself that your life isn’t already written in stone, that you’re not a slave to fate or a little nameless cog in the big machine. You’re actually a doer, a mover, a shaper. You can shape your life in the direction you want it to go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Impossible Things" (Meditations1)

"All of [the Buddha's] really basic teachings have to do with action, which is why kamma is so central to what he taught. Kamma consists of your intentions, and your intentions are shaped by your views. If your views are concerned with what you are or what the world is, you’re going to be sloppy in your actions. But if your views deal with what are you doing, what kind of actions are skillful, what kind of actions are not skillful, they focus your attention where it really can make a difference — where it really can be of use. The rest of the path then follows on that. You make up your mind that you’re going to act on intentions that are not harmful, and you apply that principle to your daily life." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Expert's Mind"

"Some people say Buddhism is selfish or harsh with its teachings on karma, selfish in the fact that each person is looking out after his or her own well-being, harsh in that people are being held responsible for their own suffering. If the Buddha could have saved us all, he would have. He had an enormous immeasurable heart, but he saw that this is the way that karma is. There are lots of things about karma that are not fair. Look at Ven. Angulimala: He had killed almost a thousand people and yet he was able to become an arahant without having to undergo a thousand deaths to pay off that karmic debt. By training his mind, he was able to mitigate a lot of the suffering he would have otherwise undergone. A lot of people were unhappy about that. They felt it wasn’t fair. The Buddha didn’t design the teaching on karma to make things fair or to be consoling. He didn’t design it at all. He just pointed out that this is the way things are, this is how they work." ~ Thani...

"So the different aspects of the path — virtue, concentration, and discernment — all help one another along. And they all provide you a safe space: a physical safe space inside the body where you can have a sense of ease; a mental safe space inside the mind where, whatever thoughts come up will come up in the arena of your understanding of kamma: your understanding of where suffering actually comes from and how it can actually be cured. And you resolve to do what you can to put an end to the causes of suffering in your attitudes toward yourself, in your attitudes toward others. So regardless of whatever mess there is in the world outside, or in your personal life, or whatever mess there has been in the past, you can find a safe space in the present moment where you can sort things out: both with the sense of well-being of a mind in concentration, friends with the breath inside, so you have a sense of being grounded, a sense of belonging here; and in the safe space of...

"Sometimes we believe in the power of our actions and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we say, “I really hope that my actions give results,” other times you do something and you say, “Well, I hope this doesn’t give results.” You try to convince yourself that the law of karma is something you can turn on and off. But actions always give results, and the results are in line with the quality of the action, and particularly the quality of the intention behind the action. So if you want good results, you have to make sure that the intentions are good. If you want those good results to be consistently good, then you have to make sure your intentions are consistently good. Remind yourself that you have the choice: You don’t have to act on every intention that comes in the mind. Even though some of the unskillful ones based on greed, aversion, and delusion seem awfully strong, they don’t have to overwhelm the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Intentions in Line with Results...

"So always remember that you’re not just sitting here on the receiving end of the world. You’re actually generating your experience, you’re taking in potentials that come from the past and you’re creating your experience of the world — every time you look, every time you listen, every time you deal with the senses in any way. Every time you move the body, every time you speak, with every thought: You’re a producer, you’re a creator, you’re a put-together-er. In this way, you shape your life. This is one of the reasons why when the Buddha talks about harming yourself, it’s not hitting yourself or killing yourself or anything like that. It’s actually killing other people, stealing from other people, lying to them, having illicit sex with them, taking intoxicants. You harm yourself in these ways, because the part of you that’s the karma-creator creating lots of bad stuff is going to have an impact on your experience now and on into the future. In the same way, he said, w...

"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?”...

"Conviction in the principle of karma requires that you make a commitment not to hedge your bets. You’re going to depend totally on the skillfulness of your own intentions to whatever extent you can develop that skillfulness. That’s the principle to which you have to devote yourself. As for other principles or lack of principles, let them go. Sometimes this feels a little scary. You’re so used to hedging your bets so that at least you’re popular, at least you’ve got connections, so that if the principle of karma doesn’t work out you’ve got something else to fall back on. But to be really committed to the principle of karma, to get the best results from it, you have to be committed. And to be really committed requires repeated acts of commitment. This is why in the Forest tradition so much emphasis is placed on the virtue of courage. Not foolhardiness, but courage. It takes a certain amount of courage to keep the mind centered and still, because otherwise we’re always...

"A lot of people don’t like the idea of responsibility. They’d rather have kamma-free zones in large areas of their lives where they can do what they want and not have to deal with the results, or have someone else protect them from the results. But that attitude is childish. If you wanted to live in a world where your actions had no results, that would also mean that generosity would have no meaning. Gratitude would have no meaning. Actions would just be thrown around, without any consequences — but they wouldn’t have any meaning, either. Nothing would have any meaning. It’s because we are responsible for our actions that they do have meaning." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Lessons of Good Kamma" (Meditations9)

"The fact that we’re meditating is directly related to the teaching on kamma, too. Where does kamma come from? It comes from our intentions. And where do our intentions come from? They come from the state of the mind. So we work on the state of the mind to improve our intentions — to make them not just good, but skillful. “Good” is well-meaning. “Skillful” is not only well-meaning, but also involves checking up to see, when you do a well-meaning action, do the results actually come out well? If something you thought was good turns out to get bad results, you go back and you recalibrate. It’s the act of reading the results and then going back and using your experience to inform your intention: That’s what turns good intentions into skillful ones. So, when we think about kamma, the kamma of meditation, remember we’re focusing on the good side — the fact that we can make a change for the better, particularly in our own minds." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Worlds to Watch Out For...

"When you forgive someone who’s wronged you, it doesn’t erase that person’s karma in having done wrong. This is why some people think that forgiveness has no place in the karmic universe of the Buddha’s teachings, and that it’s incompatible with the practice of what he taught. But that’s not so. Forgiveness may not be able to undo old bad kamma, but it can prevent new bad karma from being done. This is especially true with the bad kamma that in Pali is called vera . Vera is often translated as “hostility,” “animosity,” or “antagonism,” but it’s a particular instance of these attitudes: the vengeful animosity that wants to get back at someone for perceived wrongs. This attitude is what has no place in Buddhist practice. Patience can weaken it, but forgiveness is what clears it out of the way. The Dhammapada , a popular collection of early Buddhist poems, speaks of vera in two contexts. The first is when someone has injured you, and you’d like to inflict some injury ba...

"The Buddha’s image of each person’s karma is seeds sown in a field: Some seeds are sprouting right now; others are waiting to sprout. When you see the sufferings of others, you’re seeing only their seeds that are currently sprouting. The good seeds waiting to sprout, you can’t see. At the same time, you don’t know what bad seeds are lying in wait in your own field. Still, the most important seeds in your field are the ones you’re planting right now, because they can determine whether you’ll suffer from your old seeds or not. So you look for the good old seeds in other people’s fields that may be ready to sprout, and try to get them to plant good new seeds so that they won’t have to suffer from any bad seeds already sprouting. After all, that’s how you’d like them to treat you when your bad seeds start to mature. Acting in this way, you create good karma for yourself, and a more humane world all around." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma is Individual"

Question: So there’s no self. So in that case, who acts and who creates the kamma? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The Buddha never said that there is no self. When he teaches not -self, he’s teaching a technique, a strategy for getting rid of attachment. There’s a common misconception that the Buddha starts with the idea of there being no self, and in the context of no self teaches the doctrine of kamma, which doesn’t make sense: If there’s no self, who does the kamma and who receives the results? But that misconception gets the context backwards. Actually, the Buddha starts with the doctrine of kamma, and then views ideas of “self” and “not-self” as types of kamma. In other words, he focuses on seeing the way we define our sense of self as an action. Then the question becomes, when is the activity of identifying things as your self skillful, and when is it not? When is the activity of identifying things as not-self skillful, and when is it not? There are some instances where the B...

Question: Kamma and Rebirth, second try. How does individual kamma migrate from this life to the next one? Is this a relevant question? If no, how can our next life be better if we don’t have the benefit of a kind of karmic legacy? Thank you, Ajaan, for clarifying this “critical” question. Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not a matter of migrating. Our kamma is actually what creates our experience of the next life — or rather, it supplies the raw material for our experience of the next life. When we leave this life and go to the next one, it doesn’t feel like we’re going someplace else. Just as we have a sense of our present life as “right here,” the next life will also have a sense of being “right here,” right at our consciousness. It’s like going from one dream to another. Even though the appearance of the location in the second dream is different from the location in the first, it still has a sense of happening “right here” just as the first one did. To give another example,...

"As Ajaan Suwat once pointed out, there is an important riddle to contemplate in the practice. On the one hand, the Buddha said that all phenomena are not self, and seeing things in that way is part of the path. On the other hand, there is that point we’re supposed to contemplate everyday: “I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, whatever I do for good or for evil to that will I fall heir.” There is very definitely an “I am” there. So it’s good to think about that riddle."   ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu  "The Riddle of 'I Am'"

"There’s a difference between practice for the sake of rebirth, a good rebirth, and practice for the sake of going beyond all rebirth. But there are also some similarities between the two. The Buddha talks about four qualities conducive to a good rebirth — conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment — and there’s a lot of overlap between that list and the list of factors in the path to the end of suffering, especially in the virtue and the discernment. More basically, there’s overlap in the sense that, as you’re following those four practices that lead to a good rebirth, you’re learning a skill you’ll need on the path: the ability to look at your mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Always Observe Your Mind"

"Even when things are difficult outside or inside, you’ve got the opportunity to develop good qualities of mind. Whatever the situation, you want to figure out the skillful way to approach it so that you minimize the difficulties and maximize your potentials for freedom. If you’re dealing with more than just present responsibilities — say, with the results of past mistakes where you’ve harmed people — the same principle applies. You admit the mistakes. You admit the limitations that they place on you now, but then you try to work around them. Don’t let yourself be hemmed in by your past mistakes or be hemmed in by your past karma, because these things don’t have to totally shape the present moment. We have some freedom right here, right now, and a lot of the practice is learning how to recognize that fact and maximize it to get the best use out of it. Because all the aspects of the path are possible, whatever the limitations from your past karma are. You can learn how to be genero...