Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"I was giving a Dhamma talk on kamma up in the Bay Area. After the talk, a woman came up and said, “You know, this made me think, ‘Maybe my life isn’t determined by my DNA after all.’” I was surprised. She’d been going to Dhamma talks for a fair while and yet was still able to maintain the idea that somehow DNA determined everything that was going to happen in her life, everything she was going to do. But then, it is easy to have that view in conjunction with a lot of stuff that’s taught as Dhamma these days: the idea that there’s really no self there, that things are just happening on their own, and the only way to find happiness is to get out of the way. Don’t have any desires for anything to happen differently from the way it is. Just accept things as they are and be done with it. That’s what they say, but that’s not what the Buddha taught. His teachings all start with the power of intention. Your mind is what shapes your experience. You’re not just passive recipients. If we a...

"As the Buddha showed, the three characteristics — or rather, the three perceptions [stress, inconstancy, not-self] — should be applied only in certain times and certain places. There was once a young monk who was asked by a wanderer from another sect what the results of karma were and the monk said, “Stress.” Then he went back to the Buddha and asked him if he’d given the right answer and the Buddha said, “No. When asked about karma, you talk about how skillful karma leads to pleasure, how unskillful karma leads to pain.” Another one of the other monks piped up and said, “Well, wasn’t he thinking about the fact that all feelings are stressful?” And the Buddha replied, essentially, that was not the time or place for that teaching. So, an important part of strategy is knowing which teachings to use when. And not jumping the gun or trying to skip over things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Noble Warrior's Path" (Meditations8)

Question 15. Is it possible to burn off old kamma — say, by simply putting up with pain? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: No. In the Buddha’s time, an ascetic group called the Nigaṇṭhas believed that they could burn off old kamma by not reacting to the pain of their austerities, and the Buddha reserved some of his sharpest ridicule for that belief. As he said, the Nigaṇṭhas should have noticed that the pain they experienced during their austerities ended when they stopped the austerities, which meant that the pain was the result not of old kamma being burned off, but of their present kamma in undertaking the austerities [MN 101]. Still, it is possible to weaken the results of bad past kamma. The Buddha compared past bad kamma to a big lump of salt. If you put the salt into a small glass of water, you can’t drink the water because it’s too salty. But if you toss it into a large, clean river, it doesn’t make the water of the river too salty to drink. The river here stands for a mind t...

"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"

"Someone this morning expressed the idea, “Well, it’s all going to come out okay in the end.” And the Buddha questions that: “Will there be an end where it all sort of settles in?” We like to think that the world or the universe has some sort of plan behind it. It’s like a nice novel, all the loose ends get tied up in the end. But when you look at people’s lives: How many people’s lives have their loose ends tied up? How many people’s lives end with a nice, satisfactory, esthetically pleasing closure? That’s not the way of the world at all. It’s all unfinished business. People stop their work because they get too old, too weak to do it, or they die before it’s done. It’s not that the work ever really gets finished – it’s just that people have to drop it. Relationships tend to have lots and lots of loose ends that never really get resolved. And so the idea, “Well, it doesn’t really matter because it’s all going to come out in the end”: That’s one of the most destructiv...

"Even though you may not reach awakening any time soon, if you keep this understanding of kamma and mindfulness in mind and apply it to your actions, your life becomes a progressively better life. You learn to delight in abandoning unskillful qualities and to delight in developing skillful qualities. Right there you possess what the Buddha called one of the values of the noble ones. You become less harmful to yourself and others. This teaching is also empowering: You realize you have the power to make skillful changes in your life, and the ability to suffer less and less from what you cannot change. The sense of self that you develop around doing this becomes a healthy sense of self: one that develops around the willingness always to learn. As long as you need a sense of self, this is a good one to have. In following these teachings, you also develop what the Buddha called the seven noble treasures [conviction, virtue, conscience, concern, learning, generosity, discernment]. These...

"You know the story about Angulimala who had killed 999 people and then, not long after the Buddha taught him, became an arahant. A lot of people like that story. It shows that no matter what your background, there’s hope. But we have to remember that, at the time, there were a lot of people who didn’t like what had happened and were pretty upset. Here was Angulimala who had killed all these people and he was literally getting away with murder. You could say that he deserved to suffer, but the Buddha didn’t take that into consideration at all. He said, “Here’s a person who’s suffering really badly and his suffering is spilling out and affecting other people.” By curing Angulimala’s suffering, or showing him how to cure his suffering, he saved a lot of other people, too. So if there’s the question of whether you deserve to be happy or not, you learn how to put that aside. Realize that that’s a non-issue. The issue is that you’ve got actions. The mind is an active princi...

"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)

"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"

"It’s the same with worry and anxiety, or restlessness. These things that you’re worried about: If they really happened, what would be the best way to prepare for them? Not by spending the whole night worrying and wearing yourself out! You’re going to need mindfulness; you’re going to need alertness. You’re going to need an inner sense of strength that you can draw on, and this is what the meditation is for. It strengthens these good qualities that you can use in any situation if you’re willing to use them. So the best way to prepare for future contingencies is to strengthen the mind as much as you can. Gain practice in being as mindful as possible, as alert as possible, open to new ways of thinking. And also, try to get that perspective on future dangers. There’s that great passage where the monk is going to a dangerous part of India. He takes leave of the Buddha, and the Buddha says, “You know, the people there are reputed to be pretty savage. What if they curse you?” And the m...

"Real injustices are being done out there. The question is: what to do about them? Often we see a situation that we don’t like, anger arises, and we try to think of what to do about the situation while the anger is still in the mind. From the Buddha’s perspective, the problem is not so much that we want to do something about the injustices, but that we allow the anger to color our perception of the situation and of what should be done. So he’s not telling us to simply accept things as they are and try to swallow your anger, feeling that we’re to blame for the anger. Rather, he’s saying that we have to deal with the anger in such a way that it doesn’t get in the way of responding in an appropriate way, or a skillful way, to what we see as wrong. Once you get the anger out of the way, there are two things that can happen. One is that you may see that the situation is not as bad as you thought it was, but simply that your opinions had colored the situation. The other is ...

"The word “Dhamma” that we use for the Buddha’s teachings has other meanings as well. And one of the most important ones, one that’s often overlooked, is action. Dhamma means action. And that’s what the Buddha’s teachings are all about: your actions in terms of what you do with your body, what you do with your speech, what you do with your mind, and the actions that the Buddha recommends you do and not do." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Basic Wisdom"

"If you’re the sort of person who’s been angry, you might say, “Well, I need to be really loving and compassionate,” and you try being a Pollyanna for a while, and you realize that doesn’t work. So you go thrashing back and forth, feeling that you’re either too passive or too aggressive. It’s not the passivity or the being aggressive that’s the issue: It’s what your intention is when you’re dealing with people. Look at the Buddha. In some cases he would totally avoid getting into arguments, and in other cases he’d pursue an argument and be really aggressive. So you have to realize: There was something else going on. The passivity or the aggressiveness was not the issue. It was his intention. His intention was kind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Between Either & Or"

"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)

"Although the Jains, like the Buddhists, teach a doctrine of the moral consequences of actions, the teachings of the two traditions differ in many important details. This discourse points out two of the major points where the Buddhist teaching is distinctive: its understanding of the complexity of the kammic process, and its application of that understanding to the psychology of teaching. The Buddha shows that a simplistic, fatalistic view of the kammic process is logically inconsistent, and also leads to unfortunate results for any person who, with a background of bad kamma, believes in it. The actual complexity of kamma, however, allows for a way in which past evil deeds can be overcome: through refraining from evil now and into the future, and through developing expansive mind-states of goodwill, compassion, empathetic joy, & equanimity. In such an expansive mind state, the unavoidable consequences of past evil actions count for next to nothing. The Buddha als...

"Each of us should realize that we have to be responsible for our actions. Most of us spend our time going around trying to straighten out other people. As a result, we tend to neglect the one area where we really are responsible: what we do, what we say, what we think. The corollary of this is that we should treat every other person as a responsible person, too." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Only One Person"

"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. This is a lot of what the Buddha’s teaching is about: that you’ve got to take responsibility for yourself. Because who’s making the decisions? You can’t say, well, someone else made that decision for me or this person made that decision for me, because there’s got to be a part of you that...

"So it’s not the case that you can say, “Well, I’m just going to not have any fabrications at all, just be with direct experience.” Direct experience is something that’s already fabricated. Anything that has to do with the six senses is all fabricated. The question is: Is it skillful or not? This is where we focus on the practice of the path: That’s skillful fabrication. You want to engage in that as much as you can, develop that as much as you can. Abandon anything that gets in the way of the path." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Path of Aggregates"

"Then there’s that reflection on karma. That’s where our refuge is. If you look at it, it says: “We’re owners of our actions, heir to our actions, whatever we do for good or for evil, to that will we fall heir.” And you can focus either on the good or the evil. Karma is scary. There are a lot of things we do that are unskillful and will bear results, one way or another. It’s so easy to slip and forget. That’s one of the reasons why you want to be mindful. But there’s also the good side to karma — there’s a lot of good that you can develop with your actions. When the Buddha teaches karma, that’s what he focuses on — the good that can be done. This is why the reflection on karma is meant to give rise to confidence — that you have it within you that you can do this. If your habits are unskillful, you can change them. They’re not written in stone. Past karma doesn’t control everything. In fact, your primary experience is what your intentions are right now. When the Buddha...

"The pleasures that come from taking into account mistakes you’ve made in the past and then you learn to do something right: Those pleasures are really satisfying. As the Buddha says, people who were heedless in the past but then change to become heedful, brighten the world like a moon at night when released from a cloud. So don’t be ashamed of the fact you’ve made mistakes, in the sense of not letting them get you down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Learn from Your Mistakes"

"The times that are needed to say things displeasing are very rare. It’s a sign of a lot more skill, when you have difficulty with someone, that you can get your emotions under control and you can express your thoughts in ways that they will be happy to hear. Even when you’re saying things that are unpleasant, you have to show respect for the other person. Don’t show disdain; don’t show contempt. Choose the right time, the right place, the right situation to say those things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "True Freedom of Speech"

"This body we have, the mind we have: They’re like the gold you hear about in fairytales. The gremlin or the goblin gives you the gold, but it turns out that if you try to hoard the gold, it turns into ashes. It turns into feathers. But if, when you get the gold, you give it away, it keeps replenishing itself. It keeps repaying you in more and more ways. So as long as you have a body, as long as you have a mind, give them to whatever you find is noble, whatever you find is inspiring." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "You Bet Your Life"

"So, the whole teaching of the Dhamma has a purpose, and its purpose is the happiness of all. Now, it’s not going to make them happy by saying pleasing things all the time. But it is going to make them happy by giving them instructions, or giving them things to think about that they will then act on, and find true happiness as a result. So, the Dhamma has its attha,  it has its purpose, and its purpose is happiness. That’s the Dhamma’s goodwill [mettā] . And it’s limitless: It’s not only for monks or only for lay people, only for Asian people or only for Americans, or for any particular group of people at all. It’s for everybody, because it’s not specifically tailored for any one group. It points to a problem we all have, which is we’re creating suffering for ourselves. And it’s basically saying, “Look, this is how you can stop!” When you stop creating that suffering, you’re not left with just an empty, neutral state. You’re left with true happiness, which goes beyond abundant, b...

"Perhaps one of the reasons we’re so messed up in the West is because our culture is designed so that goodness of heart doesn’t really count for much. Our society is designed to take advantage of good-hearted people. They’re not the ones who rise to the top. And because we believe that rising to the top is what matters, goodness of heart doesn’t seem to count for much. And the Buddha wants to reestablish that it does." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Buddha's Basic Therapy"

"The same with having views in common: We start with the views of the Buddha’s teachings on kamma, that you do have choices as to how to act, and that different actions have different consequences, based on the quality of the intention behind the action. So you want to be careful about how you act. That’s the essence of right view right there. It doesn’t require that you be Buddhist in order to believe it. I’ve run into some nominal Buddhists who thought that their actions were totally determined by their genes, which means that deep down inside they don’t feel that they’re responsible for what they do. It’s hard to live with someone who thinks like that. If you want to live together, you have to admit, “I do make choices and my choices are going to have consequences, so I’d better be careful.” As long as everybody shares that view together, we can live with one another." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "What We Have in Common" (Meditations8)

"It’s important to have the perspective that comes when you’re fully in the present moment. Your relationship to the past and your relationship to the future get changed. The past is just a memory right now. It’s gone. The future’s not here yet. So when thoughts of past and future come in, remember they’re just thoughts. The reality of the karma that you’re creating right now: That’s what’s actually there in the present, and that’s what you want to understand. You want to see when craving comes up for a thought: Where is it coming from? How does it start? How does it end? And what’s the allure? Remember what the Buddha said about sensuality: It’s not your sensual pleasures that you’re so attracted to, it’s your plans for those sensual pleasures. That’s where the craving is. And this principle applies across the board. Your fears about the future: It’s not the future that you’re afraid of. Thoughts come into the mind, and you’re afraid of those thoughts, you latch onto them out of ...

"Fabrication, this process of making, comes before phenomena themselves. We hear so often how people shape their reality, how our perceptions tend to filter the ways we see reality, and yet we don’t see it as it’s actually happening, even though it happens very directly right here. Even in your own sense of the body there are lots of different sensations coming in, through the various nerve ends. The mind has its habits for selecting among these sensations to present itself with a picture of what’s going on. Sometimes the physical sensations get mixed up with the mental sensations, for lots of mental information is coming in at the same time. And so we select things, block some things out, highlight others, to create the story of our mind, our sense of what’s going on in here. And there’s ignorance underlying it all. What we’re trying to do here is to replace that ignorance with clear knowing. This is why we bring the mind to the present moment: so we can watch this process as it ...

"The mind needs a purpose. Otherwise, it begins to blur out or to start looking for entertainment on the side. So there’s the purpose in getting the mind to settle down and there’s a purpose in using the sense of well-being, the sense of concentration, to set your mind on getting some understanding about how you’re creating suffering, and how you don’t have to. This is the purpose. It’s what gives meaning to the meditation — just as in our lives in general, we have to have a sense of purpose, a sense that we’re making choices, and our choices have some impact on our experience. And we can learn how to control that. So you’re going to control your attention and your intentions to try to understand, “What do I do that’s causing suffering?” And here the word “suffering,” dukkha, can spread from heavy suffering to very light." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Take Nothing for Granted"

"I was just listening yesterday to a French Dhamma teacher saying that mindfulness is all about just being totally present to everything that’s coming into your senses all at once. Well, what’s coming into your senses all at once is not causing you to suffer. What’s causing you to suffer is your own actions, which is why the Buddha says to focus there — on what you’re doing. Be alert to what you’re doing." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Mirror Inside"