Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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 six sense media (āyatana) are old kamma in that they themselves and many of the objects that impinge on them are products of past actions. However, this is not true of all the objects of the senses, for when a person does a present action, the action and its immediate results impinge on the senses as well. At the same time, one’s experience of the input from the senses goes through many stages of mental filtering, as some sensory contacts are highlighted or elaborated on, while others are ignored or suppressed. This filtering is a form of present kamma, too, which means that all kamma — past or present — is experienced through the agency of present kamma. Now, present kamma may often be influenced by past kamma, but it does not need to be. The mind can, if it wants to, make a break with old habits. A change in knowledge — new information, new standards of judging what is important and not — can lead to a change in one’s present decisions. This means that past k...

" “There is what is given.” This sounds perfectly obvious, but it had a special meaning in the time of the Buddha. For millennia, the brahmans had been preaching about the virtue of giving, especially when things were given to brahmans. In the texts of old brahmanical ceremonies for making merit for the dead, for example, there’s a part of the ceremony where the brahmans will address the bereaved and say, “We are speaking in the voice of your dead relatives: ‘Give to the brahmans!’” When the bereaved gave to the brahmans, the brahmans — again assuming the voice of the dead relatives — said, “Give more!” You can imagine the reaction that eventually developed. Over the centuries, there sprang up schools of contemplatives who said, in reaction, that there is no virtue in giving. One of their arguments was that people do not have free will, therefore even when they give things, it doesn’t mean anything because they had no choice in the matter. Another argument against the...

"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?”...

"For most of us, whatever was the last big danger we had to face, that’s the fear we’re prepared for. But a lot of other things could go wrong. 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...

"People have noted how ironic it is that in a teaching that emphasizes not-self we have some of the earliest spiritual autobiographies of the world. The Buddha, when talking about his quest for awakening spoke very much in terms of: This is what I did, and looking at what I had done and seeing that it hadn’t given the results I wanted, I tried something else. That’s the pattern. When you think of the issue in other terms, though, this way of speaking is not ironic at all because the Buddha’s main teaching was kamma: We suffer because of our actions, but we can find the end of suffering by understanding our actions — the actions that lead to suffering, and then the actions of the path to the end of suffering. That understanding is what opens the way. The Buddha’s autobiography shows the lessons he learned about action in the course of his awakening, and he tells his story to show how we can follow his example and learn from our actions, too. Now, in doing an action and learning fr...

"The six sense media (āyatana) are old kamma in that they themselves and many of the objects that impinge on them are products of past actions. However, this is not true of all the objects of the senses, for when a person does a present action, the action and its immediate results impinge on the senses as well. At the same time, one’s experience of the input from the senses goes through many stages of mental filtering, as some sensory contacts are highlighted or elaborated on, while others are ignored or suppressed. This filtering is a form of present kamma, too, which means that all kamma — past or present — is experienced through the agency of present kamma. Now, present kamma may often be influenced by past kamma, but it does not need to be. The mind can, if it wants to, make a break with old habits. A change in knowledge — new information, new standards of judging what is important and not — can lead to a change in one’s present decisions. This means that past kamma does not ...

 " “There is what is given.” This sounds perfectly obvious, but it had a special meaning in the time of the Buddha. For millennia, the brahmans had been preaching about the virtue of giving, especially when things were given to brahmans. In the texts of old brahmanical ceremonies for making merit for the dead, for example, there’s a part of the ceremony where the brahmans will address the bereaved and say, “We are speaking in the voice of your dead relatives: ‘Give to the brahmans!’” When the bereaved gave to the brahmans, the brahmans — again assuming the voice of the dead relatives — said, “Give more!” You can imagine the reaction that eventually developed. Over the centuries, there sprang up schools of contemplatives who said, in reaction, that there is no virtue in giving. One of their arguments was that people do not have free will, therefore even when they give things, it doesn’t mean anything because they had no choice in the matter. Another argument against the merit of ...

"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?” Because you...