Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"You want to look at the attitudes you’re fostering in your mind and make sure they’re skillful ones — because the whole issue of kamma boils down to this: What you do right now is important. What was done in the past may have some influence on what you can do right now, but what you do right now is what’s really important. And the possibility of doing something skillful right now is always present." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Story-telling Mind" (Meditations1)

"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"

"If you don’t have any mindfulness — i.e., if you can’t remember what you did — you’re not going to be able to figure out how this feeling of pain or this feeling of pleasure is related to actions you did a while back and have forgotten about. So you try to keep in mind what you’ve been doing. If you see any suffering coming up in your experience, try to trace it back. “What action is this related to? What kind of attitude is this related to?” The fact that there’s pain in the body is a normal part of life, but the fact that there’s a pain in the mind is unnecessary. It doesn’t have to be there. So what’s causing the pain in the mind? If you can trace it back to an action — physical, verbal, or mental — then you’ve got a handle on things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Virtue Contains the Practice" (Meditations6)

"When people who are enjoying good fortune abuse that good fortune — say, using their power to create war and mayhem in the world — you can’t wish for them to lose their good fortune. A more skillful attitude would be to wish that they would see the error of their ways and then use their good fortune for greater good." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sublime Determinations: a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras with the Sociedade Vipassana de Meditação BrasÍlia"

"For most of us, a lot of the interest in the stories coming up in our lives is about the injustices, the feeling that something hasn’t been settled, something hasn’t been brought to closure. But when you realize it’s part of a long, long, long mudslinging battle through the many lifetimes, it gets less and less and less interesting. Less and less worthy of anger. Some people say, “That means you’re saying that the victim is responsible for his or her suffering.” Well, what’s wrong with that? What’s really wrong with that is what people tend to make out of it, which is the belief that if someone did something bad in a previous lifetime, then they deserve to get what they’re getting now, so you don’t have any compassion for them. That’s the wrong response. As I said, everybody here in the human realm has some bad karma. If you reserve your compassion only for good people, who are you going to have compassion for? Only people who have no bad actions in their past? There would be nob...

"[The Buddha] recommends assuming that the law of kamma is 24/7. It’s not like a traffic law, for instance, where no parking is allowed on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but you can park all you want on other days of the week. All too often we have the attitude that the effects of kamma should bend to our will. In other words, with some actions we tell ourselves, “I hope this action has a result,” but with others we like to tell ourselves, “I hope this won’t have a result. It doesn’t matter.” But the Buddha says that you have to take on the basic assumptions of kamma consistently if you want to follow the path consistently. In other words, skillful actions lead to good results and unskillful actions lead to unpleasant results. Always." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind"

"We often hear that the Buddha taught that past karma totally shapes the present moment. You hear it again and again: what you’re experiencing now is the result of past karma, what you’re doing now will shape things in the future. But the Buddha actually attacked that view. He said instead that what you do right now can shape right now. He said that if you don’t believe that, you’re left unprotected. In other words, whatever comes up, you just have to accept. You have to just sit with it. And it sometimes can be pretty bad. He’s basically teaching you that you can change things: Change your attitude to what you’re doing, change the way you breathe, change the way you talk to yourself, and it’ll change what you’re experiencing. You can change it so well that you can end up not suffering at all, even from really bad things coming from the past. That was the good news of the Buddha’s awakening." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Acceptance"

"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"

"Muditā [empathetic joy] is an attitude you extend not only to the results of skillful actions — which is what the happiness is — but also to the skillful actions themselves. When you see someone else doing something meritorious, and maybe you’re not able to do it yet, if someone’s further along in their meditation or they’re able to be more generous, whatever, you learn not to resent that. You appreciate it. And that appreciation in itself becomes part of your own merit." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Empathetic Joy"

"Equanimity is sometimes taught with a defeatist attitude. A defeatist attitude says, basically, that there’s no lasting happiness to be found in the world, so you might as well give up trying to find it. Just learn to accept things as they are and don’t hope for them to be better than what they are. When you give up on your search for happiness, you can be equanimous and content with what you’ve got. That, as I said, is a defeatist attitude. It’s equanimity tinged with regret, disappointment, and a sense of powerlessness. It’s heavy and narrow, a contentment found by lowering your standards for satisfaction. We bow down to the Buddha, though, because he actually has us raise our standards for satisfaction, to accept nothing less than the ultimate happiness. There’s nothing defeatist in his attitude at all. In fact, he called the noble eightfold path the path to victory: You can find a happiness that’s not subject to aging, illness, and death, that’s totally free of s...

"When the Buddha discusses how people arrive at reconciliation, it’s when someone in the relationship has done something wrong, admits  that they did something wrong, and they’re willing to try not to repeat that mistake: That’s how you can have a reconciliation. And in this way, we’re reconciling ourselves — with our own behavior — all the time, if we have that attitude. It’s one of the reasons why the Buddha said it wasn’t that he was arguing with the world, it was the world that argued with him. He was constantly reconciling himself to what he’d done wrong so that he’d be in a position to learn. So if you can reconcile yourself with your mistakes, it shows that you’re open to reconciliation with the rest of the world. Now, whether they want reconciliation or not is their issue. But you can do your part all the time." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Admit Your Stupidity"

"So we’re not just here to accept whatever comes up on the kammic screen. We’re here to see what’s wrong with what we’re doing and how we can change what we’re doing so that we can do it better. That’s what the four noble truths are all about. If you think of the three characteristics as being the Buddha’s most important teachings, they do tend to point you toward equanimity, in the sense that “Well, I’ve just got to accept that things are inconstant, stressful and not-self. I can’t get a permanent happiness, so I’ve got to accept, be content with whatever I can get.” That’s a very defeatist attitude. Remember, the four noble truths are the basic teaching. They point out that you’re doing something wrong, but you’re going to learn how to do it right. The Buddha says that learning how to do it right is the unexcelled victory. There are going to be some battles. There’s going to be some fighting. So you need strength, but you also need intelligence, the kind of intelligence that thi...

"You start thinking about the well-being of all beings. It takes you out of your narrow concern with your own sense of being pained by something. Think of all the beings in the world: A lot of people out there are suffering right now. So when you’re suffering the results of bad kamma, you’re not the only one. This thought helps to take a lot of the sting away. The Buddha gave a good example of this when he was injured by Devadatta. Devadatta rolled a rock down the mountain, hoping to crush the Buddha. The rock was turned off course by another rock. The rock shattered, some of the stone slivers shot out, and one of them went through the Buddha’s foot. So they had to get the stone sliver out, and then he had to rest. Mara came along to taunt him: “What are you doing, you sleepyhead? Are you moping around because of what happened?” And the Buddha said, “No. I’m lying down here with sympathy and goodwill for all beings.” That included the people who tried to injure him. In that way,...

Question 11. If hurting others tends to lead to illness in the next lifetime, is illness in this lifetime always the result of past kamma? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: As with every other experience of pain, illness can come from a wide variety of kammic factors, past and present. You’ve already noticed this yourself: When you intentionally stick your finger in a fire, the resulting pain doesn’t come from an action in your previous lifetime. It comes from a choice you made here and now. The Buddha himself argued against the idea that all pain comes from past kamma, and in the course of his argument he provided a list of other factors that could give rise to illness. The list comes from the medical beliefs of his day, and although it includes a lot of other causes besides past kamma — things like a chemical imbalance in the elements in the body, the change of the seasons, or poor care of the body — all the causes included in the list come under what, in another discourse, he ident...

"Even though you may have done a lot of unskillful things in the past, you do have your skillful potentials. And it’s up to you to decide which past actions are the important actions in your life story. We all have a mixed bag in the past. You can think about this as if someone were writing your life story. And if you decide to stick with the skillful path, that means that the skillful qualities you had in the past are the important ones. If you stray away from the skillful path, that means the unskillful qualities, the unskillful things you did in the past are the important ones. So as you shape the present, you’re not only shaping the present, but also highlighting different things in your past. So why not highlight the good things? If you find yourself focusing on the bad ones, remind yourself, “At least I had some good qualities in the past and those are the ones that eventually won out. At least they are winning out right now.” If a part of your mind retorts, “W...

"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...

“We suffer [householder] grief and so we look for [householder] joy in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. When we don’t get what we want, that brings more grief, but we turn around to look for joy in the same places. What the Buddha wants us to do is to turn our attention to what he calls renunciate grief, renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity. Renunciate grief is when you reflect on how you haven’t attained what you want in terms of freeing the mind from suffering. You haven’t reached the goal of the path. Renunciate joy is the joy that comes when you have  reached the goal. And then renunciate equanimity is the peace and equanimity that come when you know the path is completed. One of the Buddha’s most interesting tactics is that when we suffer from householder grief, the way to get ourselves above and beyond that is to try to transform it, not into householder joy, but into renunciate grief. Householder grief and joy, he says, don’t provide u...

"So the Buddha recommends that you develop an attitude of goodwill [mettā] for all beings, both because it counteracts the effects of bad actions in the past, and because it prevents you from acting on unskillful intentions now and into the future. If you really feel goodwill for all, there’s no way you can intentionally harm them. You don’t have to like all beings; you simply decide that you don’t want to cause them suffering. You don’t want to take pleasure in their suffering. As you think about it, what good do you get out of other people’s suffering? You don’t gain anything at all. There may be a sense of schadenfreude,  but that’s pretty miserable food for the mind. It’s better to realize that if all the cruel and heartless people in the world had a true sense of happiness, they wouldn’t do cruel and heartless things anymore. So the desire for goodwill sets your attitude straight on how the world would actually become a better place for everyone: You’re wishing that people w...

"People tend to be pretty lax in their own behavior, but they have very strong demands for what other people should do. This is why we can’t get along. On the other hand, if you have strong ideas about what you  should be doing, realizing that this is where your happiness lies, then it’s a lot easier to have equanimity with regard to other people — patience, endurance. As the Buddha said, if you develop these qualities, it’s beneficial for other people and it’s good for you, too. That’s because you’re going to need endurance, you’re going to need patience, you’re going to need equanimity in the training of your own mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Free from Fear"

"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"