Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"As [the Buddha] saw, people would fare through the world up and down, based on their actions. Their actions were shaped by their intentions. Their intentions were shaped by their views. The way these things worked out was pretty complex, but the basic principle was simple: You act on skillful intentions, the result is happiness. You act on unskillful intentions, the result is suffering, pain. Of course, you look at your life, and it’s not the case that you do nothing but good actions, nothing but bad actions. There’s a mixture. But what’s important is that, as you go through life and you realize you’ve made mistakes, you admit the mistakes and you try to develop right view. Then your actions really do make a difference. Believing in that gives you the energy to try to do your best. There are people out there, just as there were people in the Buddha’s time, who say that you’re powerless. Either actions are not real at all, or even though they are real, they have no impact on shapi...

"When the Buddha discourages speculation about karma, he’s discouraging the kind of speculation that says, “Why did this particular event happen right here, right now, to me?” If you try to trace things back, you go crazy. Karma is very complex in its working out, but simple in its basic principle: that if you act on skillful intentions, you get good results; if you act on unskillful intentions, you get bad results. And you can learn how to make your intentions skillful by acting on the best intentions you can think of. When you find the results are not good, you talk it over with those who are more advanced on the path. You reflect on what you did, where it might be wrong, where there was some delusion even in your good intentions. That’s how you learn. This is what the Buddha taught to Rāhula and it applies all the way along the path. That’s the kind of thing you need to know about karma. ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Suffering Starts Before Life"

"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...

"One of the results of practicing the Dhamma to a high level is that the results of your past bad actions get weakened and weakened, and have less of an impact on the heart and mind. Think of the case of Angulimala. He had killed a lot of people, but the Buddha saw that he had potential. So, through his psychic powers, he was able to subdue Angulimala’s pride. Angulimala submitted and practiced the Dhamma under the Buddha until he became an arahant. A lot of people were not happy with this. They may have been the relatives of people who had been killed by Angulimala. So when he was on his alms round, they would throw things at him — stones, pieces of pottery — tearing his robes, breaking his bowl, sometimes gashing his head. He’d come back from his alms round all bloody, and the Buddha would say, “Bear up with it. This is much milder than it would’ve been if you hadn’t gained this attainment.” So it is possible to gain awakening even with bad kamma in your background. But that mea...

"Given that the principle of kamma is quite complex, the results may not come as quickly as we’d like. That’s where patience and maturity come in. If you’re patient about learning from your actions and learning from your results, and mature in having a good sense of humor about your mistakes, that’s when your focus is on target. So being focused on results is a really necessary part of the practice." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focused on Results" (Meditations9)

"Even with kamma, the Buddha said that if you ask, “Well, the fact that I’m suffering this right now or that right now: Exactly what kamma did I do in the past that caused that?” his advice would be, “Don’t go there.” If you tried to trace that back, he said, it could drive you crazy, because kamma is so complex. The important things to know are the basic principles. One is that if you do something with a skillful intention — i.e., one free from greed, aversion, and delusion — the result is going to be happy. If you do something with an unskillful intention, the result is going to be miserable. And there are gradations. And because you’re doing things all the time, you’ve got lots of kamma. Another thing he has you realize is that the fact you’re a human being means that you’ve got both good and bad kamma. And it’s also important to realize that not everything you’ve done shows up right now. There’s a mistaken belief that we have one kamma account and that what we see right now ...

"We were talking this afternoon about ethics, of how our actions have an impact on other people and how that might in turn have an impact on still other people and ripple out that way. When you try to track down the ripples you go crazy. The Buddha once said pretty much the same thing. If you try to track down the results of action, the results of karma in all their ramifications, you would go crazy because it’s so complex. But, he said, there’s a way of cutting through that complexity so that you actually can make choices. And that’s to focus on your own intentions. Make sure that your intentions are skillful. You can check them by looking at what you do and then looking at the results that come about. At the very least, make sure there’s as little greed, anger, and delusion as possible in your intentions. The impact of your actions will have to be a good impact. Whether you’ve worked out all the channels through which that impact is going to go — and of course you can’t work thr...

"Reflection on karma is often useful as well. There are certain issues in life where we feel that we’ve been unjustly treated, and it’s good to remember that karma has been going on for a long, long time. And the back and forth that we’ve had with one another has been so, so long and so complex that there’s really nobody to keep tally. And it wouldn’t be worth it anyhow. Putting the individual events of your life into that much larger framework sometimes help take out a lot of the sting. You can step back from them and view them with a little bit of distance." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath Energies"

Question 25. Can the Buddha’s teachings on kamma be divorced from his teachings on rebirth? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Not really. If there were no life before birth, kamma would have no role in explaining pleasure and pain early in life. And as the Buddha said, many people are rewarded in this lifetime for doing unskillful things — he cited people who are rewarded for killing the enemies of a king, stealing from an enemy of a king, or telling a lie that entertains a king — and you can probably think of similar examples in modern business and politics [SN 42:13]. Sometimes the results of those unskillful actions don’t even show until many lifetimes later — because the causal principle underlying kamma is so complex [MN 136]. ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma Q & A, a Study Guide"

"It’s wise to take as working hypotheses the basic principles of kamma: Your actions are real. They come from your choices. They have results. Those results are determined by the intention behind the act. Those results follow patterns that shape both the present moment and the future, even beyond death. You can learn the patterns underlying actions and their results. Having learned the patterns, you are free to choose to change the way you act so as to get the results you want. A central principle of those patterns is that your present actions determine whether or not you will suffer from the results of past actions. And you can act in such a way that you can put an end to suffering — and to birth, aging, and death — altogether. If you don’t accept these principles, the path to the end of suffering is closed to you. If you do accept them and try them out in your actions, it’s open. Despite the complexity of kamma, the choice is as simple as that." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "K...

"To begin with, every act has repercussions in the present moment together with reverberations extending into the future. Depending on the intensity of the act, these reverberations can last for a very short or a very long time. Thus every event takes place in a context determined by the combined effects of past events coming from a wide range in time, together with the effects of present acts. These effects can intensify one another, can coexist with little interaction, or can cancel one another out. Thus, even though it is possible to predict that a certain type of act will tend to give a certain type of result — for example, acting on anger will lead to pain — there is no way to predict when or where that result will make itself felt [MN 136]. The complexity of the system is further enhanced by the fact that both causal principles meet at the mind. Through its views and intentions, the mind takes a causal role in keeping both principles in action. Through its sensory powers, it...

"That’s what the teaching of karma’s all about: There are choices here. And the complexity of karma is what gives us our hope, that even though some bad things may be coming up in the mind right now, there’s also a potential for goodness in their someplace. There are the seeds that have been planted someplace. So you want to look for those." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Potentials for Good"

"[The Buddha] listed four inconceivables — topics that lay beyond the range of an ordinary person even to speculate about in a healthy way. In the words of the passage, these topics “would bring madness & vexation to anyone who conjectured about them.” They are: the Buddha-range of the Buddhas the jhāna-range of a person in jhāna the results of kamma conjecture about the cosmos. The inclusion of the first two items in the list serves notice that the Buddha was not putting himself in the position of an ordinary person speculating about these matters. There was much that he knew through direct knowledge — through mastering jhāna and becoming a Buddha — that he did not have to speculate about. Thus, although the entire list lies beyond the range of healthy speculation, it tells us that we cannot know the range of the Buddha’s own knowledge of these things. The inclusion of the third item in the list, the results of kamma, may come as a surprise, given the care with which the Budd...

"The Buddha once said that the results of action are an imponderable, which may sound strange given that his teaching on action is so basic to all his other teachings. The main principle is simple: You do, or say, or think something with a skillful intention, and the results are going to be good; you do, or say, or think something with unskillful intentions, and the results are going to be bad. That’s simple — but the problem is that that simple principle gets iterated many, many, many times. And that makes its results complex. How many times in the course of the day have you done something, or said something, or thought something? You can’t count all the actions, and that’s just in one day. And it spreads out over lifetimes. You begin to realize that you’ve got a lot of things going on here. Some of the actions will give results quickly; others will give them slowly. Others are ready to give the results, but you’re not watering them, so they don’t give the results. ...

"You watch yourself in action. And this, of course, starts with the Buddha’s instructions to Rahula. I know a lot of people who’ve commented they really wished that their parents had been like the Buddha, teaching them the way the Buddha taught Rahula. He’s basically saying to try to avoid mistakes, but if you find that you’ve made a mistake, this is what you do so you don’t have to make it again — probably some of the most valuable advice you can get. If you’re planning to do something, ask yourself, “What have been the results of my doing this in the past?” If doing it led to harm, you say, “Nah, I don’t want to do that again.” That’s a skillful decision. The Buddha here is teaching compassion. But he’s also teaching you to remember your actions. It’s a training in mindfulness and the ability to see connections: “I did x, and y happened as a result.” We don’t always see those connections, either because we don’t want to see, or because the cause and the effect were separated ...

"A lot of our problem with kamma is that we don’t have a sense of how to relate to it in an emotionally positive way. But when you think about it in terms of gratitude and generosity, you realize that this power we have to make choices is important. It’s to be valued. You want to protect it. You want to train it. As for the knowledge that we’ve done unskillful things in the past, the Buddha said the proper way of thinking about that is that as soon as you realize it’s unskillful, you make up your mind you’re going to refrain from it, you’re not going to make that mistake again. That’s it. As he says, feelings of remorse over the mistake, strong feelings of guilt, the feeling you see in a dog when it knows it’s done something wrong, gets on its back, and wags its tail, hoping you’ll forgive it: That’s not the kind of reaction the Buddha advocates. Because if you let remorse take over, then you feel more negative about yourself, and because you don’t like these negative feelings, th...

"Remember the Buddha’s analysis of what a world is: your six senses. And remember that samsara is not a place. It’s an activity. It’s made out of your actions. That’s where the danger lies — in your actions — but it’s also where the promise lies. If we were just physical things defined by the world, there’d be no way we could use the processes of the physical world to get out of the physical world. But because the world is made of our actions, we can use the processes of actions to get out of this web of actions that we’ve woven for ourselves. This is where the fact of the complexity of kamma actually works to our advantage. It does have a disadvantage in that often we’re very confused as to what’s going to be helpful. Something looks good and looks okay and we do it and then we find out quite a while later that it wasn’t good at all in the long term. But the complexity of kamma also gives us freedom of choice. And we have the Buddha and we have the Dhamma to give us some basic in...

"Given that the principle of kamma is quite complex, the results may not come as quickly as we’d like. That’s where patience and maturity come in. If you’re patient about learning from your actions and learning from your results, and mature in having a good sense of humor about your mistakes, that’s when your focus is on target. So being focused on results is a really necessary part of the practice." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focused on Results" (Meditations9)

"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 also shows how hi...

"You learn from your actions — that’s why we’re focused on our actions and on their results. Given that the principle of kamma is quite complex, the results may not come as quickly as we’d like. That’s where patience and maturity come in. If you’re patient about learning from your actions and learning from your results, and mature in having a good sense of humor about your mistakes, that’s when your focus is on target." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focused on Results" (Meditations9)