Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"This is one of the purposes of doing meditation to begin with — to see how much of our experience we’re fabricating. We’re fabricating a lot more than we think. “Fabricating” here doesn’t mean that you’re lying, it simply means that you’re creating things, jerry-rigging things together, to make some sense out of your experience, or to get something out of your experience. But the way you jerry-rig can carry lots of problem with it. A lot of things that bother us in life are not simply “givens.” We’ve taken some raw material from our past karma and have shaped it into something oppressive. That’s the kind of pain that the Buddha is focusing on — the pain that comes from craving." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Fabrication of Pain"

"A lot of people think, “Well, as long as I want something that’s really good, I can do whatever I want to get it.” In other words, the ends justify the means. But the Buddha said, “No, the means have to be good, too.” After all, that’s all there is in samsara — means, the things we do. The only thing that gives you permanent, unchanging well-being is nibbana, and that’s beyond ends and means. You take that as your goal, and then when you’ve arrived, you no longer have any need for goals. But to get there, the means have to be good as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Strong Through Admirable Friendship"

"We often think of mindfulness simply as being fully aware of the present moment but it actually means the ability to keep something in mind. As the Buddha defined it, it’s the ability to remember things that were said or done long ago — and in particular, things that you  said and did long ago. This is so that when the results come, you can recognize, “Oh, this is connected to that. This happened because of this action I took. I said that, now my mind is a mess. I said that a couple of hours ago but my mind is a mess now.” Or, “I did that a while back and now my mind’s in good shape.” If you can’t see these connections, you don’t really have true insight. The insight lies in seeing cause and effect. After all, when the Buddha summarized the insight of his awakening, he boiled it down to a causal principle, the ability to see the connections: When one thing arises it causes something else to arise, either right now or down the line. When it passes away it causes the other thing t...

"There’s that paradox that we so often encounter when we chant before the meditation: First are the contemplations of aging, illness and death, inconstancy, stress, not-self; thinking about how the things that we tend to identify with as us or ours, really aren’t us or ours, and ultimately, lie beyond our control. And we live in a world that’s swept away, with no protection. Whatever we have we will have to leave behind, and yet we’re still a slave to craving: All of that on the one hand. Then on the other hand, the chant: “May I be happy.” It sounds so wistful in face of all those other contemplations of how things are. It sounds pretty hopeless, but the Buddha didn’t teach us to be hopeless. When he pointed out the negative side of the world, it wasn’t just to say, “Okay, give up hope all ye who have been born here.” It was to help us realize that the things we’ve been contenting ourselves with for so long are not really worth contentment, but there is something better — and t...

"This is another reason why the Buddha taught rebirth: as one of our motivations for practicing and for being really strict with ourselves as we practice. After all, some cravings and clingings in the mind appear at first glance to be no problem at all. They don’t seem to be affecting anybody else. We’re okay with them. But if you think about the fact that these cravings are creating not only your identity now, but also the world into which you’re going to be reborn, you realize that they’re dangerous. It’s like tuning your radio: It’ll connect with whatever’s on that particular frequency: hard rock or Beethoven or the ravings of some lunatic. Are your cravings on the frequency of the kind of world you’d really want to create and inhabit long-term? Sensual passion is the worse offender, because all of the worlds of intense suffering and conflict are on the frequency of sensual passion. Are those worlds you’d want to inhabit long-term?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "...

"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 ...

 "When Westerners went over to Thailand to study with the great ajaans, they often found they had problems with the heat, the bugs, and the general hardships. The ajaans would teach them a lot about equanimity and patience — so much so that, in some cases, that seemed to be the only message that got through. This may be why we sometimes hear craving, the cause of suffering, defined as wanting things outside to be different from what they are — the implication being that if you accept things as they are, and are okay with things as they are, then you’re not going to suffer. All you need is some contentment, some patience, some equanimity. But when the Buddha explained craving, it was something much deeper than that. The equanimity that comes from just accepting things in the senses the Buddha called worldly equanimity. It’s the lowest stage of equanimity, and there are two stages higher than that. There’s the equanimity that comes from getting the mind into good concentration and t...

"This is one of the purposes of doing meditation to begin with — to see how much of our experience we’re fabricating. We’re fabricating a lot more than we think. “Fabricating” here doesn’t mean that you’re lying, it simply means that you’re creating things, jerry-rigging things together, to make some sense out of your experience, or to get something out of your experience. But the way you jerry-rig can carry lots of problem with it. A lot of things that bother us in life are not simply “givens.” We’ve taken some raw material from our past karma and have shaped it into something oppressive. That’s the kind of pain that the Buddha is focusing on — the pain that comes from craving." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Fabrication of Pain"

"Karma, what people do, in the present moment, this is one thing you can know directly. You can know directly what you’re doing. When you focus the mind, you know you’re focusing the mind. When the mind settles down, you know it’s settling down. When the mind wanders off, you know it’s wandering off. These are things you really know here and now. When you experience suffering, you know. When you experience a lack of suffering, you know. So those are the two issues the Buddha focused on: the feelings of suffering and the knowledge of actions. The second knowledge suggested that there was a connection between the two, so the Buddha decided to see if this was true. These two are very certain things. When you’re suffering, no one can convincingly tell you, “That’s not really suffering; you’re not suffering.” Other things you might know can be shaped by the rules of the languages you’ve learned, but your experience of suffering is pre-linguistic. You know it more directly...

Question: Can you form the hope to be welcomed at the moment of death, the grand passage, with “people” you’ve loved or the “people” for whom you may have some devotion or teachers who have put us on the path of the Dhamma? I have lots of gratitude for these “persons.” Thanissaro Bhikkhu: There’s no need to put the word “person” or “people” in quotation marks. There is the belief sometimes that the Buddha teaches that there are no persons, but actually, he teaches that there are persons as long as there’s the process of becoming. We keep on taking on the identity of people, of persons, through our attachments and clingings as we go from life to life to life. It’s only when you reach nibbāna that you go beyond being a person. Now, the question concerns the hope for being welcomed by the people you love or to whom you’re devoted: You have to be careful, because sometimes the people you have loved are not in really good destinations. They may have gone to a lower destination. If you tel...

"You have to have confidence in the principle of action — that it can have an impact on your suffering. You’re not just a victim. You can come out victorious. After all, that’s what the images of the path often say: unexcelled victory. Victory over what? Over our ignorance, over our craving, over all our foolish tendencies. Our ways of looking for happiness that don’t really work out but we keep doing them again and again and again." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reflecting on Karma"

"One of the really fine things about Buddhism is that it was founded by someone who knows what it’s like to make a mistake. Even in his last lifetime, the Buddha made a huge mistake — six years of tormenting himself. And all those previous lifetimes! You look in the Jātaka stories and it’s not as if the Buddha was always perfect. He was making mistakes and having to learn from them. So unlike a religion that’s supposedly founded by a God who’s never been a human being, who’s never had to admit a mistake, the Buddha knows what it’s like to make a mistake and to have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and move on. Those instructions he gave to Rāhula are really useful in this regard. He said that if you see you’ve made a mistake, admit the mistake, talk it over with someone else, and then simply resolve not to repeat that mistake. You don’t have to carry the guilt around with you, just the memory that that was a mistake. Then you move on. The Buddha gave similar instructions to...

"It is possible, even as the body weakens with age, to accomplish great things in strengthening the mind’s tendency to form and act on skillful intentions. Given that the skillfulness of your intentions will determine how well you face illness and death, the best investment of your energy is acting in skillful ways that will help you in that regard. So it’s not wise to compose a bucket list of last-minute sensory pleasures to cram into what little time remains before you go. Instead, your bucket list should focus on the goodness you can create in your thoughts, words, and deeds. This goodness includes two sorts of qualities: general qualities, such as conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment that will create the conditions for a good rebirth; and specific meditative skills, which will be needed to master craving at the moment of rebirth." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Undaunted: The Buddha’s Teachings on Aging, Illness, Death, & the Deathless"

"[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...

"All too often, the Buddha’s teachings on karma are viewed as a holdover from his culture — that without really thinking, he just picked up an assumption that everybody else shared and tacked it on to his teaching. The reason people say this is because they don’t want to have to take on the teaching in karma — which is a shame, because it’s central to the Buddha’s teaching. As he said, it’s the beginning of right view, and it’s totally in line with his teachings on the four noble truths. If you check through the Canon, you find there are only two sets of teachings that he says are categorical, in other words, true across the board. One is the distinction between skillful and unskillful action — the word here is “karma” — and the fact that skillful actions should be developed, and unskillful ones abandoned. The other categorical teaching is the four noble truths. And the two teachings are connected. Craving is an unskillful action because it leads to suffering; all the other factor...

"The Buddha said a teacher’s first responsibility to his students is to give them a sense that there are some things that should be done, and other things that should not be done. There were people in his time who taught that everything you experience right now is either the result of past action or the result of the will of a creator God or it’s totally random. In each of those cases, he said, you’re leaving people defenseless, unprotected, bewildered. He uses that word “bewildered” as our normal reaction to suffering. You’re leaving people bewildered because you give them no idea of how to escape from the suffering they’re experiencing right now. You give them no basis even for thinking that there is such a thing as what should be done and what should not be done. After all, if everything you experience is based on past actions, then you could be a killer of living beings, you could be a thief, you could engage in breaking any of the five precepts, and you couldn’t do anything a...

"Karma, what people do, in the present moment, this is one thing you can know directly. You can know directly what you’re doing. When you focus the mind, you know you’re focusing the mind. When the mind settles down, you know it’s settling down. When the mind wanders off, you know it’s wandering off. These are things you really know here and now. When you experience suffering, you know. When you experience a lack of suffering, you know. So those are the two issues the Buddha focused on: the feelings of suffering and the knowledge of actions. The second knowledge suggested that there was a connection between the two, so the Buddha decided to see if this was true. These two are very certain things. When you’re suffering, no one can convincingly tell you, “That’s not really suffering; you’re not suffering.” Other things you might know can be shaped by the rules of the languages you’ve learned, but your experience of suffering is pre-linguistic. You know it more directly...

"When the Buddha talked about rebirth, what distinguished his teaching from everybody else in his time was that he never tried to define what it was that took rebirth. That was how people at the time decided whether rebirth happened or not: They said you are x, and either x was something that was going to die with the body or else it might not die with the body. So they reasoned things out. But the Buddha never tried to define what you are. After all, it’d be something for which you were not responsible — if this were what you already were made of and you willy-nilly would or would not get reborn. Instead, he taught that rebirth is a choice that you make, and it’s a process, a series of processes shaped by your choices. The big processes are craving and clinging. If you can’t get any control over your craving and clinging, then rebirth is going to be very difficult. It could lead you in all kinds of directions. Because at the moment of death — when the body is weak, the mind is fr...

"Mindfulness of death prepares you to find the deathless. It depends on remembering that we’re not simply aware of the fact that death is going to happen, but we also have a particular take on how it’s going to happen: the Buddha’s instructions on how to anticipate what’s going to happen. The mind will be swept along by its cravings depending on its kamma, the kamma you do as you go through the day and the kamma you’re doing as you approach the moment of death. Your daily habits, your meditative skills — these are the things that will determine whether you suffer or not. This way, you’re prepared emotionally, but you’re also prepared in terms of the skills you’ll have to bring to bear. When you approach mindfulness of death from this perspective, then you’re going to get the most out of it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mindfulness of Death" (Meditations11)

"Belief in the principle of rebirth helps to counteract one common reason for fearing death: the fear that death means total annihilation. The Buddha affirms that as long as there’s still craving in the mind, you’ll continue to have opportunities to pursue happiness even after death. In other words, if you want to be reborn, you will. At the same time, if you’re afraid that death will separate you from those you love and those who love you, the Buddha offers reassurance that loved ones who want to meet again after death will do so if they develop, in common, four qualities: conviction, virtue, generosity, and discernment. Still, repeated rebirth is at best an iffy proposition. To begin with, even if you don’t want to be reborn, you’ll still have to take rebirth as long as there is ignorance and craving in the mind. And as for hoping to meet again with your kin and loved ones, how many of them can be relied on to develop right view and maintain it all the way through death? The nu...