Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"The general Western resistance to the concept of defilement is a serious obstacle to reaching the end of suffering and stress and to reaping the benefits of the practice along the way. In light of the first two facts — that defilement is a quality of actions measured by the extent to which they cause affliction — an unwillingness to accept the idea of defilement translates into an unwillingness to examine your own actions to see if they cause harm. This is a form of narcissism that makes it impossible to see the connection between the second and first noble truths. If you refuse to accept the idea that your thoughts, words, and deeds cause suffering, you won’t be able to see the sources of suffering coming from within the mind. In light of the third fact — that the brightness of the mind is its ability to recognize defilement and do something about it — an unwillingness to accept the idea of defilement translates into a willed ignorance around one’s own actions and their effects....

"It’s easy not to believe that the quality of your intention is going to determine the results of your actions, because you see a lot of people acting out of greed, hatred, and delusion, and yet they seem to be pretty happy, in the short term at least. So it is a matter of belief. And the Buddha’s proof simply is a pragmatic one: If you believe in your actions, you’ll act more skillfully. He adds that if you really want to put an end to suffering through your own efforts, this is what you have to believe. You have to take this as your working hypothesis." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Believe in Your Actions"

"The real basis for a sense of connectedness comes through kamma. When you interact with another person, a connection is made. Now, it can be a positive or a negative connection, depending on the intention. With generosity you create a positive connection, a helpful connection, a connection where you’re glad that the boundary is down, a connection where good things can flow back and forth. If it’s unskillful kamma, you’re creating a connection, you’re creating an opening that sooner or later you’re going to regret. There’s a saying in the Dhammapada that a hand without a wound can hold poison and not be harmed. In other words, if you don’t have any bad kamma, the results of bad kamma won’t come to you. But if you have a wound on your hand, then if you hold poison it will seep through the wound and kill you. Unskillful kamma is just that, a wound. It’s an opening for poisonous things to come in. The opposite principle also works. If there’s a connection of skillful beh...

"Of the various forms of wrong speech and wrong action, the Buddha regarded the telling of lies as the most serious and most destructive — perhaps because if you cause your listeners to misunderstand the truth, it can cause them to act unskillfully not only in this lifetime, but also in future ones as well. Furthermore, as he said in [Iti 25], if a person feels no shame at telling a lie, there is no evil that that person will not do." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Right Speech & Right Action"

"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"

"Before the Buddha left home, he had a vision. The world was like a dwindling stream. The water was drying up, drying up. There were fish stranded in the stream, and they were fighting one another over the water. Of course, some of them won out. But even those who won out were still going to die anyhow. That, the Buddha said, was the world. And in the battles that the fish had among one another, a lot of bad karma was made for no purpose at all. You look at the world around us right now. You can see it really is a fish-eat-fish world, where the big fish are trying to take everything they can for themselves and leave everybody else out. But then it’s not really theirs; they’ll have to leave it. So as the Buddha said, victory over others is nothing compared to victory over yourself — in other words, victory over your greed, your aversion, delusion. That victory, he said, once it’s attained, doesn’t leave you." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Fish-Eat-Fish World"

"It’s easy not to believe that the quality of your intention is going to determine the results of your actions, because you see a lot of people acting out of greed, hatred, and delusion, and yet they seem to be pretty happy, in the short term at least. So it is a matter of belief. And the Buddha’s proof simply is a pragmatic one: If you believe in your actions, you’ll act more skillfully. He adds that if you really want to put an end to suffering through your own efforts, this is what you have to believe. You have to take this as your working hypothesis." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Believe in Your Actions"

"In terms of distress with reference to the world, the number one issue that’s hardest to put down is the sense that you’ve been wronged. There’s a very strong sense of self that grows around that and a very strong sense that if you don’t keep that in mind, you’re going to miss out on some justice, so you’re the one who has to keep the issue alive. You have to realize that whether the wrong was deserved or not, it’s an issue that you have to chalk up to karma. You may have done something like that a long time ago. It’s so long ago that you’ve forgotten and it doesn’t seem right that something you’ve forgotten so long ago should come back and hit you, but that’s how karma works. Sometimes things take many lifetimes before they show up. So it’s not a case of whether you deserved it or didn’t deserve it. It’s simply that there was a cause and this was the result. And there’s no need to feel that you have to keep it in mind in order to have justice done, because again, karma will work...

"The first lesson of skillfulness is that the essence of an action [kamma] lies in the intention motivating it: an act motivated by the intention for greater skillfulness will give results different from those of an act motivated by greed, aversion, or delusion. Intention, in turn, is influenced by the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the act of attention to one’s circumstances. The less an act of attention is clouded by delusion, the more clearly it will see things in appropriate terms. The combination of attention and intention in turn determines the quality of the feeling and the physical events (“form”) that result from the act. The more skilled the action, the more refined these results will be." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Refuge in Skillful Action"

"We’re both the creator and the watcher: the creator and the audience of all the little plays or movies we create in the mind. And those movies can have a huge impact on us. This is where our actions come from. You visualize yourself doing something and then you decide whether it’s worth doing it or not. When you meditate, the question is, “How do you create that image? And is it a reliable image? And who’s doing the building? Who’s doing the deciding?” You want to get interested in this, because otherwise you’re just watching movies all the time. And it’s not an innocent process, because sometimes the movies will inspire you to do things you later regret. So you have to watch out. Think of yourself as being behind stage, instead of out in the audience. You get to see how the play is put on and you begin to see how artificial it all is. That helps you see through some of the illusion." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Behind the Scenes"

"The same goes for our actions: We’re not really paying attention to what we’re doing because we’re often thinking about what we’re going to do next. Or we think about what we want to get out of the action and we’re not really looking at what we’re doing. As for the results, again, sometimes we don’t like the results of our actions, so we close our eyes. This is why there’s so much delusion in our lives. When you first look at these three stages of action, it’s pretty disconcerting. You see all the different things in your mind that you really don’t like — all the unskillful voices, all the unskillful motives. This is why you want to get the breath as comfortable as possible so that you can put yourself in a good mood, feeling settled, at ease, so that you can see the mind’s negative states without getting sucked into them, without getting depressed by them, without getting upset: simply, “Oh, yes, there’s that, too.” " ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dealing with Confusion"

"These are important skills: learning how to recognize how you fabricate an emotion and how you do it unskillfully; and how you can deconstruct it and construct something more skillful in its place. It may sound artificial, but the whole process of constructing an emotion is artificial in the first place. It’s something fabricated. There’s an element of intention and, in many cases, the intentions have become so habitual that they seem automatic, because of the strength of the perceptions and the strength of the breath or that particular way of breathing around greed or aversion or delusion. You tend to think, “Well, this is what I really feel.” But it’s just a habit, and as with any habit, if you see that it’s harmful to you, harmful to the people around you, you want to learn how to undo it; replace it with other habits." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Deconstruct Your Emotions"

"The real basis for a sense of connectedness comes through kamma. When you interact with another person, a connection is made. Now, it can be a positive or a negative connection, depending on the intention. With generosity you create a positive connection, a helpful connection, a connection where you’re glad that the boundary is down, a connection where good things can flow back and forth. If it’s unskillful kamma, you’re creating a connection, you’re creating an opening that sooner or later you’re going to regret. There’s a saying in the Dhammapada that a hand without a wound can hold poison and not be harmed. In other words, if you don’t have any bad kamma, the results of bad kamma won’t come to you. But if you have a wound on your hand, then if you hold poison it will seep through the wound and kill you. Unskillful kamma is just that, a wound. It’s an opening for poisonous things to come in. The opposite principle also works. If there’s a connection of skillful behavior, a good...

"If you come to the meditation simply thinking, “What’s in it for me?” you won’t benefit much from the meditation. You’ve got to train yourself to say instead, “What’s in it for the whole mass of beings? To what extent can my meditation help them too?” At the very least, it gets you out of that feeding system. There’s at least one less mouth to be fed. In the meantime, you can be an inspiration. You can take refuge in the Sangha. It’s good to keep having members of the noble Sangha appearing in the world, so that it’s not just a matter of some story way in the past, the time of the Buddha or over there in Asia. When there are members of the noble Sangha appearing right now, that’s an inspiration to other meditators. So we’re not doing this just for ourselves. We’re doing it for everybody. If we can get to the point where we have less greed, aversion, and delusion, we’re not the only ones benefiting. Other people are suffering less from our greed, aversion, and delusion. If we ge...

"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"

"Realize that you don't have to straighten out the world before you're going to be able to gain Awakening or before you're going to be able to sit down and meditate. The principle of karma is at work here. Often, when people have made up their minds to straighten out the world, the things they do to straighten out the world tend to get very unskillful and they end up making things worse. They don't like other people's greed, anger, and delusion, yet in the course of trying to straighten them out, they inflict them with their own greed, anger, and delusion. They simply compound the problem. So your only responsibility to the world is to focus on doing what's skillful. That's all you have to take care of. As for the working out of everybody else’s karma, that will work out on its own without your having to get involved. Just make sure that your own present karma is skillful. One thing you can do that’s skillful right now is to allow the mind to settle dow...

"Sometimes we believe in the power of our actions and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we say, “I really hope that my actions give results,” other times you do something and you say, “Well, I hope this doesn’t give results.” You try to convince yourself that the law of karma is something you can turn on and off. But actions always give results, and the results are in line with the quality of the action, and particularly the quality of the intention behind the action. So if you want good results, you have to make sure that the intentions are good. If you want those good results to be consistently good, then you have to make sure your intentions are consistently good. Remind yourself that you have the choice: You don’t have to act on every intention that comes in the mind. Even though some of the unskillful ones based on greed, aversion, and delusion seem awfully strong, they don’t have to overwhelm the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Intentions in Line with Results...

" Lies are statements that intentionally misstate the facts of a case. The Vinaya’s discussion of its training rule against lying shows that the intention defining a lie here is not so much the intention to deceive as it is the intention to misrepresent the truth (Pc 1). The distinction is a fine one, but it’s important. In [AN 4:183], the Buddha states that there are cases where a truth should not be told if it gives rise to passion, aversion, and delusion in the speaker. This does not mean, however, that you can misstate the facts of the case in such instances. It simply means that you need not tell the whole truth about an issue. You avoid speaking about the facts that would provoke harm, even if this would cause your listener to misunderstand the situation. AN 4:73 provides an example relevant to this principle: To maintain your integrity, you speak as little as possible of your own good points and of the faults of other people." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Right Speech ...

"Conviction is conviction in the principle of karma. In other words, believing that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the intentions you act on. That conviction helps get rid of the delusion that somehow you can act in sloppy ways, or act in careless ways, or even act in evil ways, and not suffer the consequences. So many people think, “There must be some way you can get away with that kind of behavior.” And we often see examples of people who seem to have gotten away with it, but if you look at things over the long term, you realize they don’t get away with anything at all. Even as they’re doing that kind of behavior, there’s a lot of dishonesty, there’s a lot of discomfort in the mind that they’ll often deny and cover up. But that activity of denial is a form of suffering. And then, over the long term, there will be more bad results that come back. When we’re convinced of this, this is a strength because it enables us to make the effort to dev...

"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...