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"

"I think a large part of the problem is that many people come to Buddhism having had their first spiritual experience with drugs. The nature of a drugged spiritual experience is pretty passive. It’s all about acceptance. Just let go, and everything’s really already wonderful. That may be good when you’re on drugs, but we can’t live that way. We can’t function that way. We’re acting in the world. We have to realize that the mind is not passive. When you start being passive like that, you can do it only for a little bit of time. Then you’ve got to get active again. Look what happens to people who are hooked on drugs. Anything! They’ll do anything in order to get that drugged experience again. This is where the ugly side of the eating nature of the mind shows itself, when you look for your happiness based on something that’s impermanent like that. You have to realize that the Buddha’s vision begins with something utterly different: realizing the importance of your actions. We’re all ...

"Here we’re meditating on what the mind is doing, because what the mind is doing is going to make all the difference between suffering and not. What you’re doing right now is shaping your experience right now, and if you’re not satisfied with what you’re experiencing right now, then, as they say, “If you don’t like the news, go out and make some of your own.” If you don’t like your experience now, you can change what you’re doing to shape it. Try to detect what you’re doing to shape your experience and change it for the better. This is why we meditate, because the source of all our actions, the source of all our experience, is the mind. So you’ve got to look at your mind. The best way to look at it is to get it into the present moment where it’s fabricating things. We use the breath as our topic because it’s right next to the mind and it’s our anchor in the present." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dispassion Isn’t Depression" (Meditations10)

"Your actions are what are real, that have the most reality. The world out there is not the issue. The world that you experience comes from your [intentional] actions [kamma]. Your actions are more solid, more powerful than your experience of earth, wind, water, fire, and all the other elements. That’s a pretty radical statement. This is why the Buddha keeps focusing back on what you’re doing right now because what you’re doing right now is the big shaping force in your experience." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "So Little Time" (Meditations8)

"In his effort to master kamma in such a way as to bring kamma to an end, the Buddha discovered that he had to abandon the contexts of personal narrative and cosmology in which the issue of kamma first presented itself. Both these forms of understanding deal in categories of being and non-being, self and others, but the Buddha found that it was impossible to bring kamma to an end if one thought in such terms. For example, narrative and cosmological modes of thinking would lead one to ask whether the agent who performed an act of kamma was the same as the person experiencing the result, someone else, both, or neither. If one answered that it was the same person, then the person experiencing the result would have to identify not only with the actor, but also with the mode of action, and thus would not be able to gain release from it. If one answered that it was another person, both oneself and another, or neither, then the person experiencing the result would see no nee...

Question: Kamma and Rebirth, second try. How does individual kamma migrate from this life to the next one? Is this a relevant question? If no, how can our next life be better if we don’t have the benefit of a kind of karmic legacy? Thank you, Ajaan, for clarifying this “critical” question. Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not a matter of migrating. Our kamma is actually what creates our experience of the next life — or rather, it supplies the raw material for our experience of the next life. When we leave this life and go to the next one, it doesn’t feel like we’re going someplace else. Just as we have a sense of our present life as “right here,” the next life will also have a sense of being “right here,” right at our consciousness. It’s like going from one dream to another. Even though the appearance of the location in the second dream is different from the location in the first, it still has a sense of happening “right here” just as the first one did. To give another examp...

"Everybody deserves compassion. Everybody deserves goodwill [mettā], empathetic joy. But again, it’s not so much what they deserve, it’s: What do you want to do with your life? How are you going to shape your experience? How do you want to shape the world around you? Give your goodwill as a gift, your compassion as a gift to others and to yourself. That’s a good way of shaping things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill & Karma"

"In dependent co-arising [paṭiccasamuppāda]: As we will see, present kamma consists of fabrication [saṅkhāra] and the sub-factors [perception, feeling, intention, contact, attention] coming under the factor of “name” in name and form [nāmarūpa] . Past kamma is the experience of the six senses [SN35:145], which comes after the factors of fabrication and name [SN12:2]. What this means in terms of our direct experience is that by the time we’re aware of sensory input, we’re already primed to experience it in a certain way. This fact can cause us a lot of trouble, but it also opens the way to free us from suffering. If suffering depends on the way we prime our minds, then if we prime them in a skillful way, we don’t have to suffer even when the input from the senses — past kamma — is bad." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"Oftentimes we see ourselves as the passive recipients of experiences: things come in the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body; thoughts come into the mind. And we tend to miss how much we’re doing right now to turn those experiences into suffering. The early Buddhists said that this point was the one where the Buddha’s teaching differed most radically from everything else that was available at the time: pointing to what you’re doing right now and the effects that it has right now. And also to the possibility for change. You don’t have to create that suffering for yourself. But first you have to see yourself doing it. Otherwise, it simply seems to be a part of what you’re receiving. Actually, a lot of what we experience in the present moment is what we’re doing right now. And yet we see it as something happening to us. As a result, we don’t see the opportunity for change. So when you look at experience, try to see that element of what you’re doing. Of course, to see yourself doing it, y...

"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)

"Our experience of the world is defined through our actions, our choices. Take that home and think about it quite a bit. It’s not that the world is imposed on us, willy-nilly. We’re looking for things, making choices, and in making choices, we develop our sense of the world, of what’s here and what’s over there. What comes first? What comes second? That’s how space and time are defined. So we’re defining space and time by our actions. When there’s no action, there’s no experience of space or time. The Buddha’s teachings are that radical." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Action & Result"

"The Buddha says that if you think there is a creator god who is responsible for the pleasure and pain you experience, you can’t really practice the Dhamma. You have to realize that the important issues are the things that you create. When you solve the issue of your own creations, then you’re done with the problem." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"[The Buddha] said that what you do right now can have an impact on what you’re experiencing right now. Your kamma coming in from the past is raw materials: the twigs and the branches. But what you’re doing right now makes a difference between whether the twigs and the branches just sit there on this side of the river or whether you tie them together and make them into a raft. Or worse than just sitting here, the worst thing, of course, is piling them up on your shoulder and carrying them around. You have the choice. When the Buddha points out that “Yes, your actions in the present moment, your thoughts, your intentions in the present moment do make a difference,” he’s giving you a real basis for deciding, that there is such a thing as what should be done and what shouldn’t be done. As he says, if you have a teaching that doesn’t even give you a basis for having the concept of what should and shouldn’t be done, you’re still left bewildered the way you were when you were a little ...

"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"

"We do have the power to exert control over our intentions right now. And our intentions do shape our experience of the world around us, the world inside us, at least to some extent: enough to make the difference between suffering and not suffering. What we’re experiencing right now is the result of past intentions, plus our current intentions, plus the results of our current intentions. Even though we may not have absolute control over things, and will ultimately have to let them all go, we do have some control over our actions now. And you want to make the most of that fact." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Limits of Control"

 "A proper understanding of kamma helps to correct the false idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well be equanimous and just leave them alone. When you catch yourself thinking in those terms, try to keep four principles in mind. First, remember that when you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions. They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting. Also, you have no idea what other seeds, what wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place. There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions. This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception: that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present is the current running balance in each person’s account. Actually, no ...

"Your actions are what are real, that have the most reality. The world out there is not the issue. The world that you experience comes from your [intentional] actions [kamma]. Your actions are more solid, more powerful than your experience of earth, wind, water, fire, and all the other elements. That’s a pretty radical statement. This is why the Buddha keeps focusing back on what you’re doing right now because what you’re doing right now is the big shaping force in your experience." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "So Little Time" (Meditations8)

"Feeling and perception have an effect on the mind, and the breath has an indirect effect on the mind through the feelings. How do you use these fabrications to gladden the mind? How do you use them to steady the mind? How do you use them to release the mind? In some cases, the Buddha says, you simply watch a particular defilement or a particular hindrance that’s weighing the mind down, and simply by your watching it, it goes away. Other times, as he says, you have to exert a fabrication to let go of a particular cause of stress. That can involve bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrications, which are directed thought and evaluation; and mental fabrications, which are feeling and perception. Now, all of this is to get you really sensitive to the process of fabrication. It’s not just a matter of things coming and going, arising and passing away. The mind has an intentional element in all of its experiences. Basically, you take the potential for, say, a form or a fee...

"If the Buddha saw that he was talking with people who didn’t have much experience with [generosity and virtue], sometimes he’d stop there. It’s a principle throughout the Canon that developing right view is not just a matter of thinking about right views. It’s also a matter of having some practical experience in putting them into practice, engaging in some of the actions the Buddha recommends. You can have mundane right view, but you’re not ready for transcendent right view [regarding the four noble truths] until you have some time spent in practicing right action, right speech, right mindfulness, and attempting right concentration. That way, right view is not just theory on its own, it’s theory augmented by practice. You begin to develop your understanding a lot more, because you begin to see that the benefits the Buddha is talking about are real." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Graduated Discourse"

"You probably know the story of how Devadatta tried to kill the Buddha. He rolled a rock down a mountain, hoping to crush the Buddha. Fortunately, the rock hit another rock that diverted it. But still, a sliver broke off from the big rock and pierced the Buddha’s foot, causing him a lot of pain. The texts tell us how, after the sliver was removed, the Buddha went to lie down and rest. Mara came to taunt him, accusing him of moping and being depressed and not facing pain like a real Buddha who apparently should get up and walk around even though he was in a lot of pain. The Buddha replied, “I’m not moping. I’m lying down out of sympathy for all beings.” We can take two lessons from that. The first is that when the body is sick, you look after it. You don’t try to prove that you’re able to deal with pain to the extent that you abuse the body. Lying down out of sympathy, the Buddha was preserving his strength so that he could help other beings. At the same time, that accusation that ...