Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"Desire for wealth, desire for power: These things can bring a lot of suffering and harm in their wake. And here the Buddha is offering you a totally harmless kind of food, a totally harmless kind of pleasure. Do you really love yourself? If you do, you’d go for the harmless. You’d avoid any kind of harm. As for lack of confidence in yourself, ask yourself, “Can I be with this breath?” Well, yes. “How about this breath?” Yes. In the beginning, content yourself with small victories. As the Buddha said, even just a finger-snap of the desire to be skillful is, in and of itself, meritorious. Sometimes we’re even afraid to want the path, because we’re afraid that we’d be committed to more than we can handle, and the part of the mind that’s not ready to be committed keeps pulling you back. But you can keep reminding yourself, “I’m not totally committed yet. I just want to think this thought: that it would be really good to find a path that puts an end to suffering, to find a path tha...

"So the general interconnectedness out there is not always a good thing. In fact, Interbeing is Inter-eating. We feed on one another. The types of connections that can be helpful, though, are the ones that we connect through our karma. In that chant we have about our actions: kammabandhu,  we are related through our actions. It’s through our choices that we’re connected with different people in different ways — which is one of the reasons why you want to be very careful about how you relate to others, how your actions have an impact on others. Try to create connections that are good. This is what generosity is for; it’s what virtue is for Meditation helps in this way as well. The stronger we are inside, the less we have to lean on others. The more clarity we bring to our own actions, the less we’re likely to harm others. And the greater sense of strength we have inside, the less we’re likely to do unskillful things. Because it’s usually through a sense of weakness or being threate...

Question: I’ve come to meditation to help me bear the atrocities of the world. What is awakening? Is it a moment of conscience when one embraces all the sorrows of the world, and in that case means hello to all sorrows or is it on the contrary a state of total forgetfulness and egotism, in that case it would be hello to guilt? So, which is it? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Neither. Remember the image of feeding. Ordinarily, we feed on the world, both physically and mentally, in order to gain happiness and maintain our identity as beings. But when you gain full awakening, the mind no longer needs to feed because it already has enough in terms of its own happiness. When you’ve reached that state, you can engage in the world without having to feed on it. You can help those whom you can help, and you don’t have to suffer in cases where you can’t help. In this way, you’re neither embracing the sorrows of the world nor are you running away from them. Instead you have a different relati...

"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...

"Ordinary happiness — the happiness of the body eating, sleeping, getting the things it wants — involves conflict because there are only so many resources in the world, and the fact that we need to eat and have clothing, shelter, and medicine means we’re a burden on the rest of the world. So that kind of happiness inevitably brings conflict, which is why the desire for release from all this is not a selfish thing. Now, we can’t release other people. The reason we’re tied up in this world of wandering on is because of our own lack of skillfulness. The same holds true for others: They’re tied up by their lack of skillfulness, too. We can learn to be skillful but we can’t make other people skillful. You can teach them how, but it’s up to them to want to do it, and it’s up to them to put in the necessary effort. So our first order of business in being kind to others and showing true goodwill is to develop our own skillfulness, because one way of encouraging other people to become skil...

"You notice as you read through the teachings of the ajaans, a huge percentage of the Dhamma talks are pep talks. Encouragement. It’s all too easy when you’re under difficult circumstances to think about how much better you’d like it to be this way or that way. But the ajaans are there to remind you to think about the good things you do have, not so much in terms of the material things, but in terms of good opportunities to practice. These opportunities don’t come if you’re spending all your time trying to become as wealthy as possible, or as famous as possible, or as powerful as possible. The good things of the mind come when you pare down your concern for material things, you pare down your concern for the world outside and your position in the world outside, and you focus more on what good qualities you can develop. Sometimes you develop these qualities in the context of society at large, and sometimes you develop them when you’re out in seclusion. But they are the real food fo...

Question: I’ve come to meditation to help me bear the atrocities of the world. What is awakening? Is it a moment of conscience when one embraces all the sorrows of the world, and in that case means hello to all sorrows or is it on the contrary a state of total forgetfulness and egotism, in that case it would be hello to guilt? So, which is it? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Neither. Remember the image of feeding. Ordinarily, we feed on the world, both physically and mentally, in order to gain happiness and maintain our identity as beings. But when you gain full awakening, the mind no longer needs to feed because it already has enough in terms of its own happiness. When you’ve reached that state, you can engage in the world without having to feed on it. You can help those whom you can help, and you don’t have to suffer in cases where you can’t help. In this way, you’re neither embracing the sorrows of the world nor are you running away from them. Instead you have a different relati...

"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...