Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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"

"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)

"For most of us, a lot of the interest in the stories coming up in our lives is about the injustices, the feeling that something hasn’t been settled, something hasn’t been brought to closure. But when you realize it’s part of a long, long, long mudslinging battle through the many lifetimes, it gets less and less and less interesting. Less and less worthy of anger. Some people say, “That means you’re saying that the victim is responsible for his or her suffering.” Well, what’s wrong with that? What’s really wrong with that is what people tend to make out of it, which is the belief that if someone did something bad in a previous lifetime, then they deserve to get what they’re getting now, so you don’t have any compassion for them. That’s the wrong response. As I said, everybody here in the human realm has some bad karma. If you reserve your compassion only for good people, who are you going to have compassion for? Only people who have no bad actions in their past? There would be nob...

"The distinction between skillful and unskillful provides an insightful explanation for the causes for good and evil behavior. This distinction is not limited to the values of any particular society, and it avoids the issue of whether beings are inherently good or bad. When people act in evil ways, it is because they lack skill in the way they think; when they think in skillful ways, they naturally will do good. Because skill is something that can be acquired, the way to goodness is open for all people who want to be good, no matter how badly they have behaved in the past. The Canon tells of people who had committed misdeeds and, upon realizing their mistakes, confessed them to the Buddha. The most striking instance was King Ajatasattu [DN 2], who had killed his father in order to secure his position on the throne. In spite of the gross nature of the deed, the Buddha approved of the king’s confession, and — instead of playing on any feelings of guilt the king might have had — enco...

"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...

"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"

"There was a German poet back in the 18th century who made a distinction between acting with grace and acting with dignity. Acting with grace is when you know what the right thing is and you’re inclined to do it. Your feelings push you in that direction. But then there are times when you know the right thing to do but it’s hard. It goes against your feelings. And yet you’re able to convince yourself to override your feelings and do the right thing. That’s an act with dignity. So have appreciation for the opportunities when you can  act with grace and use those opportunities to develop the strength of your mind. When the time comes that the right thing requires you to act with dignity, you’ll have the strength to do that as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Grace & Dignity"

"As the Buddha showed, the three characteristics — or rather, the three perceptions [stress, inconstancy, not-self] — should be applied only in certain times and certain places. There was once a young monk who was asked by a wanderer from another sect what the results of karma were and the monk said, “Stress.” Then he went back to the Buddha and asked him if he’d given the right answer and the Buddha said, “No. When asked about karma, you talk about how skillful karma leads to pleasure, how unskillful karma leads to pain.” Another one of the other monks piped up and said, “Well, wasn’t he thinking about the fact that all feelings are stressful?” And the Buddha replied, essentially, that was not the time or place for that teaching. So, an important part of strategy is knowing which teachings to use when. And not jumping the gun or trying to skip over things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Noble Warrior's Path" (Meditations8)

"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"

"To get our heads around the teaching on kamma, it also helps to get our heart around it. Have some positive feelings toward this teaching on kamma. It’s not there just to punish you. It’s there to offer you opportunities. It’s there to remind you that your actions are important. And even though you’ve done unskillful things in the past, you’ve got a new opportunity right now to do something skillful. And then again right now. Each right now." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Good Side of Kamma"

"There are three kinds of fabrication: bodily, verbal, and mental. On the large scale, that refers to bodily kamma, verbal kamma, and mental kamma as they give results in this lifetime and on into the next. But in the present moment, the three fabrications get boiled down to what leads to bodily, verbal, mental kamma on the large scale, and here the Buddha gives different definitions. Bodily fabrication is the in-and-out breathing. If you weren’t breathing, you couldn’t do anything physically. Verbal fabrication is directed thought and evaluation, how you talk to yourself: You direct your thoughts to a topic and you make comments about it. You may ask questions about it, and when you’ve thought in those ways, that’s when you open your mouth to speak. Finally, mental fabrications are perceptions and feelings: the labels you put on things, the feeling tones you have. These are the building blocks for all mental kamma." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "How to Change" (Meditation...

"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"

"You start out with mindfulness. The Buddha teaches you to be mindful of the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves. Why? So that you can be really clear on what your actions are and what the results are. If you’re concerned with other issues — as the Buddha says, “things in the world,” things that other people are doing — you miss what you’re doing. So you focus right here, get yourself in the present moment, not simply because the present moment is a good moment in and of itself, but because it’s the only place where you’re going to see your intentions in action." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Giving Rise to Discernment" (Meditations1)

"So keep your meditation a private affair. After all, the suffering you’re causing yourself is a private affair, something nobody else can see. Even when we live together day in and day out, each of us is making a lot of decisions that nobody else here will know. We may see some of the outside effects, but the actual experience of suffering — your suffering, your pain: You’re the only person who can feel it. And you’re the only person who can know which little decisions you make from moment to moment to moment. That’s what you want to learn how to observe. So try to develop your inner sensitivity as much as you can, so that you can make sure your decisions are going in the right direction. The intentional element here is to try to minimize suffering as much as possible." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Private Matter" (Meditations4)

 "We have this inbred difficulty of looking at our own actions, but that’s precisely what the meditation is: looking at your own actions. It’s not so much self-purification as action-purification. It requires that you see your intentions and the actions and their results. Often these are things we don’t like to look at. Sometimes it’s just simple dishonesty. Other times we don’t like to look at these things because we don’t know how to handle what we see. How can you look at your mistakes without getting all tangled up in self-hatred, self-frustration? This is where the right attitudes come in. Look at those instructions the Buddha gave to Rahula. He said that when you see an action that you’ve done has caused harm, you should feel shame and loathing — not shame and loathing for yourself, shame and loathing for the action. That’s an important distinction. Shame around the action means that you realize you’re a better person than that. You shouldn’t have done it. It doesn’t mean th...

"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)

"If you have goodwill [mettā] for yourself and goodwill for others, it’s a lot easier to act on skillful motives, to do skillful things. So how do you develop goodwill? You remind yourself of where happiness comes from: It comes from the mind and it gets expressed through your actions. Your actions can have an influence on your happiness and the happiness of others, so you want to be very careful about what you do and don’t do. This is why the precepts are a part of goodwill, an expression of goodwill. And goodwill is a motivation for the precepts. Not only that: The Buddha said that one of the best things you can do for someone else, if you’re really working for their benefit, is to get them to observe the precepts, too. Now, you can’t go around telling people they have to do this. You can tell your children and teach them. But the best way to teach them, of course, is to set an example. So you look at your precepts. Where are they still lacking? This is one way you can be kinde...

"If you have any friends or family members who are sick or dying, I know of no one who would tell you to treat them in a hardhearted way. Everyone would agree that you should be as compassionate as you can. The problem is that there’s little agreement on how compassion translates into specific actions. For some people, compassion means extending life as long as possible; for others it means terminating life — through assisted suicide or euthanasia — when quality of life falls below a certain level. And neither of these two groups sees the other as compassionate at all. The first sees the second as criminal; the second sees the first as heartless and cruel. For those of us trying to negotiate the murky territory between these two extremes, there’s not much reliable guidance. Ours is a culture that doesn’t like to think about illness and death, and as a result, when faced with someone who’s sick or dying, we’re at a loss as to what to do. Some people will advise you simply to do wha...

"We develop skillful qualities in the mind. Yet sometimes the teachings on inconstancy [anicca] seem to undermine the developing side. You think about developing something in the mind, and something inside you says, “Well, it’s going to be inconstant anyhow. No matter what you do, the results will be inconstant, so why bother?” That’s a wrong use of the teaching. It’s like that time when the young monk was asked, “What are the results of action?” and he said, “Stress. Pain.” The person asking him, a wanderer from another sect, said “I’ve never heard Buddhist monks talk that way. You’d better go check with the Buddha.” So he does, via Ānanda. And the Buddha says, when you’re asked about action, you don’t talk just in terms of stress. You talk about the three kinds of actions: actions that lead to pleasure, that lead to pain, and actions that lead to neither pleasure nor pain. A nearby monk happened to overhear this, and said, “Well, maybe young monk was thinking about the prin...

"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]." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"