Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"There’s another thing that [the Buddha] recommends that you not think about in his discussion on appropriate attention in Majjhima 2. He talks about questions that are not worth following, not worth paying attention to. And some of them are, “What was I in the past? Was I in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? How will I be in the future? What will I be in the future?” Some people say, “Well, didn’t the Buddha ask these questions of himself when he first gained awakening?” The answer is that perhaps that was his first motivation to gain those first two knowledges. But then those are precisely the questions he dropped, because he realized that the question of who he was, was not a useful question — because, after all, the whole process was driven by action. He asked himself: Why not look directly at actions? Actions that are skillful, actions that are unskillful — in ways that you can get past those categories of skillful and unskillful — in other words, to ...

"If a teaching is going to protect you, the first level of protection has to be on the theoretical level: You have to understand that your present actions are free, to at least some extent, to shape the present moment — for good or bad — and to have an impact on the future. This understanding of kamma would then provide you with motivation for looking carefully at what should and shouldn’t be done right now to avoid causing suffering. And this is precisely the understanding of kamma that the Buddha taught: As he pointed out in AN 3:101 , past actions do have their impact on the present moment, but your experience of that impact is filtered through your present-moment state mind. This is one of the reasons why Buddhist meditation focuses on being alert to what the mind is doing right now. If you’re sensitive to your present actions, you can shape them well enough to mitigate the influences from any past bad kamma and, through your present skillful kamma, to provide conditions for p...

"I don’t know how many times I’ve run into people who say that they’ve learned from their meditation that there is no agency, there is no choice. There are meditation methods that try to drive choice underground: You get to the point where you deny that you have choice, that you’re simply there on the receiving end of what happened from the past. But that’s not in line with what the Buddha taught. He said that if you think that the present moment is totally determined by the past, you have no freedom at all. If whatever you do is determined by the past, you have no choice as to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to steal. It would be a meaningless life. There would be no meaning in the path. And, he said, it would leave you unprotected and bewildered. “Unprotected” in the sense that you wouldn’t have any way of arguing against your urges to do something unskillful. And “bewildered” because you’d say, “What did I do in the past that made me compelled me to do this?”...

"There are lots of ways that we can develop doubts and uncertainty about the path. So let’s look at how the Buddha said to deal with uncertainty. First, of course, you ask yourself: What are you being asked to believe? You’re being asked to believe that your actions have an impact. That the quality of the mind with which you act is going to have an impact on the results of that action. That it’s possible to learn from your mistakes. And that you do have freedom of choice. These are all fairly commonsensical propositions. Where the Buddha is asking you to take this a little bit further than normal common sense, of course, is that by following this principle you can go all the way to true happiness, a happiness that won’t change." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Strengthening Conviction"

Question: Contentment is hard for me, the idea of accepting things just as they are. What should I do? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The Buddha didn’t teach you to accept things as they are in all cases. This is where it’s important to understand his teachings on kamma. Everything we experience in the present moment is a combination of three factors. The first factor consists of the results of past intentions. These could be intentions from just the moment before to lifetimes before, ripening now in the present moment. The second factor is your present intentions. The third is the result of your present intentions. You can’t do much about the results of your past intentions, but you can change your present intentions and their results. So, the things you have to content yourself with are the things that come from past kamma. But even then, the simple fact that your past kamma up to now has, say, given bad results doesn’t mean that it has to keep on giving bad results. You can change your prese...

"I don’t know how many times I’ve run into people who say that they’ve learned from their meditation that there is no agency, there is no choice. There are meditation methods that try to drive choice underground: You get to the point where you deny that you have choice, that you’re simply there on the receiving end of what happened from the past. But that’s not in line with what the Buddha taught. He said that if you think that the present moment is totally determined by the past, you have no freedom at all. If whatever you do is determined by the past, you have no choice as to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to steal. It would be a meaningless life. There would be no meaning in the path. And, he said, it would leave you unprotected and bewildered. “Unprotected” in the sense that you wouldn’t have any way of arguing against your urges to do something unskillful. And “bewildered” because you’d say, “What did I do in the past that made me compelled me to do this?” Because you...

"When the Buddha taught the teaching on karma, he mentioned, “There is mother and father” — which, of course, sounds obvious, but it was a controversial topic back in those times. By saying there is or there isn’t mother and father, you were saying whether your parents were owed any specific debt of gratitude. When they said there isn’t mother and father, they meant that human beings were just chemical elements that happened to combine and then give rise to your body and that was it. There’s no special virtue there. You don’t owe them any real debt, either because they were just material things or because what they did was totally predetermined. They had no choice in the matter. So when the Buddha was saying there is mother and father, he was saying that you’re not just the physical body, and your parents aren’t just their physical bodies. At the same time, they did have freedom of choice: They could have aborted you; they could have abandoned you. The fact that you have a body,...

"When you think about that passage, that there’s no one in charge, what it means is that here’s your opportunity to take charge in your life. It carries responsibilities. You have to be honest. But it also brings a lot of freedom. On a very deep level, there’s nobody out there you have to please. You act kindly because it’s your choice. You’re generous because it’s your choice. You’re virtuous, you meditate, because it’s your choice. So take full advantage of your freedom. Really appreciate the fact that we are free to choose, and that that freedom can lead to a freedom going beyond simply the freedom to choose. Absolute freedom, absolutely unlimited: That’s the happiness the Buddha promises. But you can find it only if you take charge." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Taking Charge"

"Kamma is one of those teaching that’s sometimes hard to relate to, both intellectually and emotionally: intellectually because it’s related to the issue of conviction, or saddhā . We hear the word conviction — or even worse, saddhā is often translated as faith — and we think that we’re being asked to commit to something that we’re not really sure about, that we don’t have any means of knowing. But that’s not what conviction means in the Buddha’s teachings. It means you’re going to take something on as a working hypothesis. You’re committed to the sense that you’re really going to really try to test it, but no, you’re not being forced to give your emotional assent to say, “Yes, despite my lack of evidence I’m being forced to say this must be true.” Instead, you’re advised to say, “I’m going to try it out. It makes sense. It’s asking me to believe that my actions matter and that I have a choice in my actions that’ll give results. But I’m free enough to learn from past mistakes so...

"The sense that you’ve benefited from another person’s action underscores the point that action does give results; the importance you give to the other person’s motives in helping you underscores the point that the quality of the action lies in the intention behind it; and the sense that the other person went out of his or her way to help you underscores the sense that action isn’t totally determined: You feel indebted to the people who helped you because you sense how easily they might have denied that help, and how difficult your life might have been if that’s what they had chosen to do." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Lessons of Gratitude"

"When you realize that what you’re doing right now is the important part of kamma, and that you’re free to do something skillful or not, then you can look into your impulses right now that would try to get you to do something unskillful, and you can say, “I don’t have to follow these.” You can pry into them, look into them, see what’s their allure. And then you can compare the allure with the drawbacks, gain a sense of where the compulsion came from, and realize you don’t have to give into it. That’s when you escape." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Generosity of Spirit"

"The passages related to the social virtues are the ones that sound the strangest. For example, “There is what is given.” This sounds perfectly obvious, but it had a special meaning in the time of the Buddha. For millennia, the brahmans had been preaching about the virtue of giving, especially when things were given to brahmans. In the texts of old brahmanical ceremonies for making merit for the dead, for example, there’s a part of the ceremony where the brahmans will address the bereaved and say, “We are speaking in the voice of your dead relatives: ‘Give to the brahmans!’” When the bereaved gave to the brahmans, the brahmans — again assuming the voice of the dead relatives — said, “Give more!” You can imagine the reaction that eventually developed. Over the centuries, there sprang up schools of contemplatives who said, in reaction, that there is no virtue in giving. One of their arguments was that people do not have free will, therefore even when they give things, it doesn’t m...

"So you can see that the Buddha’s teachings on kamma affirm the social virtues of generosity and gratitude. Without these two virtues, human society would be chaos. Therefore, the Buddha is encouraging us to develop these virtues in ourselves as well. And his teaching on kamma — as following a pattern that allows for free will — is what actually allows for these virtues to have meaning and to make sense." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"