Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"When we say that people suffer because of their actions, past and present, it means that there’s no one in the human world who’s really innocent. Even if someone has behaved perfectly in this lifetime, there may be some bad seeds in his or her kamma field from past lifetimes that are now sprouting. Now, this doesn’t mean that that person deserves to suffer. And it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t feel compassion for that person. If your compassion is so picky that it can go only to innocent people, you won’t find anyone to give it to. Accept the fact that the human realm is one where we all have a mixture of past bad kamma and past good kamma. We’re all in this together, so we should all have compassion for one another. And remember that the Buddha never talked about people deserving to suffer. He offered his teachings on how to stop suffering to all beings, no matter what their past kamma was." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sublime Determinations: a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras...

"The Buddha never taught a theory of just [justified] war; no decision to wage war can legitimately be traced to his teachings; no war veteran has ever had to agonize over memories of the people he killed because the Buddha said that war was okay. These facts are among the glories of the Buddhist tradition, and it’s important for the human race that they not be muddied in an effort to recast the Buddha in our own less than glorious image." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Getting the Message"

"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...

"As long as we live in a sensual realm, the Buddha said, there are going to be fights between parents and children, brothers and sisters, brothers and brothers, sisters and sisters, and between the parents themselves. This is something you’ve got to accept. There are two ways you can try to get past those quarrels. One is through reconciliation; the other’s through forgiveness. Now, reconciliation requires that everybody involved wants to patch up the relationship. Whoever’s acted harmfully has to admit that he or she has acted harmfully and to promise never to do it again — and has to make the promise in such a way that the other side believes it, or at least is determined to continue with the relationship. In other words, you share common values about what’s right and wrong, what’s proper and improper. As for the person wronged, he or she has to behave in a way that shows respect for the other side. Reconciliation is a lot of work, and it requires that both sides want it. This i...

"We talked about different ways you deal with the causes of suffering. Some causes of suffering go away when you just look at them; others require that you engage in what the Buddha calls, “exerting a fabrication” [MN 101]. And when the Buddha’s talking about fabrication in this context, he’s talking about these three kinds of fabrication. For example, suppose that you’re feeling a strong sense of anger and you want to get over it. The first thing you do is to look at your breath. Usually when you’re angry, your breath is disturbed, which aggravates the anger. So, remember what you’ve learned to do with the breath in meditation: calm the breath down, breathe through any tightness you may feel in your chest or your abdomen, and in this way you begin to reclaim your body from the anger, which has hijacked it. You make the breath your own again. That’s bodily fabrication. When the body feels calmer, it’s easier to think clearly about the situation. This is where you apply directed th...

“We suffer [householder] grief and so we look for [householder] joy in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. When we don’t get what we want, that brings more grief, but we turn around to look for joy in the same places. What the Buddha wants us to do is to turn our attention to what he calls renunciate grief, renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity. Renunciate grief is when you reflect on how you haven’t attained what you want in terms of freeing the mind from suffering. You haven’t reached the goal of the path. Renunciate joy is the joy that comes when you have  reached the goal. And then renunciate equanimity is the peace and equanimity that come when you know the path is completed. One of the Buddha’s most interesting tactics is that when we suffer from householder grief, the way to get ourselves above and beyond that is to try to transform it, not into householder joy, but into renunciate grief. Householder grief and joy, he says, don’t provide u...

"So have faith in what you’re doing and in the skills you’re developing here, because they can see you through, even when everything else starts collapsing and the mountains come moving in. And remember: The mind is not crushed by mountains. Your goodness is crushed only by your own discouragement, by your own lack of faith, your lack of conviction, lack of persistence. Those are the things that crush you, and yet those are also things you can do something about. The mountains keep moving in, moving in. The world is swept away. It’s the nature of the world. If the north mountain doesn’t get you, the south mountain will. But they get just your body. So focus on your mind: That’s your important refuge. All the skills you develop as you practice: Those are your refuge. Those don’t get swept away. Remember where the escape is. The escape is inside. You can’t escape the world, as the Buddha said, by going to the edge of the cosmos. He had that image of the skywalker — an interesting te...

"Never underestimate the power of the good example you create. This is how goodness gets spread around in the world: not by people talking, not by books, as much as by examples. When you see someone who’s done something really unselfish, it’s very inspiring. You realize, okay, the world is a place with good people, people who are able to overcome their defilements or their narrowness or whatever. The things that keep them bound up in the cycle of suffering and then revenge for suffering and then more suffering and then more revenge for suffering: That goes nowhere. We’ve seen way too much of that. But the people who stand up and say, “No, I’m not going to continue that way”: Those are the ones who make the human world a good world to be in, and they inspire us all. So you want your examples — the examples you set by your thoughts, words and deeds — to be good ones. That’s one of the ways in which you’re acting for the benefit of others." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu ...

"If you appreciate the help that you have received from others and show gratitude for the effort that they put into it, you will also be more likely to provide help to others. 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." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"Look at the Buddha. If anybody could have created a perfect society, it would have been him. But he saw that it was useless. There was a time when Mara came to him. The question had arisen in the Buddha’s mind, “Could it be possible to rule in such a way that you wouldn’t have to create bad kamma and that you could do nothing but good for all beings?” Mara shows up, and says, “Ah, yes, do that.” And the Buddha realizes that this idea of creating a perfect society is all a trick of Mara, because you’re using people for ends. And how skillful are those ends? Even if the ends are good, there’s a tendency to try to attain them in unskillful ways, to impose them on people. If you tell people that things will be good and they’ll be happy only if society is perfect, people would die before they could find true happiness. On the other hand, the solution is not a matter of simply accepting things as they are. It’s learning how to reshape them in a skillful way, starting wit...

"If you appreciate the help that you have received from others and show gratitude for the effort that they put into it, you will also be more likely to provide help to others. 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." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

Question 19. Is there such a thing as group kamma? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not the case that first you’re born into a particular group of people at a particular point in time and then, as a result of joining them, you assume the kamma committed by earlier members of that group. It’s actually the other way around: First, through your own individual intentions, you develop a particular type of kamma. Then you’re born into a group of people who have similar kamma in their individual backgrounds. In the Buddha’s terms, we’re “kamma-related,” or related through our kamma [MN 135]. What this means is that if a particular group — a family, a nation — suffers hardships, it’s not because earlier members of that group created bad kamma. It’s because the individuals currently in that group have bad kamma in their own individual backgrounds. And remember: People are not always reborn, life after life, in the same family, ethnic group, nation, gender, or even species. Sometimes a person goes fro...

"We’re not making the mind still simply to have a nice restful place to be, a nice experience of ease to soothe our stressed-out nerves. That may be part of it, but it’s not the whole practice. The other part is to see clearly what’s going on, to see the potential of human action: What are we doing all the time? What are the potentials contained in this doing? Then we apply that understanding of human action to see how far we can go in stripping away the unnecessary stress and suffering that come from acting in unskillful ways. It’s important that we always keep this in mind as we meditate. Remember: We’re here to understand human action, in particular our own human actions. Otherwise we sit here hoping that we don’t have to do anything, that we can just wait for some Imax experiences to come whap us upside the head, or some nice glowing sense of oneness to come welling up inside. And sometimes things like that can come unexpectedly, but if they come without your understanding ho...

"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,...

"So when a bad karmic storm comes whipping up, remind yourself you’ve been through worse. After all the human realm is one of the better realms to be born into. We’ve all been through the lower realms, but here we are: We survived. The question is how to survive with as much good karma as you can. Don’t let the fact that old bad karma is showing itself be an excuse to create more bad karma. It should be your signal that, okay, this is what bad karma is like when it shows its results, and you don’t want it. So do what good karma you can in the meantime. That includes developing qualities like patience, but also looking around to see what other opportunities there are to do something good. Lift your spirits. Learn how to give yourself a pep talk. As I said, you’ve been through worse. You can take this. And if you have the right attitude, working on patience when patience is called for, you can come out unscathed." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma Storms"

"So remember, your actions are important, and you can make skillful choices now. Now, as you live in this human life, we can’t guarantee that once you’ve started on the path everything will be a path of roses. We all have our past kamma, the things that come at us in life from our past actions. But again, it’s what you’re doing right now that’s going to make all the difference, so you want to focus on: What are your capabilities right now? Where are you holding onto things that are making you suffer? That was the Buddha’s definition of suffering. It’s not something that’s happening to us. It’s something we're doing." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Encouragement"

"A lot of us, when we first hear the teachings on karma, think about the bad things we did in the past, which is one of the reasons why karma is a very unpopular teaching. Things that were past, we hope to leave past. But karma says, “They may still have their fangs.” Of course, “karma” doesn’t mean just bad karma. It also means good karma. In fact, the Buddha, when he introduces karma, introduces it in a very positive way, connecting it with generosity and gratitude, both of which are really good parts of human life. The Buddha says that generosity has meaning because our actions have meaning. They have meaning in the sense that we choose to do things. That means that people have meaning, too. When we give meaning to other people, we give meaning to ourselves: that it’s worthwhile helping someone else, either materially or in terms of our knowledge or in terms of our time. If we didn’t have freedom of choice, all of this would be meaningless. We’d be just mechanical robots, pre-...

"Your goodwill [mettā] and your generosity will help you survive no matter where you go. If you go into a new society where you don’t know anybody, goodwill and generosity are the things that will carry you through. When things begin to break down, goodwill and generosity will carry you through. So remember: Your protection lies in your goodness, in the skillfulness of your intentions and the discernment with which you carry those intentions out. Those are the things that will see you through no matter what happens. That’s why the Buddha taught them as the Dhamma, because they’ve been true all the time, as civilizations rise and fall and then rise again. These are the qualities that make human life worth living, make it the kind of life that we can get the most out of it, regardless of how things arise and fall outside." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Your Goodness Is Your Protection"

"Look at the Buddha. If anybody could have created a perfect society, it would have been him. But he saw that it was useless. There was a time when Mara came to him. The question had arisen in the Buddha’s mind, “Could it be possible to rule in such a way that you wouldn’t have to create bad kamma and that you could do nothing but good for all beings?” Mara shows up, and says, “Ah, yes, do that.” And the Buddha realizes that this idea of creating a perfect society is all a trick of Mara, because you’re using people for ends. And how skillful are those ends? Even if the ends are good, there’s a tendency to try to attain them in unskillful ways, to impose them on people. If you tell people that things will be good and they’ll be happy only if society is perfect, people would die before they could find true happiness. On the other hand, the solution is not a matter of simply accepting things as they are. It’s learning how to reshape them in a skillful way, starting with learning ho...

"If you appreciate the help that you have received from others and show gratitude for the effort that they put into it, you will also be more likely to provide help to others. 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." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"