Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"So the fearlessness the Buddha teaches is not the kind of fearlessness that tries to pretend there’s nothing wrong with death or that death is not a danger. It really is. Because when you go, it’s like a trap door opening under you. And if you have good kamma, okay, there will be something to support you, to catch you. If you don’t, who knows how far you’ll fall. Instead, the Buddha’s fearlessness is the fearlessness that can see death and danger, but can see past them." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Fear & Uncertainty"

"A lot of people don’t like looking at their actions because, after all, they’ve done a lot of unskillful things. Well, just remind yourself, all human beings have been doing unskillful things. If we had no unskillful behavior in our background, we wouldn’t be here, we’d be someplace else. So we all have habits that we have to learn how to undo, and new habits that we have to learn how to develop. But it’s in exploring the potential we have for choosing freely between different courses of action that we find a different kind of freedom ultimately. It’s a freedom that’s not conditioned. Now, looking at our past actions and looking even at our present actions is often like looking at a bramble patch. That’s where we want to say, “Forget about that, let’s just go for the larger Oneness.” But it turns out that you have to go through the brambles to get to the nice part inside the bramble patch — those brambles are protecting something. It’s not brambles all the way. But you explore y...

"Buddhism is unusual among the world’s religions in admitting that it was founded by someone who knew he had made mistakes. The Buddha was a human being just like us. Through many years of his many lives, he knew he had made lots of mistakes but he learned how to learn from those mistakes. That’s what made all the difference. This means that he knew what it’s like to make a mistake, to regret making mistakes, to be in the position of living forward but only understanding backwards. And so from his experience of learning how to overcome those difficulties, he gives us wise advice on not only trying to prevent as many mistakes as you can, but also learning how to live with mistakes, because that’s what life is full of. We often make mistakes. If we take them as an opportunity to learn rather than a reason to go into strong guilt or strong denial, we can benefit from them. The more clearly you see and understand what’s going on right now, then the less likely it is that the choices y...

"As for the recollection of the virtues of the devas, that’s useful if you want to raise the level of your mind here in present life. You don’t have to wait until you become a deva. Ajaan Suwat did make a statement once, saying that when you’re thinking about your next life, don’t make a determination to come back as a human being. The human world is going to go through a lot of difficulties. It’d be better to take rebirth as a deva. The belief that devas can’t practice is not true. There are lots of devas who practice. If they get the opportunity to hear the Dhamma, they can even gain the noble attainments." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Recollecting the Devas" (Meditations6)

"We’re not here to connect with everybody. That’s an idea that has its roots back in European Romanticism: the idea we’re suffering because we don’t connect with all our fellow humanity. Well, there are some people you don’t want to connect with because they’ll have a bad influence on you. It’s not that you’re passing judgment on them forever, but you use your judgment, you use your circumspection to see which friendships are actually having a good impact on you, and which ones are not." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Circumspection"

"When you decide that you don’t agree with society’s values, learn to do it in a way that’s not confrontational. After all, you’re going your own way. You’re not a permanent earthling. You’re not here to settle down for good. You’re here primarily to practice, to train your mind. If, having trained your mind, you can help other people, that’s fine. But if you can’t, make sure that at least you get your own mind in shape." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "An Anthropologist from Mars"

"When I was up in the Bay Area [in September 2017], I came across a new word: corelessness . Apparently, the latest fashion is to claim that the Buddha said we are coreless, and that that’s the meaning of anatta . In other words, there’s a jumble of karmic activities that make up a human being. That’s what you are. The anatta  teaching, in this interpretation, is not a not-self teaching; it’s a no-self teaching. It answers the question of what you are, saying that what you are has no core. You’re like a karmic fuzz ball. All the fuzz that’s picked up as the fuzz ball moves across the floor under the force of the wind is held together only by static electricity, but there’s no real core there. This is supposed to represent what the Buddha taught about what we are. The problem is that the Buddha never talked about what we are. That was one of the questions he consistently avoided. If you say that there’s no core there, then when kamma ends in the attainment of nibbana, there’d be no...

"A proper understanding of karma also helps to correct the false idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well just leave them alone. When you catch yourself thinking in those terms, you have 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, whatever 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 one’s...

Question: Sometimes I get in touch with the suffering of others and then experience very strong sadness. How do you advise handling that? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The first step is to spread thoughts of goodwill [mettā] to those people. If there is something you can do for them, then do that. If there’s nothing you can do, then you have to move from goodwill to equanimity, which is the thought that all of us have our own kamma, and if you focus on things where you can’t make a difference, then you’ll deplete the energy you could otherwise use to help people you actually can help. It’s one of the hard parts of being a human being that we can’t help everyone who is suffering. So you try to focus on the cases where you can be of help. ~ "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"Even when things are difficult outside or inside, you’ve got the opportunity to develop good qualities of mind. Whatever the situation, you want to figure out the skillful way to approach it so that you minimize the difficulties and maximize your potentials for freedom. If you’re dealing with more than just present responsibilities — say, with the results of past mistakes where you’ve harmed people — the same principle applies. You admit the mistakes. You admit the limitations that they place on you now, but then you try to work around them. Don’t let yourself be hemmed in by your past mistakes or be hemmed in by your past karma, because these things don’t have to totally shape the present moment. We have some freedom right here, right now, and a lot of the practice is learning how to recognize that fact and maximize it to get the best use out of it. Because all the aspects of the path are possible, whatever the limitations from your past karma are. You can learn how to be genero...

"Even with kamma, the Buddha said that if you ask, “Well, the fact that I’m suffering this right now or that right now: Exactly what kamma did I do in the past that caused that?” his advice would be, “Don’t go there.” If you tried to trace that back, he said, it could drive you crazy, because kamma is so complex. The important things to know are the basic principles. One is that if you do something with a skillful intention — i.e., one free from greed, aversion, and delusion — the result is going to be happy. If you do something with an unskillful intention, the result is going to be miserable. And there are gradations. And because you’re doing things all the time, you’ve got lots of kamma. Another thing he has you realize is that the fact you’re a human being means that you’ve got both good and bad kamma. And it’s also important to realize that not everything you’ve done shows up right now. There’s a mistaken belief that we have one kamma account and that what we see right now ...

"The second principle to keep in mind is that, in the Buddha’s teaching, there’s no question of a person’s “deserving” happiness or “deserving” pain. The principle of kamma is an impersonal one: that there are actions leading to pleasure and actions leading to pain. In this way, it’s not a respecter of persons; it’s purely an issue of actions and results. Good people may have some bad actions squirreled away in their past. People who seem horrible now may have some wonderful actions in theirs. You never know. The Buddha didn’t create the principle of kamma, or say that it’s good or just. He simply pointed out the way actions produce results. So there’s no question of a person’s deserving or not deserving pleasure or pain. There’s simply the principle that actions have results and that your present experience of pleasure or pain is the combined result of past and present actions. You may have some very unskillful actions in your past, but if you learn to think and act...

"Even though there are miserable people in the world — and by that I mean people acting in miserable ways — not all human beings are like that. There are human beings who have been shining examples. You can take them as an example and you’ll benefit. That was one of the Buddha’s discoveries: By being good — in other words, developing really skillful qualities of the mind, qualities that are harmless, qualities that strengthen the mind in a good direction — you can find true happiness. And it’s not the happiness simply of patting yourself on the back that you were good, but you open up to a dimension that’s totally other, totally free from suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "To Gladden the Mind"

"There are lots of alternatives that face us after death. Some human beings, when they die, go to a higher level where they can just stay there with an energy body, as a deva or brahmā. Some of those beings on the higher levels then become deluded, thinking that they have found their permanent place, but they haven’t. They will eventually fall from that state and take rebirth on a lower level. Other human beings come back as human beings, or on a lower level. It depends on your past kamma and on your state of mind at death. But none of these states of being are permanent. The higher beings can fall; the lower animals can come back up. So our task is to try to come back to a good level where we can practice so that ultimately we get out of this mess entirely. And it is a mess. Ajaan Mun said that he could remember having been reborn as a dog 500 times, simply because it appealed to him at the time." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Facing Aging, Illness, & Death: The Central Tea...

"We live in a world where there are lots of influences around us: people, places. Of course, we were the ones who wanted to come here. I think I’ve told you the story about the nurse who was a victim of a lot of gossip in her workplace. One day when she was feeling especially oppressed by all this, she came to meditate with Ajaan Fuang. She had a vision in her meditation of being in a hall of mirrors: looking in one direction and seeing herself reflected back, back, back, back, back; looking in the other direction and seeing herself reflected back, back, back, back. The vision hinted that she’d probably been the victim of this sort of suffering many, many lifetimes. It made her feel even more oppressed. So she left meditation and talked to Ajaan Fuang about this, hoping that she’d get some comfort from him. Instead, he said, “Well, you were the one who wanted to be born as a human being in the first place.” It was like a slap in the face. But that’s the case. Each of us wanted to...

"We look at the situation in the world right now and there’s a lot to be worried about. But we can be confident about one thing, that the best way to respond to whatever the situation is in the world is to practice the Dhamma, to be generous, to be virtuous and to meditate to train the mind. Because whether the situation in the world is good or bad, there is always aging, illness and death. There is no point where the world is so totally free of insecurity that you can really trust that the situation is going to be good. Even if the economy is great and everybody agrees to lay down their arms, people are still going to get sick, still going to get old, and still going to die. But the empowering thing in all this is that your actions do shape the world you experience: the world you’ve experienced, the world that you’re experiencing now, and on into the future. So no matter what anybody else does, you always want to practice the Dhamma — to hold by your ideals, to hold by your princ...

"When the Buddha teaches us right view, he’s advising us to think about the long term. As Ajaan Lee would say, anybody can find pleasure in one way or another. Even common animals have their ways of finding pleasure. But it takes discernment to realize that there are long-term consequences to your actions. You have to take into consideration that your actions depend on your motivation. And your actions can have consequences that last for a long, long time, which means you have to check your motivation for why you’re acting and try to motivate yourself to act in a way that will lead to long-term well-being. This is what makes human beings different from animals. We can take a longer view. Yet there are a lot of people who refuse to take that longer view. That’s precisely why the Buddha made the topic of rebirth part of mundane right view. You’ve got to take this into consideration. Your actions really do have consequences, even beyond this life. There’s a continuation beyond death,...

"Our culture is a very unforgiving one. We have one shot at making it in society, they usually say. Of course, it’s based on a religion that gives you one shot. You’ve got this one lifetime and then there’s going to be either eternal reward or eternal damnation. Which is a very unforgiving way of thinking. This is one of the reasons why the Buddha’s teachings on rebirth are so helpful. If we don’t make it this time, we’ve got another chance. Now, the other chances may not come for a while. As the Buddha said, “Your chance of being reborn as a human being is right away is pretty slim.” But at least you’ve got more chances, and there’s not some arbitrary person up there who’s going to damn you forever for one little mistake, or praise or reward you for one little change of heart. Karma is a lot more fair in that area, and it gives you a chance to start over, start over, start over. So learn to think in a way that “Okay, you make a mistake. Recognize it as a mistake but it’s not som...

"We live in a world where good actions are rewarded, both in this lifetime and in future ones. We ourselves are beings who will survive death — as we have already survived death many times — to enjoy the results of our actions." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Clinging & the End of Clinging"

"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"