Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"You look in the newspapers and it seems like everything in the world is falling apart. And it is. So, what is there to accomplish? We train our minds. We’re good to one another, because that kind of goodness isn’t erased by death." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Living Honorably (2015)" (Meditations8)

"When people who are enjoying good fortune abuse that good fortune — say, using their power to create war and mayhem in the world — you can’t wish for them to lose their good fortune. A more skillful attitude would be to wish that they would see the error of their ways and then use their good fortune for greater good." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sublime Determinations: a Retreat on the Brahmavihāras with the Sociedade Vipassana de Meditação BrasÍlia"

"When you forgive someone who’s wronged you, it doesn’t erase that person’s karma in having done wrong. This is why some people think that forgiveness has no place in the karmic universe of the Buddha’s teachings, and that it’s incompatible with the practice of what he taught. But that’s not so. Forgiveness may not be able to undo old bad kamma, but it can prevent new bad karma from being done. This is especially true with the bad kamma that in Pali is called vera . Vera is often translated as “hostility,” “animosity,” or “antagonism,” but it’s a particular instance of these attitudes: the vengeful animosity that wants to get back at someone for perceived wrongs. This attitude is what has no place in Buddhist practice. Patience can weaken it, but forgiveness is what clears it out of the way. The Dhammapada , a popular collection of early Buddhist poems, speaks of vera in two contexts. The first is when someone has injured you, and you’d like to inflict some injury ba...

"This is where true happiness is going to be found: in learning how to train your actions. Any loss of that conviction would be fatal to a pursuit of happiness that could be reliable, trustworthy. So that’s going to be a serious loss. Fortunately, the things that would be a serious loss are things that are under your control. You can maintain your virtue. People can offer you all kinds of rewards for breaking the precepts, but you can say No. You can maintain your right view. As for loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of your health, that’s going to happen at some point anyhow, sooner or later. You lose these things; you get them back. You get them back; you lose them again. But with loss of right view, loss of your virtue: If you lose that, you’re going to be acting on wrong view, acting in unskillful ways, and that’s going to be for your long-term harm. That’s why it’s a serious loss. But it is under your control. You can prevent that. So you work on that — y...

"You look in the newspapers and it seems like everything in the world is falling apart. And it is. So, what is there to accomplish? We train our minds. We’re good to one another, because that kind of goodness isn’t erased by death." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Living Honorably (2015)" (Meditations8)

"The body, we’ll have to lose; our relatives, we’ll have to lose; society will break down at some point, whether it happens while we’re alive or after we die. But if it doesn’t break down before we die, the fact that we’re dying means that society is not going to be much help at that point. What will be of help is the fact that we’ve maintained our devotion to being skillful. And we see that as our top priority." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Worry"

Question: How to deal with the death of a loved one: your loved companion, your dearest grandmother, your cat — the best cat ever? How to deal with loneliness, emptiness, absence, lack of contact, no exchange, just silence? I’m afraid of that. Thanissaro Bhikkhu: This is a topic that we’ll be covering later on in the week, but the first thing to realize is that death is not the end of your contact with that being. Because of your kamma in common, you will most likely meet each other again unless either of you attains nibbāna first. So it’s not totally the end. Second, the worst part of the silence is the sense of being powerless to help the other person, but as the Buddha explains, you can make merit and dedicate it to the person who’s passed away. You can do this with animals, too. From the Buddha’s point of analysis, when you leave someone or someone has left you like this, it’s almost as if a part of your identity — your sense of “what I am” — has been ripped out, so it’s going to...

"This is where true happiness is going to be found: in learning how to train your actions. Any loss of that conviction would be fatal to a pursuit of happiness that could be reliable, trustworthy. So that’s going to be a serious loss. Fortunately, the things that would be a serious loss are things that are under your control. You can maintain your virtue. People can offer you all kinds of rewards for breaking the precepts, but you can say No. You can maintain your right view. As for loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of your health, that’s going to happen at some point anyhow, sooner or later. You lose these things; you get them back. You get them back; you lose them again. But with loss of right view, loss of your virtue: If you lose that, you’re going to be acting on wrong view, acting in unskillful ways, and that’s going to be for your long-term harm. That’s why it’s a serious loss. But it is under your control. You can prevent that. So you work on that — you’re firm in ...

"The Buddha says there are five kinds of loss, three of which he says are not serious. When we listen to his list of things that are not serious, we find that a lot of things on that list are ranked by the world as very serious: loss of wealth, loss of your health, loss of relatives. But as the Buddha said, you don’t go to hell from losing those things. And when you lose them, you get them back — as you have, many, many times in the past. What’s serious, he says, is loss of virtue and loss of your right view. These are areas where the world says, “Oh, those things are not important.” So you can see the Buddha’s values are very different from most people’s. He looked at things from the perspective of the really-long-term. If you lose your virtue, you’re going to create the kind of karma that could pull you down for a long time to come. If you lose your right view, you’re tempted to do anything at all because you feel that your actions have no consequences, they’re not real, so you ...

"Most of us in life live in a world where we think every game is a zero-sum game. If somebody else gains something, we lose. If they lose, we gain. And so there’s a constant battle back-and-forth. If someone else gets the advantage, we’ve got to take it away from them somehow. But it turns out that that’s not a zero-sum game, it’s a negative-sum game. Both sides lose in games of that sort because both sides end up doing things and saying things and thinking things that are really harmful. And then what happens? You both die. And what do you have left? All the habits that you’ve built in your mind. And because both sides have been building bad habits, you’ve lost and the other person’s lost. As they say, even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat. So it’s important that you don’t play those games. The important games are the ones where you come out ahead and the other person comes out ahead. That means you focus mainly on this game inside: on what’s in charge inside your mind...

"Remember that your primary duty is to maintain the state of your mind, because even if you have to die, the state of the mind is the one thing you’ve got that doesn’t have to be lost when you die. Now, if you let your state of mind get ruined by how you die, you’ve lost everything. You’ve lost your body, and you’ve lost your mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Facing Danger & Hardship"

"As the Buddha said, loss of friends and relatives is not all that serious. Loss of wealth is not that serious. Even loss of your health is not that serious. The serious losses are when you lose your right views and when you lose your virtue. With things outside the mind, when you lose them, you can get them back. But if you lose your virtue, you lose your right views, you can do a lot of damage before you get them back." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Near to the Buddha"