Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

Question: I was in a situation where I was forced to do something that harmed someone else. How do I live with this fact so that it is not too heavy to bear? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Remember that kamma depends on many different factors. When you’re forced into doing something harmful, the kamma is much less heavy than if you had done it on your own initiative through anger or ill will. Remember, too, the Buddha’s recommendation that you not get involved in thoughts of remorse. Instead, simply recognize that it was a mistake and resolve not to repeat the mistake. Then spread thoughts of goodwill to yourself, to the person you harmed, to the people who forced you to do the harm, and then to all beings. You spread goodwill to yourself to give yourself more encouragement to do good now and into the future. You spread it to others to strengthen your desire not to harm anyone at all. ~ "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"In the guilt cultures that we have, especially in monotheism, there’s the sense that justice has to be done one way or another. Whereas Buddhism doesn’t talk about justice at all — it talks about being skillful in your behavior. Now, sometimes skillfulness does involve punishing people who are wrong, but you’re not necessarily trying to get justice done. Think of the case of Aṅgulimāla: all those people he’d killed, and yet the Buddha saw that he had a potential. So he taught him. Aṅgulimāla was able to give up his murderous ways and become an arahant. The karmic consequence of all the killing he’d done was simply that, as he was on his alms rounds, there were people who were probably upset that he’d literally gotten away with murder and they would throw things at him: sometimes tearing his robes, sometimes bashing his bowl, sometimes bashing his head. But as the Buddha said, that was a lot less than the consequences would have been if he hadn’t gained that attainment. So the who...

"Two more qualities the Buddha said he looked for in any student: One was that the student be observant; and the other was that the student be honest — “not deceitful,” as he said. In other words, when you make a mistake, you admit it. You don’t try to cover it up because, after all, you’re trying to change your actions from unskillful to skillful. And if you refuse to recognize your own mistakes, there’s no way you’re going to learn." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Prerequisites for the Practice"

"How do you keep patience going? How do you keep persistence going? By having a good sense of humor about what’s happening to you in the path and having an infinite good humor that can keep you going. This is the attitude that allows you to say, “Whoops, another mistake! – Well, try again! Another mistake? Try again!” It’s that ability to step back from yourself a bit to see what you’re doing and not to be so in to a particular state of mind or in to a particular identity that you can’t let it go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Infinite Good Humor"

"You have to learn how to judge your actions and not come down on yourself for being really bad when you see that you’re making poor judgments or you’ve done something unskillful. You’ve got to develop the attitude of a craftsperson. You’re sitting at your bench, working on building a piece of furniture, and you just realized that you planed the wood a little bit too deeply. So what do you do? Do you throw the wood away? That would be a waste. Do you start yelling at yourself? That wouldn’t accomplish anything. You figure out how to correct for the mistake. And then you move on. Perhaps it’s because we have so few manual skills nowadays that we haven’t developed this faculty of judging a work in progress. But here’s your opportunity to develop it. Remember the basic principles. You’re judging the actions, not yourself as a good or bad person. And the purpose of the judgment is so that you can apply what you’ve learned the next time around. If you’re going to be noticing how other ...

"This is how you purify your thoughts, words, and deeds, through looking at your actions in terms of their intentions and the quality of the results. If you see that you’ve made a mistake, then resolve not to make it again. This is where the purity comes in. Purity requires not having firewalls in your mind. It means seeing the connections between what you intend to do and the results you get, realizing that you can change your ways if you’ve made a mistake." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Walls of Ignorance" (Meditations2)

"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...

"Look at what you’ve been doing to and see where it’s been unskillful. When you do this, you are passing judgment. But you’re passing judgment on your actions, not on yourself. Your intentions in the past may have been unskillful, or the actions may have been unskillful, but you’re not stuck there. Just because you’ve had unskillful intentions doesn’t mean that you’re always going to have unskillful intentions. You can change your mind. You can change your habits. The skillful or healthy sense of shame comes in here and says, “What I did in the past is nothing to be proud of, but I don’t have to repeat that mistake.” This is what your powers of judgment are good for." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Shame & Acceptance" (Meditations5)