Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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...

 "It’s important as we meditate that we don’t just think about ourselves. We also have to think about others. You see this pattern again and again in the Buddha’s teachings. Think of the five reflections that we have as a common chant: “I am subject to aging, subject to illness, subject to death, subject to separation from all that is dear and appealing to me. I am the owner of my actions.” The Buddha says that as you reflect in that way, it gives you motivation to become more and more skillful in what you do in thought, word, and deed. But he doesn’t leave the reflection there. He has you reflect not only on “me,” but also on the fact that all beings everywhere,  on every level of the cosmos, are subject to aging, illness, death, and separation. They, too, all have their kamma. Think about that: everybody, no matter what they are, from hell-beings all the way up through the highest levels of heaven. There’s nobody in charge, nobody in the universe who lies above the laws of k...

"You start thinking about the well-being of all beings. It takes you out of your narrow concern with your own sense of being pained by something. Think of all the beings in the world: A lot of people out there are suffering right now. So when you’re suffering the results of bad kamma, you’re not the only one. This thought helps to take a lot of the sting away. The Buddha gave a good example of this when he was injured by Devadatta. Devadatta rolled a rock down the mountain, hoping to crush the Buddha. The rock was turned off course by another rock. The rock shattered, some of the stone slivers shot out, and one of them went through the Buddha’s foot. So they had to get the stone sliver out, and then he had to rest. Mara came along to taunt him: “What are you doing, you sleepyhead? Are you moping around because of what happened?” And the Buddha said, “No. I’m lying down here with sympathy and goodwill for all beings.” That included the people who tried to injure him. In that way,...

"It’s the same with worry and anxiety, or restlessness. These things that you’re worried about: If they really happened, what would be the best way to prepare for them? Not by spending the whole night worrying and wearing yourself out! You’re going to need mindfulness; you’re going to need alertness. You’re going to need an inner sense of strength that you can draw on, and this is what the meditation is for. It strengthens these good qualities that you can use in any situation if you’re willing to use them. So the best way to prepare for future contingencies is to strengthen the mind as much as you can. Gain practice in being as mindful as possible, as alert as possible, open to new ways of thinking. And also, try to get that perspective on future dangers. There’s that great passage where the monk is going to a dangerous part of India. He takes leave of the Buddha, and the Buddha says, “You know, the people there are reputed to be pretty savage. What if they curse you?” And the m...

"Real injustices are being done out there. The question is: what to do about them? Often we see a situation that we don’t like, anger arises, and we try to think of what to do about the situation while the anger is still in the mind. From the Buddha’s perspective, the problem is not so much that we want to do something about the injustices, but that we allow the anger to color our perception of the situation and of what should be done. So he’s not telling us to simply accept things as they are and try to swallow your anger, feeling that we’re to blame for the anger. Rather, he’s saying that we have to deal with the anger in such a way that it doesn’t get in the way of responding in an appropriate way, or a skillful way, to what we see as wrong. Once you get the anger out of the way, there are two things that can happen. One is that you may see that the situation is not as bad as you thought it was, but simply that your opinions had colored the situation. The other is ...

"It’s important to have the perspective that comes when you’re fully in the present moment. Your relationship to the past and your relationship to the future get changed. The past is just a memory right now. It’s gone. The future’s not here yet. So when thoughts of past and future come in, remember they’re just thoughts. The reality of the karma that you’re creating right now: That’s what’s actually there in the present, and that’s what you want to understand. You want to see when craving comes up for a thought: Where is it coming from? How does it start? How does it end? And what’s the allure? Remember what the Buddha said about sensuality: It’s not your sensual pleasures that you’re so attracted to, it’s your plans for those sensual pleasures. That’s where the craving is. And this principle applies across the board. Your fears about the future: It’s not the future that you’re afraid of. Thoughts come into the mind, and you’re afraid of those thoughts, you latch onto them out of ...

"One of [the Buddha's] big discoveries is the extent to which we fabricate our experience from within, through our intentions. In other words, we’re not just on the receiving end of the material world. We actually shape the world we live in. The whole point of the path is to learn how to take advantage of that fact — so that, on the one hand, we can shape it well — and then shape it really well so that we can get beyond these worlds that we ordinarily shape and arrive at something that’s really reliable, something really solid. Yet it is an inside job. You can get advice from outside, but the actual work is something you have to do. This is very different from the materialist’s idea, which is that the material world is real and what you experience, your consciousness of things, is what they call an epiphenomenon. In other words, it’s just a side effect of the real things, which are atoms doing their thing. And the Buddha’s perspective is also very different from the post-moder...

"Real injustices are being done out there. The question is: what to do about them? Often we see a situation that we don’t like, anger arises, and we try to think of what to do about the situation while the anger is still in the mind. From the Buddha’s perspective, the problem is not so much that we want to do something about the injustices, but that we allow the anger to color our perception of the situation and of what should be done. So he’s not telling us to simply accept things as they are and try to swallow your anger, feeling that we’re to blame for the anger. Rather, he’s saying that we have to deal with the anger in such a way that it doesn’t get in the way of responding in an appropriate way, or a skillful way, to what we see as wrong. Once you get the anger out of the way, there are two things that can happen. One is that you may see that the situation is not as bad as you thought it was, but simply that your opinions had colored the situation. The other is that you can ...

"Anger often presents itself as being justified, that someone has done something outrageous or said something outrageous. It’s beyond the pale. It can’t be. You can’t stand it — and that right there is the crux of the problem: your own lack of endurance, your inability to see the larger picture. Given that people will do things you don’t like, how can you live in this world in a skillful way, not letting your anger to take over?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Anger"

"Reflection on karma is often useful as well. There are certain issues in life where we feel that we’ve been unjustly treated, and it’s good to remember that karma has been going on for a long, long time. And the back and forth that we’ve had with one another has been so, so long and so complex that there’s really nobody to keep tally. And it wouldn’t be worth it anyhow. Putting the individual events of your life into that much larger framework sometimes help take out a lot of the sting. You can step back from them and view them with a little bit of distance." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath Energies"

"Empires rise and fall, but the mind remains. That’s got to be your perspective. Because the mind remains not only through the death of the body but through many, many cycles of the Universe. So you’ve got to get it into good shape, because otherwise it’s going to take you to weird places, undesirable places. If it’s in good shape, you can go to good places." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Most Important Thing to Be Doing"

"In examining our actions in terms of cause and effect, skillful and unskillful, we are already beginning to look at experience in line with the two sets of variables that make up the four noble truths: the origination of stress (unskillful cause), the path to the cessation of stress (skillful cause), stress (unskillful effect), and the cessation of stress (skillful effect). The way the Buddha recommended that Rāhula judge the results of his actions — both while doing them and after they are done — echoes the insight that formed the heart of his awakening: that intentions have results both in the immediate present and over time. When we look at the present moment from this perspective, we find that our experience of the present doesn’t “just happen.” Instead, it’s a product of our involvement — in terms of present intentions, the results of present intentions, and the results of past intentions — in which present intentions are the most important factor. The more we focus on that ...

"It’s not as if you throw everything away, or that you deny the importance of your past experience. It’s simply that you learn how to convert it to a new use. Memories of the past that made you miserable, you can take them apart: Where’s the perception? Where is the fabrication? Where’s the allure? Why do you go for them? What gets accomplished by them and what are the drawbacks? As you take these things apart, you begin to get a new perspective. You’ll think in terms of the principle of kamma — this is a huge back-and-forth that’s been going on for who knows how long — and then the desire to get something brought to closure, to get something resolved, starts to seem meaningless. That’s when you’ve used that particular story, that particular narrative, for the sake of the Dhamma: when you develop that sense of samvega ." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "True for What Purpose?" (Meditations11)

"You get an idea of the difference between the perspective that’s provided by thinking about the many times we’ve been reborn and the belief that we have only one birth. When there’s only one birth, we can get very worked up about things. Things are tragic, things are horrible, great injustices have been done. But from the Buddha’s point of view, a lot of those ideas and feelings come from the fact that we don’t see the whole story. Think about it. He says there hasn’t been just one universe. There’ve been many universes, one after another. Scientists tell us how many billions of years the stars in our universe have been around, and we haven’t even gone through the whole cycle of this particular universe. And there’ve been many before us. As the Buddha said, those who can remember past lives back forty eons — in other words, forty universes — have a short memory. His memory extended far beyond that, to the point where he said that trying to find a beginning point for all this, eve...

"You start with right view about kamma and rebirth in general, thinking about what those principles say about your life. If you think that life ends with death and that’s it — there’s nothing more — then that’s going to put everything else in your daily life into one context. But if you think of samsara as something that’s going to lead on for more and more and more lives, then your actions take on a different meaning. You want to keep that larger context in mind, so that you can have a clear idea: What really is worth doing? What’s not worth doing? When you start getting attached to ideas, memories, material things, you can remind yourself, “Okay, you’ve had these things before, you’ve let go of them before, and you’ve come back to them again, and you’re setting yourself up to miss them again. Haven’t you had enough?” If you think everything ends with death, there’s never any sense of enough. You want to grab as much as you can before you go. But, if you realize that you’re go...

"Empires rise and fall, but the mind remains. That’s got to be your perspective. Because the mind remains not only through the death of the body but through many, many cycles of the Universe. So you’ve got to get it into good shape, because otherwise it’s going to take you to weird places, undesirable places. If it’s in good shape, you can go to good places." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Most Important Thing to Be Doing"

"If you’re serious about doing what’s skillful — trying to be compassionate, trying to have integrity in your actions, respecting everyone’s desire for happiness — then this ability to think of death is not all that scary. It lifts your fears, living your life with that perspective. You can ask yourself, “If I were to die and were looking back at my life, looking back at today, what would I wish I had done today? What would I wish I’d said today?” Knowing that most of your ordinary worries and cares are rendered pretty meaningless by death, then live your life from that perspective. Say the good things you will have wished you had said, do the good things you will have wished you had done. If you stop and think about this, you’ll see that you will have wished you’d spent more time training the mind. When you’re dealing with other people, you will have wished you had said the kind thing, the helpful thing, the appropriate thing, something that wasn’t worried about what you could g...

Question: The Buddha trained Rāhula in how to comport himself so that he would not be a nuisance to other people. Unfortunately, not everyone in the world is Rāhula. What attitude should one adopt in the face of people who do things that are unreflective and who have no sense of their own limits? Should we develop patience, tolerance, forgiveness? What other things should we do, especially given that we have not yet attained the first level of awakening? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: When dealing with difficult people, the approach we take should be determined by whether they are responsive to our actions or not. Some people are responsive and we can actually have a good influence on their actions. In that case, try to be proactive in helping them. Others are difficult to deal with and will not respond. That’s where you have to develop equanimity and forgiveness. And this is why it’s good to think about the principle of kamma in general. That helps put your actions and the other person’s actio...

"When you take one person’s many lifetimes, all too often there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern. Sometimes you do good in this lifetime and you go to a bad destination afterwards because your mind has fallen in the meantime. Or you do something bad, but then your mind rises to a better stage, and so you go to a good place. It might seem like karma doesn’t have any effect. But when you see the long-term results and you see them spread out over many, many beings, many, many lifetimes, you realize that’s what drives the universe: our actions. And it just keeps going on, and on, and on. [The Buddha] said you cannot even conceive of a beginning point, it’s been going on that long, while the tears you’ve shed over these many, many lifetimes are greater than the water in the ocean. And that’s just tears over the loss of a mother. Tears from the loss of a father are also more than the tears in the ocean. Loss of a brother, sister, child: in each case, more than the water in the ocean...

"You can’t be responsible right now for things that are going to come in from your past kamma. But you can be responsible for what you’re doing right here. This is why, when the Buddha teaches about kamma, he talks about world systems evolving and devolving, and spreads his net really wide, but then he pulls it back in. The course of the universe, the course of life can go over long periods of time, but it all comes down to actions. Where are actions happening? They’re happening right here. What do they come from? They come from your intentions. So you’re working at the source right here." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Intent"