Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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"

"As [the Buddha] noted, you can’t see all the results of actions here in this lifetime. Some people say, “Everything I’ve seen in life is enough to convince me that kamma works.” Well, No, it’s not. There are plenty of people who do all kinds of horrible unskillful things, yet they’re still alive. They thrive. The Buddha has a long list of people who thrive because they kill, steal, engage in illicit sex, lie, or take intoxicants [Saṁyutta Nikāya 42:13]. They do it with the right people and they do it in the right way to please someone in power, so they actually get rewarded by society in one way or another. But as the Buddha commented, those are only the short-term consequences. You’ve got to take the long-term consequences into consideration as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Rebirth is Relevant"

"As for what other people are thinking or saying or doing, just remember: They can never take you to hell. If you’re going to go to hell, it’s through your own doing. They can’t take you to heaven, either. If you are going to heaven, it’s through your own doing. And you don’t have to worry about heaven and hell in the afterlife. Right here and now, you can see it. Other people can do horrible things, but it’s only when you let what they’re doing get into your mind, and then you start doing horrible things along with them: That’s when it really gets bad. At the same time, no matter how good other people may be, you can always be worried about how much longer that goodness is going to last. Sometimes, the better the person is, the more you’re worried: “It can’t last. So I’m just going to have to hold on to them.” The issue isn’t what other people are doing, it’s how you’re managing your own mind. This is why you have to give importance, give weight to this ability to st...

"[The Buddha] said that what you do right now can have an impact on what you’re experiencing right now. Your kamma coming in from the past is raw materials: the twigs and the branches. But what you’re doing right now makes a difference between whether the twigs and the branches just sit there on this side of the river or whether you tie them together and make them into a raft. Or worse than just sitting here, the worst thing, of course, is piling them up on your shoulder and carrying them around. You have the choice. When the Buddha points out that “Yes, your actions in the present moment, your thoughts, your intentions in the present moment do make a difference,” he’s giving you a real basis for deciding, that there is such a thing as what should be done and what shouldn’t be done. As he says, if you have a teaching that doesn’t even give you a basis for having the concept of what should and shouldn’t be done, you’re still left bewildered the way you were when you were a little ...

"Figure out what your actions are and what the results are, how they’re connected, and which actions give rise to better results than others. This is why we meditate — to develop those powers. So it’s not a matter of you versus the system outside, where you are trustworthy and the system outside is not. Rather, it’s learning how to sort out inside you which perceptions and which thought constructs are actually more trustworthy than others." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Trust in Heedfulness"

"Restraint of the senses: being really careful about how you engage with sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas — realizing, again, that your mind is what goes out and looks for trouble. If the mind were not actively involved in wanting  to see and hear and engage with other senses, it wouldn’t receive any input. There’s an act of the mind that goes out to these things — flows out to these things, as they would say in Thai — and you want to watch for that. Who’s flowing out? Your greed and your anger? Or your discernment? You want your discernment to be the strongest flow, so that when you look at things, you can take them apart and see where they might draw you into lust or anger or greed or fear. Then remind yourself: You don’t have to be drawn in that way.  Again, have a sense of your own power. Don’t let yourself be overpowered by influences from outside. Sensory input is not a given. Remember that it’s a construct. There’s the kamma of how you watch...

"I was talking recently to a group of people who were very wound up in the politics of the world right now. One of them was saying, “You can’t just let evil survive in the world.” Well, evil has been surviving for a long time in the world. When the Buddha left the world, there was evil in the world. There’s been evil all along. The problem is that if you try to wipe evil out of the world, you can become pretty evil yourself. You have to realize that there’s a lot in the world that’s beyond our power." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Metta Isn’t Love"

"Desire for wealth, desire for power: These things can bring a lot of suffering and harm in their wake. And here the Buddha is offering you a totally harmless kind of food, a totally harmless kind of pleasure. Do you really love yourself? If you do, you’d go for the harmless. You’d avoid any kind of harm. As for lack of confidence in yourself, ask yourself, “Can I be with this breath?” Well, yes. “How about this breath?” Yes. In the beginning, content yourself with small victories. As the Buddha said, even just a finger-snap of the desire to be skillful is, in and of itself, meritorious. Sometimes we’re even afraid to want the path, because we’re afraid that we’d be committed to more than we can handle, and the part of the mind that’s not ready to be committed keeps pulling you back. But you can keep reminding yourself, “I’m not totally committed yet. I just want to think this thought: that it would be really good to find a path that puts an end to suffering, to find a path tha...

"Remind yourself that your life isn’t already written in stone, that you’re not a slave to fate or a little nameless cog in the big machine. You’re actually a doer, a mover, a shaper. You can shape your life in the direction you want it to go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Impossible Things" (Meditations1)

"We do have the power to exert control over our intentions right now. And our intentions do shape our experience of the world around us, the world inside us, at least to some extent: enough to make the difference between suffering and not suffering. What we’re experiencing right now is the result of past intentions, plus our current intentions, plus the results of our current intentions. Even though we may not have absolute control over things, and will ultimately have to let them all go, we do have some control over our actions now. And you want to make the most of that fact." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Limits of Control"

"Your actions are what are real, that have the most reality. The world out there is not the issue. The world that you experience comes from your [intentional] actions [kamma]. Your actions are more solid, more powerful than your experience of earth, wind, water, fire, and all the other elements. That’s a pretty radical statement. This is why the Buddha keeps focusing back on what you’re doing right now because what you’re doing right now is the big shaping force in your experience." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "So Little Time" (Meditations8)

"Your mind needs training. You’re going to be better off with a trained mind. After all, as the Buddha said, a trained mind is what brings happiness. You can have everything else in the world going really well for you, but if your mind is a mess, you can create all sorts of suffering. In fact, people with untrained minds who gain wealth and power are the ones who create all the big problems in the world. So remind yourself of how important it is to meditate, and how much you’ll benefit from your meditation." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Home Schooling Your Inner Children"

"Kamma and rebirth are often understood to be teachings of fate and helplessness in the face of unknowable influences from the past. For this reason, they’re often rejected. Many people regard them as Buddhism’s cultural baggage: a set of Indian beliefs that — either because the Buddha wasn’t thinking carefully or because his early followers didn’t stay true to his teachings — got mixed up with the Dhamma, his teaching, even though they don’t fit in with the rest of what he taught. So now that the Dhamma has come to the West, many people believe that it’s time to leave all this unnecessary baggage unclaimed on the carousel so that we can focus on his true message in a way that speaks directly to our own cultural needs. However, the real problem with kamma and rebirth is that we tend to misunderstand what these teachings have to say. This is because Buddhism came to the West at the same time as other Indian religions, and its luggage got mixed up with theirs in transi...

"We want to be able to see why the actions we do for the sake of happiness end up leading to stress and how we can change those ways, so that we can actually act in a way that leads to true happiness. We break things down into very simple components so that we can manage them. We realize that this is a problem we can manage. That’s the good news of the Buddha’s teachings: that even though we may be causing ourselves stress and suffering, we can put an end to it. If our suffering really were caused by things outside that were beyond our power, then there’d be no hope. Or if it were caused by things we were doing that we couldn’t change, there’d be no hope, either. But here we’re making choices. We’re probably not making them all that wisely, but we do have some wisdom. We do have some discernment. It’s just a matter of applying it, giving it a foundation here in the present moment, and then really using it to look carefully to see: Where are we creating unnecessary stress and suff...

"Equanimity is sometimes taught with a defeatist attitude. A defeatist attitude says, basically, that there’s no lasting happiness to be found in the world, so you might as well give up trying to find it. Just learn to accept things as they are and don’t hope for them to be better than what they are. When you give up on your search for happiness, you can be equanimous and content with what you’ve got. That, as I said, is a defeatist attitude. It’s equanimity tinged with regret, disappointment, and a sense of powerlessness. It’s heavy and narrow, a contentment found by lowering your standards for satisfaction. We bow down to the Buddha, though, because he actually has us raise our standards for satisfaction, to accept nothing less than the ultimate happiness. There’s nothing defeatist in his attitude at all. In fact, he called the noble eightfold path the path to victory: You can find a happiness that’s not subject to aging, illness, and death, that’s totally free of s...

"Conviction in the principle of karma requires that you make a commitment not to hedge your bets. You’re going to depend totally on the skillfulness of your own intentions to whatever extent you can develop that skillfulness. That’s the principle to which you have to devote yourself. As for other principles or lack of principles, let them go. Sometimes this feels a little scary. You’re so used to hedging your bets so that at least you’re popular, at least you’ve got connections, so that if the principle of karma doesn’t work out you’ve got something else to fall back on. But to be really committed to the principle of karma, to get the best results from it, you have to be committed. And to be really committed requires repeated acts of commitment. This is why in the Forest tradition so much emphasis is placed on the virtue of courage. Not foolhardiness, but courage. It takes a certain amount of courage to keep the mind centered and still, because otherwise we’re always...

"We live a life full of the power of kamma — old kamma and new. You can’t do anything about old kamma. You have to accept it like a good sport. That’s why you practice equanimity. But as for the new kamma you’re creating right now, you can’t practice equanimity with that. You have to be very concerned about what you’re putting into the system because you realize that this is the only chance you get to make the choice. Once the choice is made and it gets put into the system, then whatever the energy — positive or negative — that’s the sort of energy you’re going to have to experience. So pay attention: What are you putting into the system right now? This is the important thing to focus on. Whatever other people do to you, whatever arises in your body in terms of pains, illnesses, aging, death, or whatever: That’s old kamma that you simply have to learn to take with good humor, with a sense of equanimity. As for what you’re putting into the system right now, that’s ser...

"I was giving a Dhamma talk on kamma up in the Bay Area. After the talk, a woman came up and said, “You know, this made me think, ‘Maybe my life isn’t determined by my DNA after all.’” I was surprised. She’d been going to Dhamma talks for a fair while and yet was still able to maintain the idea that somehow DNA determined everything that was going to happen in her life, everything she was going to do. But then, it is easy to have that view in conjunction with a lot of stuff that’s taught as Dhamma these days: the idea that there’s really no self there, that things are just happening on their own, and the only way to find happiness is to get out of the way. Don’t have any desires for anything to happen differently from the way it is. Just accept things as they are and be done with it. That’s what they say, but that’s not what the Buddha taught. His teachings all start with the power of intention. Your mind is what shapes your experience. You’re not just passive recipients. If we a...

"Then there’s that reflection on karma. That’s where our refuge is. If you look at it, it says: “We’re owners of our actions, heir to our actions, whatever we do for good or for evil, to that will we fall heir.” And you can focus either on the good or the evil. Karma is scary. There are a lot of things we do that are unskillful and will bear results, one way or another. It’s so easy to slip and forget. That’s one of the reasons why you want to be mindful. But there’s also the good side to karma — there’s a lot of good that you can develop with your actions. When the Buddha teaches karma, that’s what he focuses on — the good that can be done. This is why the reflection on karma is meant to give rise to confidence — that you have it within you that you can do this. If your habits are unskillful, you can change them. They’re not written in stone. Past karma doesn’t control everything. In fact, your primary experience is what your intentions are right now. When the Buddha...

"As [the Buddha] noted, you can’t see all the results of actions here in this lifetime. Some people say, “Everything I’ve seen in life is enough to convince me that kamma works.” Well, No, it’s not. There are plenty of people who do all kinds of horrible unskillful things, yet they’re still alive. They thrive. The Buddha has a long list of people who thrive because they kill, steal, engage in illicit sex, lie, or take intoxicants [Saṁyutta Nikāya 42:13]. They do it with the right people and they do it in the right way to please someone in power, so they actually get rewarded by society in one way or another. But as the Buddha commented, those are only the short-term consequences. You’ve got to take the long-term consequences into consideration as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Rebirth is Relevant"