Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"Kamma works regardless of what power you have. It may explain a lot of suffering, but it doesn’t justify the suffering. It just simply says that this is why it’s there, but the way kamma works also offers the way out. So even though we’ve done bad things in the past, we don’t have to suffer for them. Think of that image of the salt crystal: You put it into a cup of water and you can’t drink the water. You put it into a river of clean water and you can still drink the water — because there so much more water than there is salt. The water stands for the state of mind in the present moment. The salt stands for your past bad kamma. How expansive the water of your mind is going to be is your choice right now. So take advantage of the freedom of choice that you’ve got right here, right now. That can make you happy." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Happy about Kamma"

Question: Kamma and Rebirth, second try. How does individual kamma migrate from this life to the next one? Is this a relevant question? If no, how can our next life be better if we don’t have the benefit of a kind of karmic legacy? Thank you, Ajaan, for clarifying this “critical” question. Thanissaro Bhikkhu: It’s not a matter of migrating. Our kamma is actually what creates our experience of the next life — or rather, it supplies the raw material for our experience of the next life. When we leave this life and go to the next one, it doesn’t feel like we’re going someplace else. Just as we have a sense of our present life as “right here,” the next life will also have a sense of being “right here,” right at our consciousness. It’s like going from one dream to another. Even though the appearance of the location in the second dream is different from the location in the first, it still has a sense of happening “right here” just as the first one did. To give another examp...

"When the Buddha discourages speculation about karma, he’s discouraging the kind of speculation that says, “Why did this particular event happen right here, right now, to me?” If you try to trace things back, you go crazy. Karma is very complex in its working out, but simple in its basic principle: that if you act on skillful intentions, you get good results; if you act on unskillful intentions, you get bad results. And you can learn how to make your intentions skillful by acting on the best intentions you can think of. When you find the results are not good, you talk it over with those who are more advanced on the path. You reflect on what you did, where it might be wrong, where there was some delusion even in your good intentions. That’s how you learn. This is what the Buddha taught to Rāhula and it applies all the way along the path. That’s the kind of thing you need to know about karma. ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Suffering Starts Before Life"

"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...

"It’s so easy to get caught up in the narratives that you spin about, “Well, how about if this happened?” Or, “How about if that happened?” Or, “I wished that had happened. I wish this had happened.” That’s the mind just creating worlds for itself right here and now. Again, the Buddha reminds you, no matter how wonderful the world, it all comes down to this: aging, illness, death, and separation. Then there’s the whole issue of karma: What did you do in order to maintain those things before they left you? That’s what you’ll be left with: the results of your actions, the imprint that they leave on the mind and the worlds they create for you." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Worldly Narratives"

"There’s a story where Somdet Toh was approached by a young monk complaining about another monk who had hit him. And Somdet Toh told him, “Well, you hit him before that.” The young monk replied, “No I didn’t. He just came up and hit me out of nowhere.” And Somdet Toh kept saying, “No, you hit him first.” So the young monk went to complain to the abbot of another monastery. The other monastery’s abbot came over and asked Somdet Toh what he was talking about. Somdet Toh said, “Well, obviously, he hit the other monk sometime in a previous lifetime.” In other words, if you try to trace things back to where a problem started, you go crazy. Because it just goes back and back and back, and there’s no sense of who was the original instigator. Which means that when you’re thinking about issues in the past, you just have to let them go. Just say, “Whatever it was, it was a karmic back and forth. Do you want to still continue it?” There’s another story — it’s in the Commentary — o...

"Our actions are the important things in the world. What we’re doing right here, right now: That’s the most important thing — which is very different from the message that we get from everybody else. The news presented by the media is about what somebody else is doing someplace else: They tell us that that’s more important and that you’re just a loser sitting here watching TV or listening to the radio or on the web, absorbing what the real actors in the world are doing. Then you get sucked into the illusion that, “Well, maybe if I send out a message, I’ll become an important actor, too.” But, actually, the really important things in your life are things that nobody else can know: what you’re doing in your mind. This is important because what you do in the mind then becomes the basis for what you say, what you do, what you think. So that’s one way to tune into the Dhamma. When you see or hear anything that helps to support that, you know you’re seeing and listening to ...

"When an intention comes up to do or say or think something, you want to know what that intention is. It’s a teaching that the Buddha teaches his son Rahula: to look at his intentions before he does or says or thinks anything. I’ve heard a lot of people say, “Gee, that’s an awful lot of attention to something like that,” because they have so many other things they have to pay attention to. Well, it turns out that the other things you’re paying attention to are often the results of your own past actions. It’s much better to start at the very beginning to make sure that the new intentions coming out are well-formed. So try to stay right here. Find ways of making the mind happy to be right here, so that it has the energy and the inclination to want to look into what’s going on in the mind and straightening that out. Once you’ve straightened out the mind, everything else gets straightened out further down the line." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Straightened Intentions...

" “We’re related through our actions” The connections we have in life with different people are created by our actions: things that we’ve done together with other people or to other people or for other people. These create the connections that we have with the people around us. Interconnectedness is a very popular teaching in Buddhism, especially nowadays, but it’s funny that people like to talk about interconnectedness without the teaching on karma. They turn to dependent co-arising as a model for interconnectedness, this web of connections where one factor can’t exist without a whole lot of other factors, but they neglect to realize that dependent co-arising is a teaching on how ignorance is connected with suffering, how craving is connected with suffering. It’s the kind of connectedness you want to cut, not the kind you want to celebrate. Connectedness through karma can go either way — the connections can be good, or they can be bad. So you want to foster the good ...

"You understand the principle of karma inside, because karma is not just something that acts between lifetimes. It’s happening all the time. With every intentional action, there’s going to be a result. Some of those results show up right away, and some of them show up over time. You want to be able to see those connections. Observing the precepts — having precepts that are pleasing to the noble ones — means you’re going to stay right here. That’s your intention, and the results will have to be right here as well. That’s why it’s easier to see the connection between the two. That’s how the practice of virtue and concentration then leads to discernment, because discernment is all about seeing cause and effect. You start out by taking the Buddha’s word for it: You take his teachings as a working assumption. But then, when you’re really here — focused, still — then you can start seeing the truth of those teachings for yourself. So, the emphasis on virtue, concentration, and discernmen...

"So for this question the mind always has — “What should I do now?” — [the Buddha] provides an answer for it. This is why the Dhamma is so good for the mind, so right for the mind, because it answers your burning question: You’ve got these responsibilities. How do you handle them, for the sake of a happiness that’s worth the effort that goes into it? The Buddha doesn’t waste his time talking about totally irrelevant things. After all, he said he learned a lot of things in the course of his awakening that he didn’t talk about. Why? Because it wouldn’t help with the solution to this problem: Why are we suffering? What are we doing that’s creating the suffering and what can we do to stop? He was very critical of teachers who would engage in what he called “bombast”: flowery words, beautiful sentiments that don’t offer any guidance that could be applied to that question, “What should I do next? What is the wisest thing to do next?” So we should take his teachings and app...

"As the Buddha showed, the three characteristics — or rather, the three perceptions [stress, inconstancy, not-self] — should be applied only in certain times and certain places. There was once a young monk who was asked by a wanderer from another sect what the results of karma were and the monk said, “Stress.” Then he went back to the Buddha and asked him if he’d given the right answer and the Buddha said, “No. When asked about karma, you talk about how skillful karma leads to pleasure, how unskillful karma leads to pain.” Another one of the other monks piped up and said, “Well, wasn’t he thinking about the fact that all feelings are stressful?” And the Buddha replied, essentially, that was not the time or place for that teaching. So, an important part of strategy is knowing which teachings to use when. And not jumping the gun or trying to skip over things." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Noble Warrior's Path" (Meditations8)

"Fabrication, this process of making, comes before phenomena themselves. We hear so often how people shape their reality, how our perceptions tend to filter the ways we see reality, and yet we don’t see it as it’s actually happening, even though it happens very directly right here. Even in your own sense of the body there are lots of different sensations coming in, through the various nerve ends. The mind has its habits for selecting among these sensations to present itself with a picture of what’s going on. Sometimes the physical sensations get mixed up with the mental sensations, for lots of mental information is coming in at the same time. And so we select things, block some things out, highlight others, to create the story of our mind, our sense of what’s going on in here. And there’s ignorance underlying it all. What we’re trying to do here is to replace that ignorance with clear knowing. This is why we bring the mind to the present moment: so we can watch this process as it ...

"Our actions are the important things in the world. What we’re doing right here, right now: That’s the most important thing — which is very different from the message that we get from everybody else. The news presented by the media is about what somebody else is doing someplace else: They tell us that that’s more important and that you’re just a loser sitting here watching TV or listening to the radio or on the web, absorbing what the real actors in the world are doing. Then you get sucked into the illusion that, “Well, maybe if I send out a message, I’ll become an important actor, too.” But, actually, the really important things in your life are things that nobody else can know: what you’re doing in your mind. This is important because what you do in the mind then becomes the basis for what you say, what you do, what you think. So that’s one way to tune into the Dhamma. When you see or hear anything that helps to support that, you know you’re seeing and listening to the Dhamma. A...

 "When Westerners went over to Thailand to study with the great ajaans, they often found they had problems with the heat, the bugs, and the general hardships. The ajaans would teach them a lot about equanimity and patience — so much so that, in some cases, that seemed to be the only message that got through. This may be why we sometimes hear craving, the cause of suffering, defined as wanting things outside to be different from what they are — the implication being that if you accept things as they are, and are okay with things as they are, then you’re not going to suffer. All you need is some contentment, some patience, some equanimity. But when the Buddha explained craving, it was something much deeper than that. The equanimity that comes from just accepting things in the senses the Buddha called worldly equanimity. It’s the lowest stage of equanimity, and there are two stages higher than that. There’s the equanimity that comes from getting the mind into good concentration and t...

"Learn how to be a good storyteller, telling yourself the right stories, stories that will bring you into the present with a sense of confidence in your own abilities, with a sense of well-being, a sense of the importance of stilling the mind. No matter what the stories are — no matter what other people have done, no matter what you’ve done — there’s a way of looking at them that can put the mind at rest. To try to find that way: This is what all the teachings on kamma, all the teachings on the sublime attitudes, are about. You weave new stories in the mind, stories in which you have a change of heart, new stories that come together right here, enabling you to stay right here with a sense of well-being, clarity, concentration, mindfulness, and discernment. Without anything tugging you back into the past, pulling you into the future, you’re able to just be right here, right now, aware right here, right now, healing the mind right here, right now. That’s how you use the mind’s story...

"Our problem is that we tend to be conspiracy theorists. We want to know: What’s happening behind the scenes? Who’s operating the lasers that shot lightning over northern California last year? We have a sense of “our self” and we have a sense of the world in which “our self” operates, but those ideas are behind-the-scenes ideas. The Buddha tries to reduce them to what’s on the surface. The world, he says, is simply events of the six sense spheres, and the feelings that arise from contact, all of which are happening right here. The same with your sense of self: It’s just the aggregates. What are they? They’re events. They’re actions that are happening right here on this level. The more you try to elaborate a theory that gets behind, behind, behind the scenes, the further you’re getting away from what the Buddha wants you to look at: What are the patterns right on the surface?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "On the Surface of Things"

" “We’re related through our actions” The connections we have in life with different people are created by our actions: things that we’ve done together with other people or to other people or for other people. These create the connections that we have with the people around us. Interconnectedness is a very popular teaching in Buddhism, especially nowadays, but it’s funny that people like to talk about interconnectedness without the teaching on karma. They turn to dependent co-arising as a model for interconnectedness, this web of connections where one factor can’t exist without a whole lot of other factors, but they neglect to realize that dependent co-arising is a teaching on how ignorance is connected with suffering, how craving is connected with suffering. It’s the kind of connectedness you want to cut, not the kind you want to celebrate. Connectedness through karma can go either way — the connections can be good, or they can be bad. So you want to foster the good ...

"As Ajaan Suwat used to say, each of us has one person. You’re responsible for yourself. You can’t be responsible for other people, but you can provide a good example. This is what the Buddha did. He showed that a human being can, through his or her own efforts, find freedom from suffering. He didn’t go out and release people from their suffering, but he did show them that there’s a way. And that was enough. That opened people’s minds to new possibilities. That in and of itself is quite a gift. Otherwise, we go through life thinking, “Well, this is as good as it gets. We might as well learn to content ourselves with fighting over what’s out there.” The image the Buddha gave is of a pond that’s gradually growing drier and drier, becoming just a puddle. The fish in the pond are fighting over what little water that’s left. As long as you think that the only happiness in life lies getting that water, you’re going to resign yourself to fighting for it. But if you realize that if you de...

"You start out with mindfulness. The Buddha teaches you to be mindful of the body in and of itself, feelings in and of themselves, mind states, mental qualities in and of themselves. Why? So that you can be really clear on what your actions are and what the results are. If you’re concerned with other issues — as the Buddha says, “things in the world,” things that other people are doing — you miss what you’re doing. So you focus right here, get yourself in the present moment, not simply because the present moment is a good moment in and of itself, but because it’s the only place where you’re going to see your intentions in action." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Giving Rise to Discernment" (Meditations1)