Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"[The Buddha] recommends having a sense of love for yourself, in the sense that you don’t want to act in any way that would cause you harm down the line. And if you really care about yourself, you’re also not going to cause harm to any other people at all, because if you can harm them, then there’s going to be trouble coming back. If your happiness depends on their misery, they’re not going to stand for it. Even if they can’t get you, your kamma will, at least to some extent." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "See Yourself as Active Verbs" (Meditations10)

"There’s that paradox that we so often encounter when we chant before the meditation: First are the contemplations of aging, illness and death, inconstancy, stress, not-self; thinking about how the things that we tend to identify with as us or ours, really aren’t us or ours, and ultimately, lie beyond our control. And we live in a world that’s swept away, with no protection. Whatever we have we will have to leave behind, and yet we’re still a slave to craving: All of that on the one hand. Then on the other hand, the chant: “May I be happy.” It sounds so wistful in face of all those other contemplations of how things are. It sounds pretty hopeless, but the Buddha didn’t teach us to be hopeless. When he pointed out the negative side of the world, it wasn’t just to say, “Okay, give up hope all ye who have been born here.” It was to help us realize that the things we’ve been contenting ourselves with for so long are not really worth contentment, but there is something better — and t...

“We suffer [householder] grief and so we look for [householder] joy in terms of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. When we don’t get what we want, that brings more grief, but we turn around to look for joy in the same places. What the Buddha wants us to do is to turn our attention to what he calls renunciate grief, renunciate joy, renunciate equanimity. Renunciate grief is when you reflect on how you haven’t attained what you want in terms of freeing the mind from suffering. You haven’t reached the goal of the path. Renunciate joy is the joy that comes when you have  reached the goal. And then renunciate equanimity is the peace and equanimity that come when you know the path is completed. One of the Buddha’s most interesting tactics is that when we suffer from householder grief, the way to get ourselves above and beyond that is to try to transform it, not into householder joy, but into renunciate grief. Householder grief and joy, he says, don’t provide u...

"There’s a sense of joy in seeing that the teachings on kamma really work: You do skillful things and there will be rewards. That’s a somewhat more impersonal principle, but it lifts the mind to a higher state, because it’s getting “you” out of the way. Think about it: What are the attitudes in your mind that would interfere with empathetic joy? They’re all very childish. One is if you see someone who has something that you want but you don’t have, and you feel resentment, jealousy, envy. But when you’re able to overcome that and take yourself out of the picture, that heightens the concentration. There are also cases where people have done things that lead to happiness, who acted skillfully in the past, but they’re not skillful anymore. In fact, they’ve taken the results of their past skillful actions and now they’re abusing them — and you don’t like it, you don’t want to see them be happy, you feel they don’t deserve their happiness. But when you think in the terms of the princip...

"So when we talk about having faith in the principle of karma, it’s not just saying, “Oh, yes, I think that’s a good idea.” It means that you have faith in the people who are teaching it. And you have so much faith that you actually try to act in line with it. The Buddha makes this point over and over again — your actions show what you really believe in. So when you believe in something, make sure that your actions are good. That provides you not only with the theory but also with the appropriate emotions — a sense of saṃvega, a sense of pasada, heedfulness, equanimity — as these things are needed. This way, the teaching on karma is not just something that you give your intellectual assent to. It’s something you assent to with your whole heart and you carry it out into your actions. Because this is how you benefit the most from it — as you bring your actions into line with the theory." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Faith in Karma"

"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...

"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 analyzes th...

"So when we talk about having faith in the principle of karma, it’s not just saying, “Oh, yes, I think that’s a good idea.” It means that you have faith in the people who are teaching it. And you have so much faith that you actually try to act in line with it. The Buddha makes this point over and over again — your actions show what you really believe in. So when you believe in something, make sure that your actions are good. That provides you not only with the theory but also with the appropriate emotions — a sense of saṃvega, a sense of pasada, heedfulness, equanimity — as these things are needed. This way, the teaching on karma is not just something that you give your intellectual assent to. It’s something you assent to with your whole heart and you carry it out into your actions. Because this is how you benefit the most from it — as you bring your actions into line with the theory." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Faith in Karma"

"[The Buddha] recommends having a sense of love for yourself, in the sense that you don’t want to act in any way that would cause you harm down the line. And if you really care about yourself, you’re also not going to cause harm to any other people at all, because if you can harm them, then there’s going to be trouble coming back. If your happiness depends on their misery, they’re not going to stand for it. Even if they can’t get you, your kamma will, at least to some extent." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "See Yourself as Active Verbs" (Meditations10)

"The reflection on how all living beings are the owners of their actions is meant to induce samvega — realizing that wherever you might go in the cosmos, even in the deva realms, kamma still reigns. There’s no place anywhere where you can come to the end of having to keep on making the effort to act skillfully unless you make it to nibbāna ." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reflection on Kamma"

"[The Buddha] recommends having a sense of love for yourself, in the sense that you don’t want to act in any way that would cause you harm down the line. And if you really care about yourself, you’re also not going to cause harm to any other people at all, because if you can harm them, then there’s going to be trouble coming back. If your happiness depends on their misery, they’re not going to stand for it. Even if they can’t get you, your kamma will, at least to some extent." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "See Yourself as Active Verbs" (Meditations10)

"The reflection on how all living beings are the owners of their actions is meant to induce samvega — realizing that wherever you might go in the cosmos, even in the deva realms, kamma still reigns. There’s no place anywhere where you can come to the end of having to keep on making the effort to act skillfully unless you make it to nibbāna ." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reflection on Kamma"

"It’s good to think every day about the huge length of time that we’ve been around. That helps put things into perspective. As the Buddha said, the amount of tears you’ve shed is greater than the water in the oceans. The amount of blood you’ve shed, having had your head cut off — for having been a thief, for having been a highway robber, for having been an adulterer — in each case, is more than the water in the oceans. It’s good to think about that vast stretch of time, to give rise to a sense of samvega as motivation to want to get out. Because as the Buddha saw, we can go to many different kinds of rebirth, up and down, and there’s no place where you can stay and say, “Okay, that’s it.” You rise and then you fall. You fall and then you rise. Ajaan Maha Boowa once made a comment that people who like to plan their next life really don’t believe in rebirth. They say, “Okay, I’ll make merit here, and that’ll take care of everything next time around.” I saw this in Thai...

"So when we talk about having faith in the principle of karma, it’s not just saying, “Oh, yes, I think that’s a good idea.” It means that you have faith in the people who are teaching it. And you have so much faith that you actually try to act in line with it. The Buddha makes this point over and over again — your actions show what you really believe in. So when you believe in something, make sure that your actions are good. That provides you not only with the theory but also with the appropriate emotions — a sense of saṃvega, a sense of pasada, heedfulness, equanimity — as these things are needed. This way, the teaching on karma is not just something that you give your intellectual assent to. It’s something you assent to with your whole heart and you carry it out into your actions. Because this is how you benefit the most from it — as you bring your actions into line with the theory. When the Buddha gained awakening, he learned an awful lot of things. But he taught only the th...

"[The Buddha] recommends having a sense of love for yourself, in the sense that you don’t want to act in any way that would cause you harm down the line. And if you really care about yourself, you’re also not going to cause harm to any other people at all, because if you can harm them, then there’s going to be trouble coming back. If your happiness depends on their misery, they’re not going to stand for it. Even if they can’t get you, your kamma will, at least to some extent." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "See Yourself as Active Verbs" (Meditations10)

"It’s good to think every day about the huge length of time that we’ve been around. That helps put things into perspective. As the Buddha said, the amount of tears you’ve shed is greater than the water in the oceans. The amount of blood you’ve shed, having had your head cut off — for having been a thief, for having been a highway robber, for having been an adulterer — in each case, is more than the water in the oceans. It’s good to think about that vast stretch of time, to give rise to a sense of samvega as motivation to want to get out. Because as the Buddha saw, we can go to many different kinds of rebirth, up and down, and there’s no place where you can stay and say, “Okay, that’s it.” You rise and then you fall. You fall and then you rise. Ajaan Maha Boowa once made a comment that people who like to plan their next life really don’t believe in rebirth. They say, “Okay, I’ll make merit here, and that’ll take care of everything next time around.” I saw this in Thailand. Ther...