Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"The fact that you’ve done bad things in the past doesn’t mean you’re a bad person now . A lot of people are embarrassed to think about the fact that they may have committed some pretty bad karma in the past. But we’re all in that boat, simply that some people’s karma is showing now and other people’s is going to show later. Because you can’t look into your karmic account and figure out what the running balance is or when good things are going to come, when bad things are going to come. The Buddha’s image is more like a field. You plant seeds, and some of the seeds sprout quickly, some seeds sprout slowly. What you’re seeing right now are the seeds that are sprouting right now, but you don’t know what else you have planted in that field. You don’t know what else other people have in their fields. Use this thought to depersonalize the issue." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma Storms"

"If Buddhist groups are to bring reconciliation to modern society, they have to master the hard work of reconciliation among themselves. Only then will their example be an inspiration to others. And even if their impact is not enough to prevent a general descent into the madness of fascism, terror, and war, they will be planting seeds of civilization that can sprout when the madness — like a fire across a prairie — has passed." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reconciliation, Right & Wrong"

Question 11. If hurting others tends to lead to illness in the next lifetime, is illness in this lifetime always the result of past kamma? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: As with every other experience of pain, illness can come from a wide variety of kammic factors, past and present. You’ve already noticed this yourself: When you intentionally stick your finger in a fire, the resulting pain doesn’t come from an action in your previous lifetime. It comes from a choice you made here and now. The Buddha himself argued against the idea that all pain comes from past kamma, and in the course of his argument he provided a list of other factors that could give rise to illness. The list comes from the medical beliefs of his day, and although it includes a lot of other causes besides past kamma — things like a chemical imbalance in the elements in the body, the change of the seasons, or poor care of the body — all the causes included in the list come under what, in another discourse, he ident...

"A proper understanding of karma also helps to correct the false idea that if people are suffering they deserve to suffer, so you might as well just leave them alone. When you catch yourself thinking in those terms, you have to keep four principles in mind. First, remember that when you look at people, you can’t see all the karmic seeds from their past actions. They may be experiencing the results of past bad actions, but you don’t know when those seeds will stop sprouting. Also, you have no idea what other seeds, whatever wonderful latent potentials, will sprout in their place. There’s a saying in some Buddhist circles that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions. This principle, however, is based on a basic misperception: that we each have a single karmic account, and what we see in the present is the current running balance in each person’s account. Actually, no one’s...

"If Buddhist groups are to bring reconciliation to modern society, they have to master the hard work of reconciliation among themselves. Only then will their example be an inspiration to others. And even if their impact is not enough to prevent a general descent into the madness of fascism, terror, and war, they will be planting seeds of civilization that can sprout when the madness — like a fire across a prairie — has passed." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reconciliation, Right & Wrong"

"The fact that you’ve done bad things in the past doesn’t mean you’re a bad person now . A lot of people are embarrassed to think about the fact that they may have committed some pretty bad karma in the past. But we’re all in that boat, simply that some people’s karma is showing now and other people’s is going to show later. Because you can’t look into your karmic account and figure out what the running balance is or when good things are going to come, when bad things are going to come. The Buddha’s image is more like a field. You plant seeds, and some of the seeds sprout quickly, some seeds sprout slowly. What you’re seeing right now are the seeds that are sprouting right now, but you don’t know what else you have planted in that field. You don’t know what else other people have in their fields. Use this thought to depersonalize the issue." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma Storms"

"[Ajaan Suwat] came from a very large peasant family, and large peasant families usually don’t have much to hand down to their children. He met a forest monk who said, “Hey look, it’s your actions that matter. And the fact that you’re poor now: You may have not been generous in the past, but you’ve got the opportunity now to practice the Dhamma.” So this quality of conviction is what sees us through. When things are going easy, the idea of having conviction doesn’t speak that much to us. But when things get hard: We look at our lives, we look at the people around us, the situation we’re in — and the last thing you need is something that teaches you to just give in. The teaching of karma is precisely what tells you not to give in. It places power in your hands. You have to think, “Well, I may have misused that power in the past,” and learn to accept that fact as a good sport. We all have bad karma in our backgrounds. It’s not the case that you look at a person right now...

"The Buddha’s image of each person’s karma is seeds sown in a field: Some seeds are sprouting right now; others are waiting to sprout. When you see the sufferings of others, you’re seeing only their seeds that are currently sprouting. The good seeds waiting to sprout, you can’t see. At the same time, you don’t know what bad seeds are lying in wait in your own field. Still, the most important seeds in your field are the ones you’re planting right now, because they can determine whether you’ll suffer from your old seeds or not. So you look for the good old seeds in other people’s fields that may be ready to sprout, and try to get them to plant good new seeds so that they won’t have to suffer from any bad seeds already sprouting. After all, that’s how you’d like them to treat you when your bad seeds start to mature. Acting in this way, you create good karma for yourself, and a more humane world all around." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma is Individual"

"Even with kamma, the Buddha said that if you ask, “Well, the fact that I’m suffering this right now or that right now: Exactly what kamma did I do in the past that caused that?” his advice would be, “Don’t go there.” If you tried to trace that back, he said, it could drive you crazy, because kamma is so complex. The important things to know are the basic principles. One is that if you do something with a skillful intention — i.e., one free from greed, aversion, and delusion — the result is going to be happy. If you do something with an unskillful intention, the result is going to be miserable. And there are gradations. And because you’re doing things all the time, you’ve got lots of kamma. Another thing he has you realize is that the fact you’re a human being means that you’ve got both good and bad kamma. And it’s also important to realize that not everything you’ve done shows up right now. There’s a mistaken belief that we have one kamma account and that what we see right now ...

"The fact that you’ve done bad things in the past doesn’t mean you’re a bad person now . A lot of people are embarrassed to think about the fact that they may have committed some pretty bad karma in the past. But we’re all in that boat, simply that some people’s karma is showing now and other people’s is going to show later. Because you can’t look into your karmic account and figure out what the running balance is or when good things are going to come, when bad things are going to come. The Buddha’s image is more like a field. You plant seeds, and some of the seeds sprout quickly, some seeds sprout slowly. What you’re seeing right now are the seeds that are sprouting right now, but you don’t know what else you have planted in that field. You don’t know what else other people have in their fields. Use this thought to depersonalize the issue." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma Storms"

Question 6. Is it true that “If you want to see a person’s past actions, look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, look at his present actions” ? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: That’s much too simplistic. It implies that you have a single kamma account, like a bank account, with your present situation showing the running balance. As mentioned above, kamma is like seeds in a field. You’re planting kamma seeds in your field with every intention, and those seeds mature at different rates. So you’ve got lots of kamma accounts at different stages of development. All you can see at any one moment are the seeds that are currently sprouting. As for the other seeds that haven’t yet sprouted, good or bad, you can’t see those at all. ~ Karma Q & A, a Study Guide

"That’s what the teaching of karma’s all about: There are choices here. And the complexity of karma is what gives us our hope, that even though some bad things may be coming up in the mind right now, there’s also a potential for goodness in their someplace. There are the seeds that have been planted someplace. So you want to look for those." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Potentials for Good"

"The Buddha once said that the results of action are an imponderable, which may sound strange given that his teaching on action is so basic to all his other teachings. The main principle is simple: You do, or say, or think something with a skillful intention, and the results are going to be good; you do, or say, or think something with unskillful intentions, and the results are going to be bad. That’s simple — but the problem is that that simple principle gets iterated many, many, many times. And that makes its results complex. How many times in the course of the day have you done something, or said something, or thought something? You can’t count all the actions, and that’s just in one day. And it spreads out over lifetimes. You begin to realize that you’ve got a lot of things going on here. Some of the actions will give results quickly; others will give them slowly. Others are ready to give the results, but you’re not watering them, so they don’t give the results. ...

"If Buddhist groups are to bring reconciliation to modern society, they have to master the hard work of reconciliation among themselves. Only then will their example be an inspiration to others. And even if their impact is not enough to prevent a general descent into the madness of fascism, terror, and war, they will be planting seeds of civilization that can sprout when the madness — like a fire across a prairie — has passed." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reconciliation, Right & Wrong"

"[Ajaan Suwat] came from a very large peasant family, and large peasant families usually don’t have much to hand down to their children. He met a forest monk who said, “Hey look, it’s your actions that matter. And the fact that you’re poor now: You may have not been generous in the past, but you’ve got the opportunity now to practice the Dhamma.” So this quality of conviction is what sees us through. When things are going easy, the idea of having conviction doesn’t speak that much to us. But when things get hard: We look at our lives, we look at the people around us, the situation we’re in — and the last thing you need is something that teaches you to just give in. The teaching of karma is precisely what tells you not to give in. It places power in your hands. You have to think, “Well, I may have misused that power in the past,” and learn to accept that fact as a good sport. We all have bad karma in our backgrounds. It’s not the case that you look at a person right now and you ca...

"A lot of our problem with kamma is that we don’t have a sense of how to relate to it in an emotionally positive way. But when you think about it in terms of gratitude and generosity, you realize that this power we have to make choices is important. It’s to be valued. You want to protect it. You want to train it. As for the knowledge that we’ve done unskillful things in the past, the Buddha said the proper way of thinking about that is that as soon as you realize it’s unskillful, you make up your mind you’re going to refrain from it, you’re not going to make that mistake again. That’s it. As he says, feelings of remorse over the mistake, strong feelings of guilt, the feeling you see in a dog when it knows it’s done something wrong, gets on its back, and wags its tail, hoping you’ll forgive it: That’s not the kind of reaction the Buddha advocates. Because if you let remorse take over, then you feel more negative about yourself, and because you don’t like these negative feelings, th...

"Some people feel they don’t deserve happiness. Well, the issue of deserving and not deserving happiness never comes up in the Buddha’s teachings. There’s simply the issue of cause and effect. A good action, an action motivated by a skillful intention, leads to good results. It’s impersonal. Unskillful actions motivated by unskillful motivations lead to pain. Each of us has a lot of actions in the past, so there’s bound to be good mixed with bad. You don’t have to wear off the bad kamma before you can enjoy the good. You simply learn to make the best use of both pleasure and pain when they come along. The Buddha never talks about having to wear off your old kamma before you can gain awakening. The idea that meditation is a purification that burns away your old kamma is actually a Jain teaching that he ridiculed. And you wonder what he would have said about a passage I read the other day in a Buddhist magazine — that if you can maintain equanimity during sex, that can...

"Often you may find that, given your past kamma, current circumstances are not all that good. But remember several things: One, past kamma is not totally determining what’s going to happen in the future; you make decisions from moment to moment. Two, what you see right now is not the sum total or running balance of your kamma account. Think of your past actions more like lots of accounts, or lots of seeds that can sprout and grow and blossom at different times. You may be going through a fallow period right now when not many good seeds are blossoming and some bad seeds are blossoming instead, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have good seeds in your kamma accounts. So what you want to do is to work right now on what the skillful decision is right now." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Truths of the Will"

"The Buddha’s image of each person’s karma is seeds sown in a field: Some seeds are sprouting right now; others are waiting to sprout. When you see the sufferings of others, you’re seeing only their seeds that are currently sprouting. The good seeds waiting to sprout, you can’t see. At the same time, you don’t know what bad seeds are lying in wait in your own field. Still, the most important seeds in your field are the ones you’re planting right now, because they can determine whether you’ll suffer from your old seeds or not. So you look for the good old seeds in other people’s fields that may be ready to sprout, and try to get them to plant good new seeds so that they won’t have to suffer from any bad seeds already sprouting. After all, that’s how you’d like them to treat you when your bad seeds start to mature. Acting in this way, you create good karma for yourself, and a more humane world all around." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Karma is Individual"

"The essence of action [kamma] is the intention that drives it. Intentions can be either unskillful — leading to pain; or skillful — leading to pleasure. As the Buddha discovered, unskillful intentions are rooted in greed, aversion, or delusion; skillful intentions are rooted in states of mind free from greed, aversion, and delusion. Skillful intentions are a special class of good intentions, in that well-meaning intentions inspired by delusion can lead to pain. In other words, not all good intentions are skillful, but all skillful intentions are good. A good intention has to be free from delusion in order to be truly skillful. The effects of action can be experienced both now, in the immediate present, and into the future. As a result, your present experience is composed of three things: the results of past intentions with long-term effects, present intentions, and the immediate results of present intentions. Past intentions provide the raw material from which present intentions ...