Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"Don’t steal other people’s bad qualities to think about. You never asked their permission to take their bad qualities and to brood over them. If you’re going to steal their qualities, take their good ones and think about those instead. Ajaan Lee also says that if you take the bad words of other people and brood over them, it’s like taking something they’ve spit out and then eating it yourself. And then when you get sick, who are you going to blame?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"Learning how to get along with one another also requires skill. You don’t just do what you feel like doing. You have to think about, “When I act, what are the results going to be? How is this going to impact the people around me?” And then try to have the best kind of impact you can think of." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Happiness as a Skill"

"In his effort to master kamma in such a way as to bring kamma to an end, the Buddha discovered that he had to abandon the contexts of personal narrative and cosmology in which the issue of kamma first presented itself. Both these forms of understanding deal in categories of being and non-being, self and others, but the Buddha found that it was impossible to bring kamma to an end if one thought in such terms. For example, narrative and cosmological modes of thinking would lead one to ask whether the agent who performed an act of kamma was the same as the person experiencing the result, someone else, both, or neither. If one answered that it was the same person, then the person experiencing the result would have to identify not only with the actor, but also with the mode of action, and thus would not be able to gain release from it. If one answered that it was another person, both oneself and another, or neither, then the person experiencing the result would see no nee...

"Make the negative energy the ab normal energy, the things that you rarely put out, and make sure the quiet energy is what’s the dominant and the more normal way that your mind thinks. This way, you begin to see the power of your mind to change the world around you. If you want the world to change to be a better place, you’ve got to start making the mind a better place, so that it sends out a better form of energy." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Energy You Put Out"

"So goodwill [mettā] for yourself means not harming others. And then you start thinking about them. They want happiness too, just like you. It’s just that we live in this world where people have lots of different levels of understanding and levels of behavior, and you have to be forgiving. So when anger comes up, you’ve got a tool to deal with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Guardian Meditations"

"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...

"So we’re not just here to accept whatever comes up on the kammic screen. We’re here to see what’s wrong with what we’re doing and how we can change what we’re doing so that we can do it better. That’s what the four noble truths are all about. If you think of the three characteristics as being the Buddha’s most important teachings, they do tend to point you toward equanimity, in the sense that “Well, I’ve just got to accept that things are inconstant, stressful and not-self. I can’t get a permanent happiness, so I’ve got to accept, be content with whatever I can get.” That’s a very defeatist attitude. Remember, the four noble truths are the basic teaching. They point out that you’re doing something wrong, but you’re going to learn how to do it right. The Buddha says that learning how to do it right is the unexcelled victory. There are going to be some battles. There’s going to be some fighting. So you need strength, but you also need intelligence, the kind of intelligence that thi...

"We’re always worried about our relationships to people outside, but our relationship to ourself is very unskillful and that’s a lot more basic, and a much bigger problem. How do you relate to your own thoughts? How do you relate to your perceptions? Learn how to relate in more skillful ways." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Overcoming Complacency"

"If the Buddha saw that he was talking with people who didn’t have much experience with [generosity and virtue], sometimes he’d stop there. It’s a principle throughout the Canon that developing right view is not just a matter of thinking about right views. It’s also a matter of having some practical experience in putting them into practice, engaging in some of the actions the Buddha recommends. You can have mundane right view, but you’re not ready for transcendent right view [regarding the four noble truths] until you have some time spent in practicing right action, right speech, right mindfulness, and attempting right concentration. That way, right view is not just theory on its own, it’s theory augmented by practice. You begin to develop your understanding a lot more, because you begin to see that the benefits the Buddha is talking about are real." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Graduated Discourse"

"Every little movement of the mind is either skillful or unskillful, so you have to watch for each movement. You can’t just say, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter.” Because it does matter. Unskillful thoughts hide unskillful intentions, and where do these unskillful intentions come from? Have you really looked into them? Sometimes they come from some very basic flaws in our character. So we’ve got to watch out. We have to be very careful." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Fool & the Wise Person"

"Some people actually find it easier to start with thoughts of goodwill [mettā] for someone who’s been a benefactor, a person who has helped them. Whoever you find it easiest, start with that person first. Think about what it means to have goodwill for that person. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to be there for that person all the time, simply that whatever you do or say or think that’s going to have an impact on that person, you don’t want it to harm them. If possible, you want them to act to skillfully, too. Because it’s not that the case that your wishing them happiness is going to be like a magic wand that will light up a little light someplace in their head. After all, there is that phrase: “May they look after themselves with ease,” in other words, may they know how to behave in such a way that actually does lead to true happiness. This is where goodwill goes deeper than just hoping that people have a nice life. You hope that they, too, will act on skillful intentions. I...

"You’ve got karma: You’ve got to keep thinking about that all the time. What kind of life are you creating for yourself if you keep acting on anger? The Buddha said, for one thing, that you make yourself ugly. You end up destroying things that have value. You can destroy friendships very easily. You can destroy things physically and you say and do things that, in the moment, you think are really clever. But when you reflect on them later, you realize you’ve done a lot of harm. So as I said, the first order of business is to see anger as something really harmful. As for the voice that says, “Well, how are you going to get things done in the world? How are you going to change things that need to be changed?” there are lots of ways you can make change without having to be angry about it. In fact, when you can think more calmly and clearly about things, you’re more likely to come up with an effective idea of what should be done." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Anger"

"Anger is just a negative response to something you don’t like. Ill-will is the desire that somebody else suffer. Anger may alert you to a problem, but ill-will has no uses at all. You can think of anger as an alarm bell. When an alarm bell goes off, you don’t need it to keep ringing. You turn off the alarm so that you can think clearly about what needs to be done." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Fabricating Goodwill"

"So when the texts tell us to stick with the precepts in all cases, they’re actually teaching us how to protect our long-term well-being. This doesn’t mean that the precepts leave you totally defenseless against an enemy, just that they force you to think outside the box. If you’re determined not to kill under any circumstances, that determination forces you to think in more creative ways to keep an adversary from taking advantage of you. You learn methods of self-defense that fall short of killing. You put more store in diplomacy and don’t look down on intelligent compromise." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "At War with the Dhamma"

"Direct your thinking specifically to making the mind still. In other words, you don’t try simply to stop thinking altogether, because that doesn’t work. You have to do something that seems a little bit paradoxical: You’re going to think about bringing the mind to stillness, or think about bringing it to a point where it doesn’t have to think. That recognizes steps in the process. Like that old paradox, you have to have a desire to put an end to desire before you can actually get to the end of desire, because life is a constant process of desiring and acting. People tend to lose sight of this, especially when they try to turn the Buddha’s teachings into a philosophy or a philosophical system whose purpose is to step back and take a look at the way the world is and draw a map of the world. Now, the Buddha did draw maps, but instead of, say, drawing a whole set of plans for how the house is built, he simply drew a map to where the exits are. Part of the Buddha’s map to the exits is ...

"The same goes for our actions: We’re not really paying attention to what we’re doing because we’re often thinking about what we’re going to do next. Or we think about what we want to get out of the action and we’re not really looking at what we’re doing. As for the results, again, sometimes we don’t like the results of our actions, so we close our eyes. This is why there’s so much delusion in our lives. When you first look at these three stages of action, it’s pretty disconcerting. You see all the different things in your mind that you really don’t like — all the unskillful voices, all the unskillful motives. This is why you want to get the breath as comfortable as possible so that you can put yourself in a good mood, feeling settled, at ease, so that you can see the mind’s negative states without getting sucked into them, without getting depressed by them, without getting upset: simply, “Oh, yes, there’s that, too.” " ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dealing with Confusion"

"So when we talk about acceptance as a part of the path, we have to be very careful about what it means and what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that you just accept everything as wonderful, learning to be accepting of all things and equanimous around all things. Sometimes equanimity is useful; sometimes it’s not. You accept the fact that your actions do shape your experience, and you accept the fact that there’re going to be a lot of unpleasant things in life because you’ve been unskillful in the past, but you don’t just sit there. You try to figure out what you can do now to act as skillfully as possible, speak as skillfully as possible, think as skillfully as possible, listen as skillfully as possible, respond to pain and pleasure as skillfully as possible. So make use of the insight that our lives are shaped by our actions. The question is not so much what we are, the question is what are we doing? Actually, what we are is the result of actions, both past and present, so ev...

Question: Is it possible to send thoughts of goodwill [mettā] to dead people? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Please do. After all, they’ve been reborn — either that or they’re looking for a place to be reborn — and either way, they can benefit from your kind thoughts of goodwill for them. ~ "Facing Aging, Illness, & Death: The Central Teaching of the Buddha"

"In his effort to master kamma in such a way as to bring kamma to an end, the Buddha discovered that he had to abandon the contexts of personal narrative and cosmology in which the issue of kamma first presented itself. Both these forms of understanding deal in categories of being and non-being, self and others, but the Buddha found that it was impossible to bring kamma to an end if one thought in such terms. For example, narrative and cosmological modes of thinking would lead one to ask whether the agent who performed an act of kamma was the same as the person experiencing the result, someone else, both, or neither. If one answered that it was the same person, then the person experiencing the result would have to identify not only with the actor, but also with the mode of action, and thus would not be able to gain release from it. If one answered that it was another person, both oneself and another, or neither, then the person experiencing the result would see no nee...

"If you meet up with the results of some past bad kamma — suppose somebody does something bad to you — it doesn’t mean that your past kamma compelled them to do something bad. It’s simply that your past kamma left the opening. They saw the opening and they took it. And of course, that becomes their kamma now. The fact that you had that past bad kamma: There are unskillful ways and skillful ways that you can think about it. The unskillful way would be to think, “Well, this person was simply carrying out the dictates of kamma. So the person’s not responsible or is actually doing something good.” That’s unskillful. There’s no excuse for that person’s behavior, because the person did choose to take that opening. The skillful way is to say, “Well, I must have some past bad kamma, so I’ll learn how to take it in stride and not get too worked up about it. And I’ll take it as an incentive to try to be more skillful in the future.” As for times when someone does something real...