Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"If you act with skillful intentions, the results are going to be good. You’re convinced of that. If you act with unskillful intentions, the results are going to be bad. This is very different from what the world tells us. Success in their eyes can often come from being very devious. But the Buddha says genuine success, genuine well-being, requires that you start with a good heart, that you desire to harm no one. You have goodwill [mettā] for all. You take that good intention and you work on it to make it skillful." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "True Values"

"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"

"You always have to look very carefully at what you’re doing, because that’s where you’re going to learn this path. If you spend all your time in abstractions, you miss the path. You don’t see the path happening right in front of you. So you want to be careful about what you do, what you say, what you think, because these things have consequences. And if you’re very careful, you find a level of action that takes you beyond the consequences. But in order to develop that kind of precision, that kind of skill, you have to work on ordinary, everyday actions: what you do, what you say, how you interact with other people around you, the work you take up around the monastery. This is important." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Seven Treasures"

"We’ve all made mistakes in the past, but we’ve all done some good things, too. Focus on the good things. Those are what give you strength to keep on doing more good things. If you focus on the bad things you’ve done, you just start spiraling down and it’s hard to pull yourself up. So focus on the good that you’ve done. Dedicate that to your future, dedicate that to the people you’ve harmed in the past, so that you can live in this world without a sense that you’ve got a big debt. You’re working on paying off your debts, so work at it every day, every day." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focus on the Good"

"The whole purpose of the meditation is to watch yourself in action. As the Buddha said, you find the Dhamma by committing yourself to the practice of the Dhamma and then reflecting on it: watching what you’re doing and perfecting it from there. That’s the real work of the meditation, and it’s a large source of the insight. It’s not something you simply get out of the way before you get to the great experiences. You look at yourself more and more as you’re engaged with intention until you understand what it means to have an intention and how the intention to create a state of becoming creates a place in the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No-Tech Meditation" (Meditations11)

"This is where true happiness is going to be found: in learning how to train your actions. Any loss of that conviction would be fatal to a pursuit of happiness that could be reliable, trustworthy. So that’s going to be a serious loss. Fortunately, the things that would be a serious loss are things that are under your control. You can maintain your virtue. People can offer you all kinds of rewards for breaking the precepts, but you can say No. You can maintain your right view. As for loss of relatives, loss of wealth, loss of your health, that’s going to happen at some point anyhow, sooner or later. You lose these things; you get them back. You get them back; you lose them again. But with loss of right view, loss of your virtue: If you lose that, you’re going to be acting on wrong view, acting in unskillful ways, and that’s going to be for your long-term harm. That’s why it’s a serious loss. But it is under your control. You can prevent that. So you work on that — y...

"Someone this morning expressed the idea, “Well, it’s all going to come out okay in the end.” And the Buddha questions that: “Will there be an end where it all sort of settles in?” We like to think that the world or the universe has some sort of plan behind it. It’s like a nice novel, all the loose ends get tied up in the end. But when you look at people’s lives: How many people’s lives have their loose ends tied up? How many people’s lives end with a nice, satisfactory, esthetically pleasing closure? That’s not the way of the world at all. It’s all unfinished business. People stop their work because they get too old, too weak to do it, or they die before it’s done. It’s not that the work ever really gets finished – it’s just that people have to drop it. Relationships tend to have lots and lots of loose ends that never really get resolved. And so the idea, “Well, it doesn’t really matter because it’s all going to come out in the end”: That’s one of the most destructiv...

"We’ve all made mistakes in the past, but we’ve all done some good things, too. Focus on the good things. Those are what give you strength to keep on doing more good things. If you focus on the bad things you’ve done, you just start spiraling down and it’s hard to pull yourself up. So focus on the good that you’ve done. Dedicate that to your future, dedicate that to the people you’ve harmed in the past, so that you can live in this world without a sense that you’ve got a big debt. You’re working on paying off your debts, so work at it every day, every day." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focus on the Good"

"As you’re engaging the whole mind, that’s when you get to know the whole mind. You have to take responsibility for what’s happening. There’s a quality of integrity underlying all of this. The mind doesn’t settle down? Well, you have to figure out what you’re doing, what you’re doing wrong, and be cheerful enough to admit when you’ve done wrong. A lot of people don’t like the idea of right and wrong. Sometimes they come to the Dhamma, thinking, well, you can get beyond right and wrong just by willing yourself to transcend them. But you can’t get beyond them that way. You get beyond right and wrong by figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong, dropping what’s wrong, working with what’s right until it’s completed the job. Then you can let go of that, too. Until you’ve completed the job, though, you have to be very much concerned with what’s right and wrong, what’s skillful and what’s not." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Engaging the Whole Mind"

"Genuine helpfulness: You see what the other person really needs, and if you’re in a position to provide it, you go ahead. You don’t make a show of helping them just to make a good impression on them. You don’t do it for their sake or anyone else’s sake. You do it for the sake of the practice, for the sake of developing your own goodness. You try to see what needs to be done, and then you go ahead and do it. One of the lessons I learned from my father is there are a lot of jobs that need to be done in the world that nobody wants to do. So they provide a huge, wide-open opportunity for you to develop your goodness with no competition. Look for that kind of job, those kinds of tasks around the monastery or wherever you’re living." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Make Yourself Small"

"The causes will take care of the results. It’s not the case that by imagining results you’re going to get the causes to go in that direction. If that were the case, Right Imagination would be one of the steps on the path. But it’s not. What you want to do is develop the path, develop Right View. So concentration, mindfulness — all the elements of the Eightfold Path — are things to be developed. And where do you find the things to be developed? They’re right here, right in front of your nose. That’s where the work is to be done — not in your anticipation of where you’re going to go, but in paying really close attention to the breath right here and now. This is your path." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Laying the Infrastructure"

"When looking at people around you, it’s important that you get away from your sense of competitiveness, of this person versus that person. You look, not at them, but at their activities. Otherwise you start comparing yourself to the other person: “This person’s better than I am. That person’s worse than I am.” And that brings in questions of conceit, resentment, and competition, which are not really helpful because we’re not here to compete with each other. We’re here to work on ourselves. So again, look at other people simply in terms of their thoughts, their words, their actions. And see what’s an admirable action, what are admirable words, what are admirable ideas, ones you can emulate, ones you can pick up. In this way the fact that we’re living together becomes a help to the practice rather than a hindrance. The same is true when you notice people around you doing things that are not so admirable. Instead of judging the other person, simply judge the actions by...

"By paying attention to the moments when you catch yourself being unskillful, you work with that particular intention. You don’t have to deal with your entire character all at once. Just see what’s happening right here, right now, with that particular lack of skillfulness — because you can deal with individual events. They’re not too much. They’re not overwhelming. And as you develop this quality of being meticulous, you actually accomplish the training." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sweat the Small Stuff"

"Someone asked the other day, “Given the situation in the world right now, what are you supposed to do? Just give up?” And I said, “No. There is the possibility things could collapse. But you work on developing good qualities of the mind in the meantime. Even if you don’t attain your particular goals in the world outside this time around, the fact that you’ve worked on the mind means that you’re carrying something good with you as you go.”" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Patience & Hope"

Question: My friends ask me why it matters which being I will reincarnate as, because it, she, or he will not remember that it, she, or he was me in the former life? Indeed, I have no memories of my former lives. Maybe they were much better, but I do not suffer from it as I do not know. This system sounds like you work really hard all your life for someone else to get the results from all your good actions. What should I tell them? P.S. Personally, I meditate and practice virtue for the benefits it brings me in this very life. Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Are you the same person that you were when you were a child? Yes and no. However, many things that you did when you were a child, like going to school, are definitely benefiting you now. At the time you were a child you felt that “I am me.” Now you feel, “I am me,” even though you now look and act and think like a very different person. The same sort of principle applies whether it’s in the same lifetime or going over to another lifetime. ...

"Our sense of self does have two roles. On the one hand, it’s the experiencer. You’re the one who’s experiencing the pain, experiencing the results of your own actions, the results of other people’s actions. But you’re also the agent. You’re shaping your experience. So when you find yourself in a bad mood, it’s not against the principle of acceptance to try to work your way out of it. After all, what are you accepting? Are you simply accepting the fact that you’re a passive victim of things? The Buddha never asks you to accept that. He just wants you to accept the fact that you have a role in shaping your experience. That’s the essential element in his teaching on conditionality. There are some influences that come in from the past, but there are other things that you have the choice to shape in the present moment. As for what’s happened in the past, you can’t change that. And the effects that you’re feeling from things that happened in the past, you can’t change that. But you do ...

"We’ve all made mistakes in the past, but we’ve all done some good things, too. Focus on the good things. Those are what give you strength to keep on doing more good things. If you focus on the bad things you’ve done, you just start spiraling down and it’s hard to pull yourself up. So focus on the good that you’ve done. Dedicate that to your future, dedicate that to the people you’ve harmed in the past, so that you can live in this world without a sense that you’ve got a big debt. You’re working on paying off your debts, so work at it every day, every day." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Focus on the Good"

"You have to learn how to judge your actions and not come down on yourself for being really bad when you see that you’re making poor judgments or you’ve done something unskillful. You’ve got to develop the attitude of a craftsperson. You’re sitting at your bench, working on building a piece of furniture, and you just realized that you planed the wood a little bit too deeply. So what do you do? Do you throw the wood away? That would be a waste. Do you start yelling at yourself? That wouldn’t accomplish anything. You figure out how to correct for the mistake. And then you move on. Perhaps it’s because we have so few manual skills nowadays that we haven’t developed this faculty of judging a work in progress. But here’s your opportunity to develop it. Remember the basic principles. You’re judging the actions, not yourself as a good or bad person. And the purpose of the judgment is so that you can apply what you’ve learned the next time around. If you’re going to be noticing how other ...

Question: What is the common thread among all ten perfections [pāramīs] that allows you to apply them in daily life? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The common thread is that you always have to think about the long-term consequences of what you’re doing, and to remember that the most important aspect of any activity is what qualities it develops in your own mind. For instance, suppose you’re at work. Your boss has said something really stupid and infuriating. You have to ask yourself, “What would be the best thing for me to say right now that would give the best long-term results?” Now, you may be able to think of a very clever, sarcastic reply, but then you have to ask yourself, “If I let this out of my mouth, what will happen? What kind of person will I become? What kinds of qualities will I be developing?” That’s a simple example. So, think about the long-term consequences of what you’re doing — and we’re talking really long-term: throughout this lifetime and into future ones. That’s the pe...

"Where do you go next? Well, you don’t have to worry about that right now. As long as you’ve been doing good things in your life, you go to a good place. Where do the good things come from? They come from a mind that’s well rested, a mind that has a good sense of well-being here in the present moment. So when you’re working on the present here, you’re helping to get the future covered as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Housecleaning"