Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"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"

"When you forgive someone who’s wronged you, it doesn’t erase that person’s karma in having done wrong. This is why some people think that forgiveness has no place in the karmic universe of the Buddha’s teachings, and that it’s incompatible with the practice of what he taught. But that’s not so. Forgiveness may not be able to undo old bad kamma, but it can prevent new bad karma from being done. This is especially true with the bad kamma that in Pali is called vera . Vera is often translated as “hostility,” “animosity,” or “antagonism,” but it’s a particular instance of these attitudes: the vengeful animosity that wants to get back at someone for perceived wrongs. This attitude is what has no place in Buddhist practice. Patience can weaken it, but forgiveness is what clears it out of the way. The Dhammapada , a popular collection of early Buddhist poems, speaks of vera in two contexts. The first is when someone has injured you, and you’d like to inflict some injury back. The second...

"There’s a slogan that sometimes you hear floating around Buddhist circles: that if you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at their current condition; if you want to see their future condition, you look at their current actions. But that’s not true. There’s a lot more to a person than you can see in the present moment. That slogan seems to think that we have a single karma account and what you see right now is the running balance. But in the Buddha’s image, karma’s more like a field full of seeds. What you see right now are the seeds that are sprouting. But there can be lots of other seeds in the field that you don’t see at all. They’re ready to sprout or they’re just lying dormant. Which means that when you see somebody suffering, or see somebody doing something that could lead to suffering, you don’t just say, “Well, that’s their past karma,” and leave it at that. The same when you look at yourself: You don’t say, “All I’ve got is the karma I see right now.” If we’r...

"If you’re practicing and you still haven’t come to the end of the practice, what would you want? Where would you like to go? Part of the mind will say, “I want to stick with the practice,” but there are other parts of the mind that have other ideas about what would be a nice life. You’ve got to watch out for them. Learn how to reason with them, to see through them. This is one of the reasons why we have that reflection on the body. It’s not only for dealing with lust. It’s also to get you to reflect that if you were to come back as a human being, you’d have to do this all over again: going through the period of being in a womb, coming out, and being totally defenseless; then gradually learning how to use this body and being subject to the illnesses that come with the body, and the aging, and the death that will come with the body. Do you want that again? When the Buddha was asked to give some advice on how to counsel someone who was about to die, he basically said, “Set your min...

"The fact that we’re meditating is directly related to the teaching on kamma, too. Where does kamma come from? It comes from our intentions. And where do our intentions come from? They come from the state of the mind. So we work on the state of the mind to improve our intentions — to make them not just good, but skillful. “Good” is well-meaning. “Skillful” is not only well-meaning, but also involves checking up to see, when you do a well-meaning action, do the results actually come out well? If something you thought was good turns out to get bad results, you go back and you recalibrate. It’s the act of reading the results and then going back and using your experience to inform your intention: That’s what turns good intentions into skillful ones. So, when we think about kamma, the kamma of meditation, remember we’re focusing on the good side — the fact that we can make a change for the better, particularly in our own minds. After all, look at the mind: It’s a huge mess of all kinds...

"In another passage where the Buddha’s teaching kamma, he starts with the virtues of generosity and gratitude. For most of us, when we hear about kamma, there’s that “Oh darn” moment, where we start thinking about all the bad things we did in the past and all the bad things that are going to happen to us in the future because of that. But the Buddha doesn’t start with the bad things at all. He starts with the good. He does say that certain actions tend to lead to certain results, but the fact that a past bad action has happened doesn’t mean that you, acting in the future, can’t make some changes in how it’s going to be experienced. He gives the analogy of a crystal of salt. You’ve got a crystal of salt, say, the size of your fist. If you put it into a cup of water, you can’t drink the water because the water is way too salty. But if you put it into a large, expansive river of clean water, you can still drink the water in the river. In the same way, if you develop an expansive min...

"You’re chipping in the right direction as you’re focused on the appropriate line of questioning: “What am I doing right now? Is it skillful or unskillful? What can I do to make it more skillful?” That quality that the Buddha said lay at the heart of his awakening, which was not resting content with skillful qualities: If you see there’s room for improvement, you’re happy to improve, happy to try to figure out how to do it. If you haven’t figured it out yet, keep your eye out in that direction." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Abandoning the Effluents (1)"