Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"There was a debate recently over the question of whether there are times when it’s justified to go out and kill people if they’re really evil. Well, that’s making your goodness depend on their goodness or badness. It’s not an independent value; it’s not an independent principle. But as the Buddha pointed out, your goodness has to be generated from within. It comes from your wisdom, seeing that regardless of how bad other people are, you’re not going to behave in that way. And that gives rise to a sense of self-esteem." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Loving Yourself Wisely"

 " “The world has nothing of it’s own. One has to pass on, leaving everything behind.” Actually, we don’t leave everything behind. As the Buddha points out, you take your karma. So you try to only take good things with you by making sure you create only good karma. Ajaan Suwat used to comment on how the Buddha would talk about how the aggregates are not-self, the sense media are not-self, not-self, not-self. But then the Buddha would turn around and say, “We are the owners of our actions.” In Thai, the translation is basically both that we’re the doers of our actions and the owners, at the same time. Our actions are ours. So again, you develop the qualities of mind that give you good actions that you can depend on." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The World Offers No Shelter"

"Each of us is the owner and doer of actions. And so you don’t want to cause people to do things that will make them suffer, and at the same time you don’t want to do anything that is going to make yourself suffer. It’s a pretty radical view of our relationships. We like to think that we can make other people happy by being nice to them, and there is a certain pleasure they can get when we’re nice to them, but that doesn’t necessarily make them happy. You’ve probably seen many cases where you’ve tried your best to be nice to somebody and they’re not happy. They’ve got their own karma. This is especially clear when people are suffering from a mental illness, when they’re getting old and sick, or when a baby is newly born. You can’t talk to the baby and make things okay. You realize that what we experience is our own actions. We do have an impact on other people, but the major impact is through what we get them to do. So we want to look for happiness in a way that inspires other pe...

"We often think of kamma as something very diametrically opposed to goodwill [mettā]. How can people be happy if they’ve got bad kamma and deserve to suffer? — that’s what we think, but that’s not what the Buddha taught. The teachings on kamma and goodwill go together. You realize the difference between suffering and non-suffering is a matter, not of past kamma, but of present kamma: your skill in the present moment. The same principle applies to other people as well." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill & Kamma"

 "So when we wish that all beings be happy, part of the reason is that we’re trying to develop the motivation that we don’t want to harm anybody in our actions. Because that’s all we’re responsible for: our own actions. Then you also think about the fact that the happiness there — in “May all beings be happy” — has to come from causes. It’s not that we go around with a magic wand to touch beings on the heads and say, “Okay, whatever you’re doing right now, be happy.” Because a lot of activities that people do are harmful to themselves, to other people. Part of being truly happy — and that’s the important part, that it’s true happiness — part of being truly happy is to learn how to stop doing unskillful actions." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Can All Beings Be Happy?"

"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." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Empathetic Joy"

 "Admirable friends can’t do the work for you. As [the Buddha] says, no one can purify you; you can’t purify anybody else. You don’t go to heaven because of other people’s good actions; you don’t go to hell because of other people’s bad actions. It’s your actions that determine that. So there is that sense in which you’re separate. And of course you’re the one who chooses your friends to begin with. So in that way, the separateness of our selves comes first." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Separate Self"