Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Karma & Rebirth

"In the five reflections, the reflection on karma is the one that gives hope. You realize that you’re in charge of your actions. You’re not simply a victim of fate or of the stars or of some other being acting through you. You’re the one who’s making the choices. That’s what gives you hope. But it’s hope coupled with heedfulness. You’ve got the power to do good with your actions, but also the power to cause harm. The principle of karma is a double-edged sword. If you’re not careful, you can use it to cut your own throat. This is why the Buddha recommends reflecting on the principle of karma as a way of inspiring heedfulness." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Sublime Attitudes" (Meditations2)

"We develop skillful qualities in the mind. Yet sometimes the teachings on inconstancy [anicca] seem to undermine the developing side. You think about developing something in the mind, and something inside you says, “Well, it’s going to be inconstant anyhow. No matter what you do, the results will be inconstant, so why bother?” That’s a wrong use of the teaching. It’s like that time when the young monk was asked, “What are the results of action?” and he said, “Stress. Pain.” The person asking him, a wanderer from another sect, said “I’ve never heard Buddhist monks talk that way. You’d better go check with the Buddha.” So he does, via Ānanda. And the Buddha says, when you’re asked about action, you don’t talk just in terms of stress. You talk about the three kinds of actions: actions that lead to pleasure, that lead to pain, and actions that lead to neither pleasure nor pain. A nearby monk happened to overhear this, and said, “Well, maybe young monk was thinking about the prin...

"You’re shaping the present moment out of the raw materials that come from your past actions. But your shaping of these materials actually comes prior to receiving the materials. You already have the skills or lack of skills that are going to determine, when you get the raw materials, what you’re going to do with them and how much suffering or lack of suffering you’ll experience. So here, as part of the path, we’re developing better skills." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dispassion Isn't Depression" (Meditations10)

"I don’t know how many times I’ve run into people who say that they’ve learned from their meditation that there is no agency, there is no choice. There are meditation methods that try to drive choice underground: You get to the point where you deny that you have choice, that you’re simply there on the receiving end of what happened from the past. But that’s not in line with what the Buddha taught. He said that if you think that the present moment is totally determined by the past, you have no freedom at all. If whatever you do is determined by the past, you have no choice as to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to steal. It would be a meaningless life. There would be no meaning in the path. And, he said, it would leave you unprotected and bewildered. “Unprotected” in the sense that you wouldn’t have any way of arguing against your urges to do something unskillful. And “bewildered” because you’d say, “What did I do in the past that made me compelled me to do this?” Because you...

"All too often, the Buddha’s teachings on karma are viewed as a holdover from his culture — that without really thinking, he just picked up an assumption that everybody else shared and tacked it on to his teaching. The reason people say this is because they don’t want to have to take on the teaching in karma — which is a shame, because it’s central to the Buddha’s teaching. As he said, it’s the beginning of right view, and it’s totally in line with his teachings on the four noble truths. If you check through the Canon, you find there are only two sets of teachings that he says are categorical, in other words, true across the board. One is the distinction between skillful and unskillful action — the word here is “karma” — and the fact that skillful actions should be developed, and unskillful ones abandoned. The other categorical teaching is the four noble truths. And the two teachings are connected. Craving is an unskillful action because it leads to suffering; all the other factor...

"Another argument against karma is that given the doctrine of not-self, how does karma make sense? If there is no self then who's doing the action? Who's receiving the action? What's there for continuity? That's getting the context backwards. The Buddha started with the teaching on karma first and then came up with the doctrine of not-self in the context of karma. In other words he said people act — you can see that for sure. Then the question of how does the doctrine of not-self fit in to the way people act? And it turns out that the Buddha said that our sense of self is something that we do — it is a type of karma. You create your sense of yourself. You create the sense of what you are. Your create your sense of what belongs to you. It’s a type of action and the question is: Is it a skillful action? Is it going to create suffering or is it not going to create suffering?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "War on Karma" (51min mp3 audio)

"Remember that the important principle underlying kamma is based on the causal pattern that the Buddha discovered during his own awakening: that our present experience is composed of the results of past actions, our present actions — in particular, our present intentions — and the results of our present intentions. He also realized that the fact of having a present experience comes from our present kamma. Without present intentions, the results of past actions — and, of course, the result of present intentions — wouldn’t appear in our experience. This is because, as he explained in dependent co-arising, our experience of our present intentions comes prior to our experience of the past kamma known through the senses. Some of the lessons to be drawn from this are that we are free to make choices in the present, but there are also patterns that we can learn from. In other words, by paying careful attention to our choices and their results, we can learn from them to become more and mo...