Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu The Karma of Mindfulness

Good evening, and welcome to our retreat on the themes of mindfulness and kamma. 

We’re here this week to learn some useful skills to deal with one of the most fundamental problems in life, which is that we all desire happiness, we keep acting on the desire for happiness, and yet we often cause suffering for ourselves and others through our own actions. The Buddha, after his awakening, focused his energies on helping us solve precisely this problem. As he analyzed it, he saw that there’s nothing wrong with desiring happiness. We simply don’t approach that desire with enough wisdom.

One of the most basic principles of wisdom is that we need to train our minds. You may have noticed that you can be living in good conditions and yet still suffer, and that you can be happy in spite of bad conditions. Your happiness and suffering both depend on the inner condition of your mind. And the Buddha discovered that the condition of your mind doesn’t have to be a random thing or left to chance. It can be trained through your own efforts. But your efforts have to be guided by wisdom. Two of the most important concepts that the Buddha used in his instructions on how to develop wisdom are mindfulness and kamma.

Unfortunately, these two concepts are often misunderstood. Kamma is misunderstood and, in the West, is generally disliked. Mindfulness is something that everybody likes even though they don’t understand it properly. So this week will be devoted to understanding these two concepts and the relationship between them so that we can get the most use out of them.

The concept of kamma is usually disliked because people believe it to be deterministic, teaching that your present experience is controlled by your past kamma, which is something you’re powerless to change. But as the Buddha pointed out, your present experience is shaped not only by past kamma but also by present kamma. In fact, your present kamma is more important than your past kamma in determining whether or not you suffer in the present. Present kamma deals with the way you shape your experience in the present moment. We are active beings, not passive. The mind takes an active and proactive role in shaping its experience from moment to moment.

It’s like fixing food. Our past kamma is like raw food, and our present kamma is like the act of fixing the food so that we can eat it. In fact, feeding is one of the central images in the Buddha’s teachings: Because we are beings, we need to feed both physically and mentally. To feed properly, we need to know how to fix our food well.

Another reason why people don’t like the idea of kamma—especially when connected with rebirth—is that they see that it’s something that can’t be proven, and so they’d rather just put the whole issue aside. But the question of how far the consequences of your actions go isn’t something that can be put aside. Every time we act, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re calculating the balance between the effort put into the action and the results we expect to receive. And as we make these calculations, we’re making assumptions about the future that can’t be proven: Do we have free will? Will our actions affect only this life, or will they go on into the next?

In presenting his teaching on kamma, the Buddha is giving us a set of assumptions—or working hypotheses—that will explain why it makes sense to follow a path to the end of suffering, and that will encourage us to act skillfully in all situations. We won’t know that these assumptions are actually true until we reach the first level of awakening, but we will see that these assumptions make us better, more responsible people in the meantime. Of course, some people would rather not make the effort to be more responsible, but the Buddha wasn’t interested in teaching them.

A third reason why people don’t like the idea of kamma is because they assume that the Buddha simply picked up the idea of kamma, unthinkingly, from what everyone in India believed at the time. This is not true. The questions of whether people actually are responsible for their actions, or kamma, and whether their actions actually shaped their experience, were hotly debated in the Buddha’s time. And the Buddha had a very distinctive way of explaining kamma, unlike anything else that had been taught in India—or anywhere else.

Two principles in his teaching on kamma were especially distinctive. The first is that kamma is intention [§4]. In other words, action is not simply a matter of the motion of the body. It’s a matter of the mind—and the intention that drives the kamma makes the difference between good actions and bad.

The second distinctive principle is that kamma coming from the past has to be shaped by kamma in the present before you can experience it. You actually experience your present kamma before you engage with the results of past kamma. Without present kamma, you wouldn’t experience the results of past kamma at all. The importance of your present kamma is the reason why we meditate. When we meditate, we’re getting more sensitive to what we’re doing in the present moment, we’re creating good kamma in the present moment, and we’re learning how to be more skillful in creating good kamma all the time, from now into the future.

Now, in learning to shape our present moment skillfully, it helps to learn lessons from other people who have learned through experience how to shape their kamma skillfully themselves. We also have to learn from our own actions, observing what we do and the results of what we do. Once we’ve learned those lessons, we have to remember them. If we learn them and then forget them, they’re useless.

It’s for this reason we need to develop mindfulness, or sati, which the Buddha defined as a faculty of memory: your active memory, the lessons you need to remember from the past about how to shape your experience skillfully in the present. There are people who explain mindfulness as bare attention or full awareness, but the Buddha wasn’t one of them. In his use of the term, mindfulness is your active memory, your ability to keep things in mind. So, as we discuss mindfulness in the course of this retreat, try to keep the Buddha’s meaning of the word in mind.

To practice right mindfulness, you combine mindfulness with two other qualities: sampajañña, which is to be alert to what you’re doing right now and to the results you’re getting from your actions; and ardency, ātappa, which means putting your whole heart into doing it well. You need to bring all three qualities together as you meditate so that your practice of mindfulness will be right, and will strengthen the next factor in the path: right concentration, samādhi.

As we meditate, we actually develop mindfulness together with concentration. Some people say that mindfulness practice is one thing; concentration is something else. But again, the Buddha was not one of those people. Mindfulness and concentration have to work together. Without mindfulness you can’t remember where to stay concentrated. Without concentration, your mindfulness gets very fuzzy and forgotten. So this week we will be learning to put mindfulness and concentration together, and also to bring kamma into the mix, because mindfulness and concentration are things we intentionally do. You can’t understand them properly or do them properly without understanding the principles of kamma.

You have to remember that you’re fixing food for the mind all the time: each time you breathe in, each time you breathe out. We tend to forget this, though, because we’re too intent on wanting to gobble down our experiences, whenever we can find them. We forget the lessons we’ve learned from the past. So we have to remember that we’re here fixing food for the present moment, and we want to eat well. How we do this will also influence what we experience in the future. Ultimately, we want to bring the mind to a place where it’s so strong that it doesn’t need to feed anymore at all.

This means that both mindfulness and kamma make reference to all three time frames. Mindfulness brings in what you’ve learned from the past and reminds you to focus on shaping things well in the present moment so that it will also have a good effect in the future. In the same way, the results of your past intentions come in from the past, providing the raw material for the food in the present; and as you fix that food in the present, it will have an influence on the food available to you well into the future.

This further means that the teachings on mindfulness and kamma work together. In fact, they’re inseparable. You can’t understand right mindfulness without understanding kamma, and you can’t develop skillful kamma for the purpose of release without developing right mindfulness.

That’s the main lesson of the retreat. If you’re in a hurry to leave and go home, you can leave now because you’ve learned the basic lesson. But to learn it as a skill will take some time. That’s why we’re here for a week—and why the retreat is being recorded, so that you can take the lessons home and continue working on them after the week is up.

My teacher used to recommend not teaching people until they had meditated. If they haven’t meditated, they won’t understand anything. So the first step in learning about mindfulness and kamma will be to meditate now. That way you’ll have some hands-on experience in focusing on your present kamma and in developing the three qualities of mindfulness, alertness, and ardency.

Source:

The Karma of Mindfulness
THE BUDDHA’S TEACHINGS ON SATI & KAMMA
Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu
(Geoffrey DeGraff)