Two Helpful Essays Illuminating Liberal Practice

Just finished reading two essays from Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, "Karma" and "The Road to Nirvāṇa Is Paved with Skillful Intentions" , and they're both excellent. Wanted to flag them, because they tie together a lot of what I've been working on.

The first essay rescues karma from its New Age caricature. Karma in early Buddhism is a feedback loop, not a verdict. Past and present action shape the present together, and present input is always available. The political payoff comes when Thanissaro extends the point into a critique of identity-as-essence:

Where we come from is old karma, over which we have no control. What we "are" is a nebulous concept at best—and pernicious at worst, when we use it to find excuses for acting on unskillful motives.

That's a similar argument to what I was making in Social Conservatism is Suffering . If we put our dignity in what we inherited rather than in what we do, we make ourselves miserable. Tribal mythology is fragile. The work of defending it produces the suffering it was supposed to prevent.

The second essay is the constructive piece. It opens with this:

One of the Buddha's most penetrating discoveries is that our intentions are the main factors shaping our lives and that they can be mastered as a skill.

The skill is laid out in MN 61 , where the Buddha tells his son Rāhula to reflect on his actions before, during, and after. Two ideas make the practice work: appropriate attention (asking yourself the right questions instead of the wrong ones) and admirable friendship (people whose practice is good enough to learn from). I wrote about the friendship side years ago, drawing on a different sutta, and Thanissaro's pairing makes the connection explicit.

The committee model of mind he discusses is worth knowing: the self stands in for the agent who adopts or vetoes the impulses that arise, rather than for the impulses themselves. Thanissaro also redefines shame as the mark of holding yourself to a high standard, rather than as a feeling of unworthiness. And he makes the case that self-honesty is the hardest of all the disciplines, because delusion is self-concealing.

The whole picture is roughly what the argumentation/illumination distinction was reaching for, and it fits with the larger Inner Life of Liberalism project @uncanonical.net and I are building, where Liberalism and Sympathetic Joy was an early gesture in the same direction.

Both essays are short and plainly written. Read the karma one first. They pair.