Chapter One
Karma and Continuation
Imagine a teapot. We put some tea leaves into the pot, pour boiling water in, and after waiting a few minutes, we pour out the tea. That tea is the continuation of the tea leaves. As the tea is drunk, we can see that the tea is in us, the teacup, and the person drinking the tea. When that person who drinks the tea writes poetry or calligraphy, we can also see the tea in the poetry and calligraphy. The tea is on a journey; it doesn’t stay in one place.
When a person has a thought, it is their continuation. When that thought arises, it influences that person and their environment. The same is true of speech and bodily action: if we speak a word or perform an action, that word or action immediately affects us and our environment. In every moment, we generate energy in these three areas: thinking, speech, and action. This is called karma, or action. Karma is our continuation, and continuation is rebirth. Every moment is a moment of rebirth.
We Are the Sum of Our ActionsWe must see that we are not just within the boundaries of our five
skandhas.[1] We are in all our karma, all our output. Output does not only mean going out but also moving forward. All our actions of body, speech, and mind are heading towards the future. When the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that a person is the sum of their actions, he was absolutely correct. It means that a person is the totality of all their karma, of their three actions of body, speech, and mind. The karma they create affects both themselves, their five skandhas, and their surroundings. We must see that a person is both within and beyond the boundaries of skandhas, just as we see that the tea is not only in the teapot: it is also in the teacup, the person drinking the tea, and the poems and calligraphy they create. These are all different manifestations, expressions, of the fruits of our action.
Taking Care of What Comes In
The teapot is a useful image, but it is not perfect. We only see the tea going out, not coming in. However, in each moment of daily life, there is both input and output. We need to acknowledge that what we receive is a form of nourishment. What we hear, see, smell, taste, and feel all enter us at every moment. For instance, if we read a newspaper article, the sadness, anger, irritation, or violence of the article goes into us. That is called input.
Input in terms of the teapot would be tea and boiling water, but in terms of a person it can include many things: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the smells, images, and sounds that enter through our senses. The quality of the output depends a lot on the quality of the input. As we receive, so shall we create. If we consume a lot of violence and hatred, then what we create through body, speech, and mind will also contain these elements. If what we take in is wholesome, then what we create will be healthy. If we receive thoughts, images, and sounds that are kind, beautiful, and true, then with those materials we can create good karma for the future.
We must practice mindful consumption, guarding the six senses so that what goes into us does not harm us and become the source of harmful outputs. If we protect ourselves, the karma we create will be right karma, good karma. Guarding the six senses means placing a guardian at each sense gate—eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind—to be aware of what is entering the citadel of the skandhas. That is mindfulness. The guardian at the six gates is our mindfulness.
Things that go in through our five skandhas are, in fact, just raw materials. If we have a practice, a path, we can transform whatever we receive into something beautiful. For example, if we lack wisdom and mindfulness when we watch a violent film, the energy of violence will enter us and harm us. What we produce, how we express ourselves, and how we behave will then contain those violent elements. But if we practice, our mindfulness and concentration will protect us. Those elements enter us, but we can transform them into understanding, compassion, and the path itself. It’s like the silkworm that eats mulberry leaves: when it spins silk, it does not produce mulberry leaves; it produces silk. We are the same. If we have the practice, we can neutralize the toxic elements that enter us and transform garbage into flowers.
The skandhas play an important role in our continuation. And yet, we must also train ourselves to see that we go into the future
beyond the combination of the skandhas. We must see ourselves as a cluster, not a single element; a cluster of flowers, not a single flower. All of these—karma of thought, speech, and action—are us. We are the totality of our karma.
Working with Inputs and Outputs(Phap Luu)
In the previous section, Thầy uses the language of “inputs” and “outputs” to describe the functioning of karma. He explains that our karma—our output—depends in large part on what we take in through our six senses: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. But the process isn’t a mechanistic one; it is organic. We have the capacity to intervene in this process, both in terms of what we allow in through our senses and how we work with what does come in. We can help shape the current of our karma. This influence we have is a key feature of Thầy’s teaching on continuation as we’ll see in the pages and chapters to come.
Guarding our senses—being mindful of what we do or do not allow in—is a basic way to affect how we continue in the world. If we are new to mindfulness practice, we need to remove ourselves altogether from difficult situations. When a conversation becomes heated, or when we find ourselves watching a violent film as mentioned above, we can excuse ourselves and choose walking meditation outside instead. As our practice deepens, we’re better equipped to handle unwholesome inputs. We notice what’s coming in; we recognize that it can feed emotions like anger, hatred, and despair, and we practice bringing our attention back to our body and our breathing. By paying attention to something neutral or wholesome—like our breathing—we remove the necessary condition (our attention) that allows the unwholesome thought to arise. This is a strategy, grounded in mindful awareness, for intervening in the input-output process. It’s what Thầy means by “neutralizing the toxic elements that enter us.” We create wholesome karma even when what’s coming in isn’t so wholesome.
This is not just theory—we need to use it to change our behavior. When we bring our attention to our breathing, when we ground ourselves in the body, we cut off the kind of thinking that makes violence, sensual desire, or hatred manifest in us and in the world. Try it for yourself.Karmic Effect
Karma can have two kinds of effect: immediate and delayed. For example, if you say something untrue, it affects you right away, but it also affects you later, after people discover that you’ve lied. You must face the consequences of that discovery. We know that things we do now can make us suffer ten or twenty years later.
When you have a thought of loving kindness, the world profits and so do you—the effect is immediate. When you say something nice to another person, you both benefit from that loving speech. If we know how to handle our thoughts, speech, and action, we will continue to create happiness in ourselves, each other, and the world, even when our body is no longer present in its current form.
A Beautiful Continuation in the Here and Now
I live my daily life in such a way that I can go beautifully into the world. I want to think beautiful thoughts of loving kindness, compassion, understanding, and love. And every time I have a thought, I offer myself to you—to my students, my friends, and the world. That is output; that is my continuation. I want to transform all negative inputs before I go into the cosmos, into my friends, and into my students.
You can also ensure a beautiful continuation. In the here and now, when you come back to yourself, you have the power to shape your continuation. Our continuation is not something in the future—it takes place in the present moment. If you have acted skillfully, please continue to do so to ensure a good future for yourself and for future generations.
If you produced a thought yesterday that was not worthy of you, you can correct it today; you can transform that continuation. Free will is possible in the here and now. If you have Right View, you will be able to produce a different thought, a thought that carries within it understanding, compassion, and nondiscrimination. The moment you produce this wonderful thought, it will go out and catch the other thought that you produced yesterday. And in the space of half a second it will be able to transform that thought.
We always have the chance to correct the past. We say that the past is already gone, but the past is always returning in a new manifestation, and this we can correct if needed. Do something different today based on Right View and transform the whole situation. This is possible.
Karma and Right ViewRight View is the foundation of all ethical action. When you have Right View, your thinking is Right Thinking, your speech is Right Speech, and your action is Right Action. The path of well-being has to begin with Right View.
Right View is the foundation
and fruit of our practice. Mindfulness leads to concentration and concentration leads to insight, or Right View. Right View is the view that transcends all views. It is free from discrimination, free from dualistic thinking. When we speak of Right View, we don’t mean a view that’s superior to all other kinds of views. As long as you’re caught in one view, you can’t have Right View. Instead, Right View is the absence of all views—for example, the views of birth, death, being, nonbeing, subject, and object—and it can remove all discrimination, intolerance, anger, fear, and despair.
Insight and Action (Phap Luu)
In the previous passage, Thầy notes that when we grasp onto any view, our entire experience becomes shaped and filtered by that way of seeing the world. We receive new inputs and changes that might challenge the fixed view that we’re trying to hold onto, but instead we can distort our perception of the new input to accommodate our established views—like the bark of a tree that grows around a nail which has been driven into it. Change happens, and yet we remain committed to our previous view. Right View—the letting go of all views—helps us learn, grow, develop, and act in a free and natural way, without the limiting influence of fixed opinions or beliefs, language structures, or deep-seated habits, whether personal, cultural, or ancestral. It isn’t easy to become aware of our hidden, deeply ingrained biases, let alone abandon them. This is our practice, though: not to be caught by any views, even Buddhist teachings. As Thầy makes clear in his description of Right View, we aren’t replacing old established views with new fixed ones. To generate real insight, to see with unclouded eyes, takes diligence and courage—we need to feel at ease in the world living and working without any fixed conceptual scaffolding. From that place of clear looking, from Right View, our thinking, speech, and action naturally bring about well-being and understanding. Right View is the key to the entire Eightfold Path proposed by the Buddha.[2]
It is the kind of insight that we will explore in the next chapter.[1] According to Buddhism, a human being is composed of five skandhas: form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Form means our body, including our five sense organs and our nervous system. The second skandha is feelings; feelings can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The third skandha is perception, which includes noticing, naming, and conceptualizing. The fourth skandha is mental formations. According to the Vijñānavāda school of the northern transmission, there are fifty-one categories of mental formations. This fourth skandha consists of forty-nine of these mental formations; feelings and perceptions are mental formations, but because they are so important, they have their own categories. The fifth skandha is consciousness. [2] The Eightfold Path (Right View, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Diligence, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration) is the path the Buddha described to overcome all our afflictions. It is the path of happiness that stops the kind of actions that create suffering.
Copyright © 2025 by Thich Nhat Hanh. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
