Tied to the Past and Future

But kamma and rebirth focus on past and future. Doesn’t the Dhamma teach us to focus totally on simply being mindful—i.e., fully present—in the present moment?

The Buddha talks about the importance of focusing on the present moment only in the context of what he taught on kamma: You focus on the present because you know that there’s work to be done in training the mind in developing skillful present intentions, and you don’t know how much more time you have to accomplish that training. If you don’t train it now, you’ll suffer both now and on into the future.

It’s important to note that mindfulness doesn’t mean being fully present in the present moment. It means keeping something in mind. Right mindfulness means keeping in mind lessons from the past—either teachings you’ve learned from others, or lessons you’ve learned from your own experience—so that you can apply them skillfully, by also being alert, in shaping your present intentions.

When the Buddha’s discussions of kamma touch on the far past and the distant future, he always concludes by coming back to the present: Just as the past has been shaped by previous kamma, the future will be shaped by what you do now. He discourages people from asking what particular actions led to their present state or what particular future state they can expect from their current actions.

Instead, he asks them to keep the general principle in mind—that skillful actions lead to good results, and unskillful actions to bad—and to focus on being as skillful as possible in the present moment, ideally for the sake of reaching awakening through the level of skill that puts an end to kamma.

Even the highest insights that arise in meditation focus on kamma in the present moment. As the Buddha says, you develop discernment by noticing which of your mind states are skillful actions, which are unskillful [SN 46:51]. Then you pay attention to how you can develop the skillful ones and abandon the unskillful ones [AN 2:18; AN 2:19].

In this way, you come to see how you shape the present moment through your present intentions—which, in the context of meditation, the Buddha calls “fabrications” (saṅkhāra). Even the highest states of bliss attained in meditation are dependent on inconstant causes—your own actions— which means that they, too, are inconstant.

Seeing this, you arrive at a wise value judgment: You want something more dependable than that. That’s when you realize that you have to let go of even your most skillful intentions: not staying in the state of bliss but also not going anywhere else. When you can drop the present intentions that keep your awareness of space and time going, the unfabricated—the experience of nibbāna—is found.

So, in practice, the present isn’t divorced from the past and future. It’s tied to the past and future through the dynamics of kamma, and the goal of the practice is to get beyond past, present, and future entirely.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the Treatises book, Karma Q & A: A Study Guide, “Objections, #33.”