The suicidal ones Options

who knows what happends to the souls that belong to people whom committed a suicide?

This post has been edited by ZmiriZ: Mar 24 2005, 09:00 PM

Buddhism and Suicide

The first precept in Buddhism is to abstain from harming living things...including oneself! There is nothing masochistic about the Buddha's teaching (such as love others but be really mean to yourself!). On the contrary, Buddhism is not only about caring for others but also about preserving a healthy body and a positive mind for oneself. Therefore, suicide is seen as morally wrong and will result in negative karmic consequences (see karma). For example, it might mean being reborn in one of the hells, or as an animal or as a hungry ghost (see samsara). To take one's own life, is also to destroy the advantage that human life affords for spiritual progress, even for gaining enlightenment.

As with most moral issues, the degree to which this can be said to be morally wrong will depend on all sorts of factors - the mental health of the individual, the external pressures bearing down on that individual, and ethical factors that might impinge on the situation. For example, to what extent is a manic depressive culpable? What about the person who commits suicide because of a broken heart, social rejection, or unbearable physical pain? What about the person who kills himself to save others (a patriot, for example, who captured by the enemy takes cyanide rather than risk revealing under torture the names of his compatriots)? And what about in the Jataka stories (stories of the Buddha's previous lives) where, as a Bodhisattva, the Buddha slits his own throat so that starving tiger cubs may feed off his blood? (The Hungry Tigress). There was also the case of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in the 1960s who set themselves alight in protest against anti-Buddhist policies.

Ultimately, the Buddhist perspective on suicide needs to be seen in the context of the four noble truths. The first of these sees life as generally a state of suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha). Someone contemplating suicide is, in one way or another, in a state of suffering, presumably seeking a way to end that suffering. Death, they believe, will bring such suffering to an end. From the Buddhist perspective, however, committing suicide will only lead to further suffering - a worse state in fact. Consequently, suicide is futile as it only makes things worse. The answer to suffering is to uproot one's innate craving (tanha) and to tread the eightfold path to nibbana or nirvana, a 'state' beyond suffering. In the early Buddhist sangha (community of monks/nuns), attempting suicide or aiding someone to commit suicide was an offence that carried with it expulsion from the order.

The Buddha's rational solution is to work with what we are and not try to take short cuts out of suffering. This is not to underestimate the terrible suffering that anyone contemplating suicide must go through when usually emotions are strong and persuasive. Support, counselling, help - in all their various forms - are what someone in a suicidal frame of mind needs most of all.