We’ve been given the gift of life, so cherish it, Buddhist nun SANGYE KHADRO aka Kathleen McDonald says to SONAL SRIVASTAVA in Delhi recently
Atalented PhD student, RohithVemula, committed suicide in January.Waiting for his scholarship money, he slipped into depression and took the irreversible, tragic step.More recently,60 dalit students from Bihar studying at Rajdhani Engineering College (REC) in Bhubaneswar threatened to commit suicide if they didn’t get their stipends from authorities on time. Why is suicide or threat of suicide even an option? Sometimes, fear of failure drives people to end their lives. However, Buddhist nun Sangye Khadro says that’s just not the right way to deal with difficulties in life.She talks of Buddhists who terminated their lives during Buddha’s time. “There were a few followers of Buddha, who were mediating on suffering — ruminating on how there is so much suffering in the world.They became depressed and committed suicide. The Buddha said that’s not the right approach — you cannot become free of suffering by killing yourself.” Khadro says that suicide is not considered a skilful solution to the problem because Buddhists believe that even when we die,we don’t stop existing; it is just the end of this life, for our mind and consciousness will continue to exist and go to another life. Whatever suffering we experience is the result of karma we have created in this and past lives. In order to be free of karma,we need to perfom spiritual practice, not suicide. “We can purify our karma by means of spiritual practice and meditation. Killing oneself doesn’t necessarily end one’s karma.The karma that you have to suffer will be with you and it will be there in your next life. Your next life might even be worse than this one,”she says.According to Khadro,we should cherish our life and nurture it.
“You can see elderly Tibetan men and women chanting mantras, rolling prayer beads, going around stupas. If you are really old,you can still do some practice.The idea is to stay alive as long as you can and that way you continue to create good karma and purify your bad karma,” she says. Explaining Buddhist concepts of impermanence and rebirth, Sangye Khadro, who was brought up as a catholic in America, says many people believe in the soul and think that it’s the real ‘me’.“I went to Catholic schools, and we had picture books which depicted people dying and going to heaven.There was this notion that some part of me that looks just like me and may have some part of my feelings and thoughts is going up to heaven and maybe I will meet my relatives and friends who passed away in heaven and we will all be together.That kind of idea is rejected by Buddhism. Buddha said that there isn’t such a thing as permanent eternal ‘me.’We are basically body and mind.The body is the physical,material part of us — down to molecules and atoms.The other part is mind or consciousness — nonphysical phenomenon consisting of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, memory and perceptions that are a bit like a river or a stream — flowing and changing impermanence,” says the nun. There is nothing in our minds that is fixed,permanent or unchanging.“It’s more like a flow of changing experience of time that leaves the body and goes on to the next. When my mind takes a new body and new life,it will experience new circumstances and a new identity.Maybe I have a new name and I will develop a whole new sense of ‘I’.There are children who can remember their past lives, but apparently that fades over time. That’s why we say that there is no fixed identity that continues over time,”elaborates Khadro.
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