Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche
As some of you may be aware, a Taiwanese poet/ writer (Chiung Yao) has recently
taken her own life. There seems to be a lot of conversation surrounding this
incident, and I have been asked for my opinion on it many times. I have to
admit that my understanding is based purely on hearsay, because I haven’t read
anything about it on my own. I was told that one of the reasons behind her
decision to take her own life was that she did not wish to burden her family.
Other reasons include wanting to have control over her own death and wanting to
avoid the pain of aging and sickness and the misery of going through brutal
medical treatment. I will talk about this from a Buddhist point of view and
from two aspects—one being the action of taking one’s own life and the other
being motivation.
Motivation is tremendously complex and subjective. This is why, in Buddhism,
wisdom is the most important. One could have so-called good motivation but
without wisdom, which may eventually put oneself and others in harm’s way even
further. If you ask any parents why they scold their kids, they would say that
they do it out of good motivation. And it’s the same rationale of “good
motivation” behind such behaviours as spoiling children and excessive spending
in child-rearing to the extent of exhausting one’s family inheritance.
Ironically, such parents would often times only find out later that their
children would never turn out the way they expected them to be.
Behind every instance of so-called motivation there is always selfishness.
Selfishness is very clever—it always manages to convince you that you have good
motivation. If you ask the US government why they bombed Laos, creating such
grave consequence of making Laos the most bombed country in the world, they
would say that they did it out of the good motivation to save mankind from the
hands of the communists. On the other hand, if you ask Mr. Marx why he wrote
the book Das Kapital, which created such havoc even till today, he would say
that he did it out of the good motivation to save mankind from the oligarchs
and plutocracy.
While not wanting to burden other people is a very wholesome motivation, there
remains the question of whether one’s action would in actuality achieve this
goal. For example, if one of my friends takes his or her own life with the
reason of not wanting to burden me, I think I would actually feel burdened my
entire life. I might even go to such extreme as to think that I am the very
cause of his or her death.
It might seemingly demonstrate the wholesome quality of humility to think that
we ourselves as human beings fail to contribute to the society; or worse, that
our activities lead to negative impact on the society or the earth. We human
beings are a burden to the earth. Not only are we not contributing to the
sustainability of the earth, we are actively ruining it. From this perspective,
it could perhaps be said that a single bee’s life is more significant to the
earth than a whole country’s population. Nevertheless, we can make our lives
worthy simply by acknowledging that we are a burden to the earth, and this
acknowledgement may prompt beneficial actions. After all, we human beings are
supposedly more powerful than bees, because we know how to tell stories and, we
assume, bees don't. We can create narratives like "the longevity of bees
is important", whereas bees are not capable of communicating to other bees
such narrative as "human beings are the biggest threat to the earth".
This is the reason why, even though bees, with a number in the trillions, could
extinguish human beings within 24 hours, it is not happening. It would be good
if we can train ourselves to tell stories, and to tell a different kind of
stories.
Some people say that they take their own lives because they want to be in
control. Who doesn’t? But we are not good at controlling our lives, and we
never apply the right solution to gaining such control. Some of the readers may
think that life is just like an espresso machine. If it gets too old and
broken, one might as well just discard it in a garbage dump. But for Buddhists,
life is a much more complex machine. There is something called mind, and this
mind is like a sponge—it absorbs and contains all kinds of inclinations and
habitual patterns. Taking one’s own life could become one of such habitual
patterns. It's like scratching one's skin rashes, it can be satisfying, but if
you keep scratching, your skin may never heal.
I do remember that, a few years ago, in Bhutan, a boy asked his sister for a
small change to go see the latest film. When the sister couldn’t give him the
change, the boy, who was only in his early teens, hanged himself. There are so
many stories of young, bright, lively, joyful, jolly people taking their own
lives. Of course, there must be so many reasons for them to do that; yet often
times we are unable to comprehend their decision, failing to discern any
apparent or plausible motive. For Buddhists, the behavior of taking one's own
life is driven by tendencies or habitual patterns developed in one's many past
lives, which, on a larger timescale, go far beyond any traumatic or gratifying
experiences in one's childhood in this very life. One's past life experiences—happy
or painful—play a very powerful role in one's current life choices.
Besides these habitual patterns, many of these young people may think that life
is like a video game, which you can always recalibrate or restart. But it would
not be the same once the current life is ended; and if it turns out to be the
same, there would be no point at all in ending the current life. Today, a lot
of young people may be smart, well informed academically and intellectually
mature, but on an emotional level, they are absolutely immature and completely
lack of resilience. A variety of reasons may be responsible for the lack of
emotional maturity of the younger generation, one of the contributing factor
being their caring, loving and ambitious parents, who are eager to make a
profit, so to speak. Everybody wants to be a winner and they want to win all
the time. Our education system, from nurseries all the way to high schools and
universities, seems to promise a stable, secure and successful future, but we
all know that things never happen as planned, assumed or expected.
Another reason for the writer to take her own life was not wishing to go
through the pain of aging and sickness and the brutal agony of medical
treatment. Of course, we as individuals all have different priorities. For
some, it is important to avoid such pain and agony, and I have sympathy for
such attitude. As for me, even one more hour of living on this earth,
experiencing the skylight, the dark sky, the whistling of the trees, is
worthwhile. Especially for a follower of the Shakyamuni Buddha, even one hour
of the cognitive ability to understand who Buddha is and part of his
teachings—either remembering it oneself or being reminded by someone else—is
worthwhile. Like warriors in the battlefield, if we know our priorities, it is
worth it to endure the pain of life.
The challenges we face in today’s life—the loss of physical and mental
abilities, the inability to achieve one’s life goals, and so on—are, in my
view, related to how we cultivate our goals and aims in our lives. A lot of
people may aim to become Elon Musk, Peter Thiel or Bill Gates, as a result of
the education system that was designed centuries ago to foster such life goals.
This is something we need to change. And we can change—it is not rocket
science. We should be aware that there can be, and there existed in history,
totally different goals and lifestyles.
As a non-Chinese, when I look at Chinese paintings, there is to me clear
evidence that many centuries ago many Chinese had a life goal of going into the
mountains and becoming hermit, living what we call today a simple life--gazing
at the morning mist, the rolling clouds, the staggered trees and rocks, for
hours, weeks, months and years on end, and writing about it. With time, the
Chinese have forgotten to teach and learn that kind of life goal; in fact, it
may even be considered "lying flat" (Tang-ping) today. But is it
really lying flat? Lying flat versus being productive is an utterly subjective
matter. A world that is overwhelmingly nerve-racking, stressful and cut-throat,
in which "the winner takes it all" and everyone looks out for
oneself, created this anxious society which is not necessarily productive.
Our generation, or rather, my generation, is a byproduct of the previous
generation's vision. While many great things have sprung into being from that
vision, the previous generation have not always been wise. They created the
ideas of jobs, careers and bills, and as a consequence, we as the current
generation now have to live within the confines of such things, striving to get
jobs, pay bills and whatnot. The design of our world is such that we can't
really, to a certain extent, escape from it.
But even within the confines of such design, we could always create our own
boundary. How many pairs of shoes do we really need? Should we save that money
for a trip to Mount Huangshan during our next holiday? Where we could feel the
majestic energy of the centuries-old rocks and soak up the vibe of a place
where incredible Taoist masters thought of such astounding idea as Wu-wei--the
action of non-action--something that is, not only at the time but even today,
avant-garde. Perhaps the great Taoist wisdom of Wu-wei could be the answer to
the looming AI revolution. A confident and relaxed citizen may be the most
feared citizen by the enemy.
How we grow up and how we educate ourselves have an enormous impact on how we
relate to the world. Some native American children grow up relating to
mountains as a child to its mother. Their sense of purpose in life and their
way of relating to the world would be quite different from that of, say,
children born in a Chinese miner family who grow up perceiving mountains as
mines that can be exploited and destroyed. The latter would, when grown up,
relate to the world with tension and a competitive state of mind.
