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by Jayaram V
Hinduism does not approve suicide. Hindus believe that human
life is very
precious, which is attainted after after hundreds and thousands
of births and provides an unique opportunity to each individual
to make a quantum jump into higher planes of existence or attain
immortality. Even gods and other celestial beings do not have this
opportunity unless they come down to earth and take birth as human
beings.
It would therefore be a very serious mistake on the part of an
individual if he commits suicide. It would seriously hamper his
spiritual progress and put him back on the evolutionary scale by
a few lives behind. It would also expose him to the risk of redoing
in a more arduous way what he wanted to avoid in the first place.
According to Hindu beliefs if a person commits suicide, he
neither goes to the hell nor the heaven, but remains in the earth
consciousness as a bad spirit and wanders aimlessly till he completes
his actual and allotted life time. Thereafter he goes to hell and
suffers more severely. In the end he returns to the earth again
to complete his previous karma and start from there once again.
Suicide puts an individual's spiritual clock in reverse . Hindu
scriptures therefore aptly described it as murder of self (atmahatya).
One of the traditional customs of Hinduism in the past was, sati,
the self immolation of a woman on the funeral pyre of her husband
with the underlying belief that if she died along with her husband
she would rejoin her husband in the heaven and give him company
as a (servant) wife. Though this was not practiced universally and
was mostly confined to certain castes, the custom of sati prevailed
for a very long period in the Indian subcontinent till the
British, backed by educated Indians, aptly put an end to it in the
19th century through a legislation.
Sati was a cruel custom born out of the belief that a woman had
no intrinsic value without her husband and that she had no duty
and no justification to exist after the death of her husband. It
was a sad and cruel custom and speaks volumes about the attitude
of ancient Hindus towards women, the same Hindus who would at the
same time bow before a goddess and surrender themselves in meek
submission. For the rich and aristocratic it was a convenient
way to get rid of old and hapless widows and keep the family properties
intact.
Suggested Further Reading
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