As Spring arrives here in the United States, and as the Tibetan New Year passes with great incident and suffering, Woeser, the astute and talented Tibetan commentator in China, has posted a piece in The Epoch Times on the recent flurry of suicides in Tibet.
Suicide, of course, is a distinctly human form of tragedy. While all of the major world religions take a stance on it--Buddhism sees suicide largely as yet another destructive act that arises from delusion--for each of us, particularly for those of us who have lost loved ones to such an act of self-destruction, suicide often seems an authentic gesture of sorts, a final message that living, however miserably, could never deliver.
And so on February 27, 2009, after the Chinese canceled the Great Annual Prayer Festival in Sichuan, a 24-year-old monk from Kirti Monastery lit himself on fire and ran through the streets carrying a photograph of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The Chinese police shot him repeatedly. He was removed to a hospital, and as of several weeks ago, nothing was known about his health, or whether he lived or died. (Read a brief report at The Huffington Post.)
His name was Tabey, and this was the message he delivered to the Tibetan people, the Chinese, and the world community: life in Chinese-occupied Tibet had become impossible for him in this incarnation.
Was this a reasonable action? Most of us, deluded as we are, are currently incapable
of answering this question. It is said that Quang Duc, the Vietnamese monk who was famously photographed by Malcolm Browne in 1963 in Saigon, was actually the second choice for the immolation. The story is told that a much younger monk had set himself the task, and when Quang Duc learned of this, he said, "No, no, you're too young for this, you have much life left; let me do it." And so, doused with gasoline, he sat down, and he delivered his message.
Perhaps true renunciation leads certain individuals to see the full consequences of suicide, to understand that a temporary, but fully conscious evacuation of this particular mind-body complex can lead to greater awareness among those of us who are left behind to witness it. And perhaps greater awareness can ultimately lead to an alleviation of suffering . . .
Maybe. I don't know; I'm certainly not qualified to make such judgments. But I do know that our witness to these suicides is vitally important; and that our witnesses will range along a broad spectrum; and that this spectrum extends from the Tibetans who recently declared a hunger-strike to death in front of the Chinese embassy in Brussels to the casual reader who remarks the untimely and tragic death of a fellow humang being.
All of these responses matter, and all of them ultimately register at the subtlest level of our consciousness.
So it is vitally important that we witness these suicides in Tibet; that we grapple with them as each of us are able; that we do not forget the starkness and bleakness that arise when we contemplate them; that we transform this starkness and bleakness into an authentic and durable compassion for the suffering they reflect; and that we use this starkness and bleakness to develop the knowledge that reveals to us the causes from which this suffering springs.
Maybe that's obvious. But in the face of suicide and hunger-strike--in the face of high-octane human suffering--it's worth repeating.