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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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