This term paper is the final assignment of Buddhist Ethics in my last semester of coursework (1/2015) under the tutelage of Dr. Kieko Obuse. Among my writings in classes, this one is the best and the most I love.
Why are the Japanese fond of suicide? No one likes suicide. But under certain circumstances, say, heartbreak, depression, or economic distress, people can commit suicide, you may argue. Nevertheless, it is not the case in Japan. The Japanese can commit suicide by unbelievable reasons. For examples, After Yukiko Okada, a famous popular singer, committed suicide in April 1986 by jumping off a seven-story building, more than thirty youngsters took their own lives within two weeks after her death. And the number of suicides doubles in that month comparing to the previous year. These copycat suicides are subsequently called “Yukiko Syndrome.”
A decade later, Hideto Matsumoto ‘hide,’ a heavy metal band’s leader who died in May 1998 by hanging himself, made three teenage fans kill themselves in one week after his own attempt. Another more tragic case, in January 1986, a 14 year-old junior high school student killed himself for being bullied by his classmates. After the news spread, other students committed suicide all over the country. Are they crazy or just sympathetic?
Furthermore, there is a new kind of suicide attributed to Japanese origin. In October 2004, nine people died by shutting themselves inside their vehicles and poisoned themselves by breathing the fumes from portable charcoal stoves. Seven cases did the same thing in March 2005. They all used the Internet to manage their death together. We call these cases “internet suicide pacts.” Dying alone is too lonely, they might think. There must be some intelligible explanation of the phenomena mentioned above. The reason that the Japanese are living in tension and likely to have a psychological breakdown so they kill themselves is too simple.
Let us think about more serious episodes: Kamikaze attacks in World War II and samurais who disembowel (hara-kiri) themselves for the sake of honor. Even Durkheim once noticed that “The readiness of the Japanese to disembowel themselves for the slightest reason is well known.” It is not just psychological factor that makes the Japanese do this, I think. There must be something in Japanese culture contributing to these peculiar incidents. In this essay, I will try to figure out what it is. Has it anything to do with Buddhism? This paper is intended to submit in Buddhist Ethics class, but my focus is rather on the Japanese way in dealing with suicide, not about ethics (the sense of right and wrong) as such. So, I find ‘ethos’ is a more appropriate word to use here.
Suicide in Buddhist view
If life is suffering, why not simply end this life by suicide? In the way of Buddhist thinking, suicide cannot solve the problem of suffering. In the traditional account, there are still many lives to come. If we commit suicide now, it is likely that we will be reborn as a more suffering being. This can be explained in terms of karma; we have an ill-will and take a life, so we do a bad karma of killing.
In a more naturalistic account, now we take a human form which, according to the tradition, its likelihood is very rare (from biological view, it is extremely rare as well). If we kill ourselves, we also kill our opportunity to develop ourselves to become enlightened. And enlightenment has nothing to do with our hardship in life. We always can practice in any situation no matter how tough it is. So, suicide is not a proper way to deal with our problems. However, from Buddhist ethical view, suicide seems to be equivocal.
From the Vinaya point of view, taking a human life with intention make a monk defeated (pārājika); he is no longer a monk at the spot. How about taking one own life? In the commentary of this rule, there is an account that after the Buddha taught some monks a specific form of meditation known as “contemplation of the impure,” then he left for seclusion. Monks practiced this meditation and felt disgust in their bodies. Many felt death would be preferable than this repulsive life. So, they killed themselves or had others to do that. When the Buddha came back, he stopped monks doing so. Then the third pārājika was declared. But in no place the rule mentions suicide, only helping others to kill themselves is prohibited.
Damien Keown sees it is a technical reason that monastic rules can apply only to those who can do it. When the doer has died, no rule can apply to him. “In the case of a person who has killed himself, this question clearly does not arise.”
There are interesting cases in Pāli canon that some monks (Channa, Vakkali, and Godhika) who were sick and in pain decided to take their lives. While contemplating the actions, they got enlightened together with dead, and the Buddha confirmed they are arhats. These cases open a possibility that while Buddhism generally opposes to suicide, it prepares to make an exception for the cases of the enlightened persons who transcend the conventional moral norms. But Keown points out that “although the Buddha appears to have felt great sympathy for those involved, there is little evidence that he ever condoned suicide.” He also tells us that in Sarvāstivāda school suicide may be permitted to avoid loss of the arhat status.
In Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, Nāgārjuna says “In the Vinaya it is said that … suicide is not a fault of onslaught on a living being, but it is sullied by delusion, by attachment, and by hate.” But in Mahāyāna context, sacrifice one’s own life can come from a good intention. From the Brahmajāla Sūtra, A Chinese text from the 5th century CE, it is read:
In accordance with the Dharma he should explain to them all the ascetic practices, such as setting fire to the body, setting fire to the arm, or setting fire to the finger. If one does not set fire to the body, the arm or the finger as an offering to the Buddhas, one is not a renunciant bodhisattva. Moreover, one should sacrifice the feet, hands and flesh of the body as offerings to hungry tigers, wolves, and lions and to all hungry ghosts.
This might be the reason that Chinese monks put fire on their head to make dotted marks. And a more drastic case, Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese monk, set fire on himself to protest against the government. This suicide clearly has a political concern. Thich Nhat Hanh, a well-known Vietnamese monk, feels sympathetic to the case. He regards the action as a constructive act not a suicide. “The Vietnamese monk, by burning himself, says with all his strength and determination that he can endure the greatest of sufferings to protect his people … To express will by burning oneself, therefore, is not to commit an act of destruction but to perform an act of construction, that is, to suffer and to die for the sake of one’s people. This is not suicide.” From Thich Nhat Hanh’s view, only bad intention can be called suicide. I find this too selective.
To sum up this section, the issue of suicide in Buddhist view is complicated. We can say generally that Buddhism regards suicide as a kind of killing, so it is wrong in ethical sense. But with a more transcendental concern, suicide in some case can be justified. However, it is not so simple as that, because suicide seems to relate closely to culture. Suicide can be justified in some culture, such as China and Vietnam, but not in Tibet, a region where practices such as ritual suicide and auto-cremation are not found. According to Tibetan tradition, suicide is seen as one of the gravest bad actions, as serious as murder. Now let us move to Japan where suicide has cultural value.
Suicide in Japanese culture
On December 7, 1941, a surprise attack on US navy ships in Pearl Harbor killed two thousands of people and destroyed a number of ships and planes. This event triggered the US into World War II. Following that, the British heavy cruiser Repulse and the allegedly unsinkable battleship Prince of Wales were sunk in the South China Sea by the same means—the attack from divine wind, Kamikaze. My dictionary puts ‘Kamikaze’ as “a Japanese aircraft loaded with explosives and making a deliberate suicidal crash on an enemy target.” The means of attacks was not only by suicide planes, but also suicide boats, suicide torpedoes (kaiten), and suicide swimmers. How did the Japanese do that? My question is not about how they did that technically but rather how can Japan create such a mindset? The answer seems to be that it is the way of Japanese warriors—bushidō.
The martial traditions of Japan have been handed down for over a thousand years, possibly from Nara period. The ethos of the samurai class was known as bushidō, a set of traditions that emphasized frugality, stoicism, honor, obedience, a sense of duty, a war-like spirit, loyalty, courage, and self-discipline. In Inazo Nitobe’s classic written in 1905, Bushido: The Soul of Japan, the author says that the teachings of Confucius are the most prolific source of bushidō. Confucius is quoted as a saying, “A man must live in such a way that he is always prepared to die.” The idea of self-sacrifice and the belief that the individual existed to serve the emperor and the nation are inherent in the bushidō code.
In Japanese there are various words for ‘suicide’ and they have subtle differences. For example, jisatsu (translated as ‘self-killing’) carries a negative, even sinful connotation, as the word suicide does in many Western cultures. But jiketsu (literally translated as ‘self-determination’) and jisai (literally ‘self-judgment’) suggest an honorable or laudable act done in the public interest; for example, an act carried out to protect the honor of the one who commits suicide. Unlike Judeo-Christian morality, there is no ethical or religious taboo against suicide in Shintoist Japan.
The honorable suicide mentioned above is well known as seppuku, the ritual suicide by disembowelment, vulgarized in the West as hara-kiri. Following the prevalence of the samurai, practices of seppuku multiplied rapidly, especially among the defeated samurai as a means of showing their courage and preserving their honor. Incidents of seppuku reached epidemic proportions during the Mongol invasion in the 13th century.
Toyomasa Fuse who studied seppuku found that it has elaborated typology. For example, by the freedom of choice it can be divided into voluntary (jijin) and forced (tsumebara) seppuku, several sub-types can be divided further under these categories. By body position it can be divided into standing (tachibara) and sitting (suwaribara) position. It can also be divided by mode of disembowelment, such as slitting sideways in 1 or 2 or 3 lines and also slitting vertically.
Fuse also found that the emergence and ascendancy of Buddhism and bushidō had altered the world-view (Weltanschauung) of the Japanese fundamentally. The Japanese philosophy of life began to be replaced by an affirmation of death. The meaning of life was understood in terms of one’s ability to find the right time and place to die. This sounds like Buddhism has some influence on bushidō and seppuku. I will find out in the next section.
Buddhist influence on Japanese suicide
As we have seen above, even though in traditional Indian Buddhism suicide is equivocal, it is never encouraged to do. Later, Mahāyāna glorifies self-mutilation and suicide as expressions of piety in the Lotus Sūtra. Mark Blum summarizes the values lie behind the stories of physical sacrifice as follows:
- There is disgust at one’s physical existence stemming from the view that the body is unreliable and in a state of decay; losing the body or parts of it is therefore not a significant loss.
- There is no greater offering than one’s body.
- By giving this body, one gains another one beyond the grave that is far superior.
I think this account is still in line with traditional teaching which we see commonly in the Jātaka. However, Indian Buddhism never valorized suicide, perhaps Blum is right to see that self-sacrifice as mourning to one’s death is not originally Buddhist and probably not Indian in origin.
Brian Victoria criticizes a misuse of non-self (muga) by the Japanese via Zen Buddhism. He cites Takuan, a Rinzai Zen master, “The uplifted sword has no will of its own, it is all of emptiness … The man is about to be struck down is also of emptiness.” In another place Victoria suggests that Takuan sees the killing of a human being is of no more consequence than “the splitting of the spring breeze in a flash of lightning.” So, Victoria concludes that the way Zen leaders in Japan collapsed two truths (ultimate and conventional) into one undifferentiated reality provides bushidō with a corrupted metaphysical foundation. This foundation not only sanctioned killing, it also “valorized the Zen-trained warrior’s willingness to die.” Influence from Zen on suicide may not be direct, but quite significant.
Perhaps, a more substantial belief influencing suicide in Japan from the Buddhist part comes from Pure Land sects. In 1525 Jitsunyo, a son of Rennyo also a head priest of Honganji branch of Jōdo Shinshū at the time, died. In one record, it says “… Expressing their lament at the ōjō (death and passing to the Pure Land) [of Jitsunyo], those people who cut open their bellies and died were ten in number. Afterward we received word that in addition there were ten others who later did the same.” Another record says “In lamentation over ōjō of Jitsunyo … thirteen people threw themselves into the sea or a river and died.” Mark Blum who studied the case remarks that such behavior is utterly contrary to the teachings of Shinran. He thinks Japanese notion of suicide came from non-Buddhist influences, particularly the Confucian tradition of junshi—self-destruction as an heroic expression of devotion to one’s lord. However, he also points out that there was a community within Pure Land Buddhism, which has its own tradition of voluntary death called jigai ōjō—self-destruction for birth in the Pure Land. Not only Jitsunyo’s case did the devoted suicides follow, suicides among the followers of Hōnen and Ippen also were recorded.
In his study of suicide, Durkheim cited an account that “The sectarians of Amida have themselves immured in caverns where there is barely space to be seated and where they can breathe only through an air shaft. There they quietly allow themselves to die of hunger.” The reason that the believers in Pure Land Buddhism do such an action seems to come from a combination of belief in postmortem rewards for self-sacrifice and the goal of birth in the realm of Amitābha Buddha. So, they created the tradition of jigai ōjō which Mark Blum calls “ōjō-suicide,” the practice appears to have expanded so dramatically as to have become the normative religious rationalization for suicide in the medieval period. Although this practice was condemned officially by educated clergy, it gained respect from many people in the society.
The conclusion of this section is that the attitude toward suicide in Japan from Buddhist part mainly comes from Zen school, which provides how to face one’s death, and Pure Land school, which provides the future reward of suicide.
Theories of suicide
It seems incomplete if we do not talk anything about Western theory of suicide. I will go through some ideas briefly. One big name who had studied suicide as a social phenomenon systematically was Emile Durkheim. He classified suicide into three basic types: egoistic (those who are insufficiently integrated in to society’s value), altruistic (those who are so deeply socially integrated that they aspire to represent these values as martyrs) and anomic (otherwise those who are unable to cope with a sudden loss of their accustomed social situation) suicide.
Toyomasa Fuse sees seppuku as an altruistic suicide—a supreme act of responsibility and of belonging. He also sees that seppuku is a good example of individual behavior being subordinate to the needs of social cohesion, because it is an act of self-destruction in which the individual’s purpose and meaning is defined so strongly in terms larger than himself that he readily sacrifices his life in the name of his social role. This account fits perfectly with Durkheim’s paradigm. However, Mark Blum sees Buddhist ethical view on suicide does not fit into Durkheim’s scheme, because the focus on motivation behind the act can make suicide “a kind of achievement in piety without any tinge of martyrdom.” I think what he means is bodhisattva’s sacrifice.
Another conclusion from Durkheim’s study is that the more integrated into society a person was, the less the chance of suicide. Durkheim observed that Catholics are less likely to commit suicide than Protestants. The reason is that traditional Catholicism ordered the life of the believer through extensive rituals and subordinated the believer to the church hierarchy. The feeling of solidarity within one’s society makes the individual less likely to commit suicide. Some scholars test Durkheim’s hypothesis with Islamic societies; and the result seems to confirm that “religion can play an independent role in the suppression of suicide.”
However, Japanese suicide can dismantle this Durkheim’s theory, because even though the Japanese have highly hierarchical structure and strong sense of solidarity, they still commit suicide for some other reasons. Ironically, the main reason is from the sense of solidarity itself as well as the faith in religion.
Conclusion
As we have gone through many things up to now, can we make any sense from the scenes that Japanese youngsters killed themselves after the pop stars? From the evolution theory’s point of view, suicide makes little sense in terms of a contribution to survival and reproduction in individual level. But in cultural level we can see suicide as an adaptive behavior that makes society unified. This account seems to favor Durkheim’s theory. However, in the case of Japan the ethos of suicide is indeed complicated. There are three basic components contributing to the practice:
- Japanese local belief, known as Shintō, provides an ideology of divine status of one who perform it.
- Confucianism provides the sense of loyalty and dignity that worth dying for.
- Japanese Buddhism in general, Zen and Pure Land sects in particular, provides a new conception of death and the meaning of the afterlife that make suicide less fearful and even preferable.
The Japanese are molded by these three systems of value for more than a thousand of years.
Nevertheless, the spirit of bushidō declines after World War II, as Carl Becker points out that postwar Japanese went completely devoid of religious and death-related education which widely promoted during the war. This is the reason held by Becker that makes Japanese people nowadays more anxious with death. This can be reflected by the vast of taboos related to death, for example, one may not wear a kimono with right lapel over left, or leave chopsticks sticking in rice, for these are reserved for funereal occasions; references to death are scrupulously avoided; skyscrapers have no forty-second floor, for it is a homonym of the words “to die;” and envelopes for presenting offerings to the dead may not be purchased in advance, as if they might unfortuitously occasion a premature death.
If we see Buddhism as a technology, or a set of technologies, we can say that the Japanese way to utilize this technology is effective and powerful. The doctrine of non-self (no one is out there and in here) can get rid of the fear of death and make the believers brave. The belief in the Pure Land reinforces the will to death for a better life. From my point of view, this is another thing that the Japanese twist to serve their purposes. Death is not the way to express something, like dignity, loyalty, guilt, courage, etc. I think the main purpose that the Buddha teaches us to contemplate on death is to encounter death with a peaceful mind individually, not socially.
The moral of this story tells me that Japanese-ness is weird (idiosyncratic, I mean). The Japanese can be highly intellectual but irrational in some other domains, can be religious and secular at the same time, and can superstitiously fear of death yet fanatically kill themselves in certain circumstances. Are those teenagers who killed themselves after a rock star and those who headed to death with their enemies crazy? Perhaps, they are not crazy individually but culturally. It is this craziness that makes Japanese army intimidating to its enemies in the past, as well as makes Japan invincible in many areas nowadays, I think.
Notes