BUDDHISM AND SUICIDE
 
The popular idea about Buddhism is that it wants you to become a drop in the ocean when you become enlightened so that you become lost in it and one with the ocean. This seems to denote the disappearance of the individual. Others say the correct understanding is that the little drop becomes the whole ocean. If so, then you become God when you are enlightened. God does not exist in the Buddhist system but Nirvana is described as you becoming functionally God - something that has the powers ascribed to God. The doctrine would essentially be saying that experience wise you are still you but each other persons is really you as well. So in that sense individuals disappear and it is nothing to dread or worry about.
 
If anybody should say Nirvana is better if you are dead then I say:
 
When you are not dead yet it cannot be the same or as good as it would be when you are dead. From this, it follows that Nirvana is a delusion. Nirvana would result in death if it were a real experience for final liberation should mean the end of the body and its bondage. But it doesn't. The Buddha and his monks lived after enlightenment.
 
When life is bad and escape from it into Nirvana is good then why not kill yourself when you are enlightened? Not killing yourself would accumulate bad karma and result in the loss of Nirvana. And what if like some enlightened people you do evil again and fall back into an unenlightened state? You could get rid of the risk by killing yourself.
 
It is true that Buddhism regards suicide as a sin though some strands don’t. But when Nirvana and deliverance from the body are the meaning of life it follows that you should in principle at least, kill yourself to obtain Nirvana. But then if you really attain Nirvana you would not need to kill yourself.
 
Buddhism is frequently accused of advocating the committing of suicide in the form of making sure you don’t survive death or ceasing to be a person – by becoming enlightened. Buddhism is confusing for it says there is nothing there to be saved and you realise that you are nothing when you are enlightened. Yet it speaks of Nirvana which you get when you are enlightened as bliss. Many would say that it is as true to say Buddhists are on a suicide mission as it is to say that they are not.
 
Nirvana is supposed to dissolve your ego and your very self and free you from material laws. Buddhism claims that you can attain to Nirvana without dying. Buddhists say it is desire, the wish that you were your own person, not the body that blocks you from Nirvana. That would mean that the system does not encourage suicide. But the fact that you have a body shows that desire is still in operation. You are not going to feed it and care for it if you have no desire. You will just waste away and die in a trance. So it seems that Buddhism should advocate suicide for the body holds you in bondage as well as desire. Desire may be the main cause but the body is a symptom of desire and has to be destroyed. This would appear to call on you to kill anyone who claims to have been enlightened.