Suicide: Sutta versus Commentary

[ekocare]

@bksubhuti

This was in reference to several (3 or more) Westerner Monks who are Suttanta only and killed themselves.

• Ven NyanaVira (Clearing the Path)
• The monk from the what-the-buddha-saiddotnet website
• A monk who lived near to the Island Forest Hermitage where ven Nyanavira was from… recently last year or so.

@Ontheway

True, I wonder why such unfortunate incident happened to those western monks. It gives a bad name to Buddhism if viewed by other religions’ people, they might say without understanding: “Look at them! They practice and yet kill themselves! What could be more wrong than if a religion encourages suicides?”

The problem is being totally Suttanta and not believing the commentary…
There are many suttas which reference Suicide and then afterwards, the Buddha declared that they used the knife blamelessly.

The most recent EBT suicide this year, is the Iranian monk in Sri Lanka, who had been arguing for EBT philosophy always.