126 Bulldog

I attended dharma study at the temple and before I went to bed I was still thinking about our discussion. The master had read aloud and explained several poems about fear of old age, illness, and death.

"Nobody wants to die," said the master.

Hmm.

Every quarter I had three or four students who wrote about depression, about wanting to die, and sometimes about their attempts to take their own lives. Just the night before I had read such a paper by a young man consumed by resentment, anger, hatred, and self-loathing. He blamed god, the universe, society, and the superficial morons and idiots, he called them, who annoyed and frustrated him. He called his feelings both homicidal and suicidal. Several times he expressed his desire to die, to be dead, to kill himself, to end his misery in this hell on earth.

His essay was alarming.

When the master asked for comments and questions I thought of my student.

I raised my hand.

"Some people want to die," I said.

No.

The master defended his generalization.

Those who did want to die were mentally ill, the master said. Given the hundreds of millions of people on earth, the master declared, the number who wanted to die were few.

"Only a drop in the bucket," the master said.

The master seemed to define suicide out of existence, there being really no self, no birth, no death, and thus no way to kill oneself. To me none of these explanations seemed quite to the point.

Was it true that nobody wanted to die?

No.

Some people did want to die.

That afternoon Dean and I talked for half an hour about suicide, the issue I had raised in discussion, and about the depressed and suicidal students regularly enrolled in my classes.

"But do you think they really do want to die?" asked Dean.

"Yes," I said.

I told Dean that if I wanted to help my suicidal students I couldn't minimize their desires to die—they were not a drop in the bucket—nor dismiss them merely as the thoughts of the mentally ill; nor dared I define self and death out of existence no matter how true it might be from a Buddhist perspective. I had to start from where my students were.

They wanted to die.

Later the master expressed doubt that my students meant what they said.

"Do they really want to die," asked the master, "or are they reaching out?"

But when he heard my account of the rest of my conversation with Dean, the master offered a concession.

"All right, then, some do want to die, so let me amend that," the master said, "but most people want to survive and to live."

You could not kill yourself, the master explained, for there was no one to kill. This was the futility and sadness of suicide. Life continued, the issues continued, and the state of mind at the moment of suicide continued into the next moment. All of the karma of that instant had negative consequences, the master said, so suicide actually made things only worse.

"You're like a bulldog," the master told me. "Once you get hold of someone's leg you won't let go."

True.

If there is no self and thus no self to kill or to be killed in a suicide, what is the source and cause of the negativity and sadness?

If there is no self and thus no self to kill or to be killed in a suicide, is the same true of homicide?

No self and no self to kill or to be killed and thus no murder and no murderer? No death?

No warrior? No victim?

No war?

According to the National Institute of Mental Health:

In 2000, suicide was the 11th leading cause of death in the U.S. Specifically, 10.6 out of every 100000 persons died by suicide. The total number of suicides was 29350, or 1.2 percent of all deaths. Suicide deaths outnumber homicide deaths by five to three. It has been estimated that there may be from 8 to 25 attempted suicides per every suicide death.

Do people want to die?

Yes.

Sometimes even I.