The Flower Adornment Sutra with Commentary（448）

Question: What is the Buddhist point of view on euthanasia? Is it absolutely banned?

Venerable Master: The things people do are not necessarily totally right or totally wrong. Therefore it’s correct for the government not to permit euthanasia. People may see someone going through the agony of dying and think they could help alleviate the person’s suffering by making him die. It might seem right to assist his death. However, these are just things people do. It’s true that within Buddhism, such actions are not allowed. Everything is karma. The person’s pain is also karma that he is supposed to experience. He is due to undergo that retribution. You can’t employ some kind of contrived maneuver to prevent him from suffering the consequences of his karma.

A propos of this, Emperor Chongzhen had been a left-home person in his previous life. However, he hadn’t received full ordination. He was just a novice monk, a little Sramanera, and he died very young. When he passed away, his t eacher told his fellow monks, “Tie his corpse by the legs and have it dragged around, and keep dragging the corpse until it disintegrates.” But the Sramanera’s Dharma brothers decided that was too cruel. The novice, who was already dead, had been so good when he was alive. After his death, to drag his corpse on the ground until it was pulverized would be too uncompassionate. And so they left the corpse intact and buried it instead. Since the boy had been a novice, in his next life he became Emperor Chongzhen, an emperor who had the Way but lacked blessings. Consequently, later on he ended up hanging himself on Coal Mountain.

If his Dharma brothers had dragged his corpse until it disintegrated, then in that life as an emperor he would have had blessings along with virtue in the Way. But since they didn’t do that to his corpse, in his life as emperor he had the Way but was deficient in blessings, and he ended up hanging himself and dying on Coal Mountain. That’s what people say. I don’t know whether or not it’s true. But if his corpse had been gradually ground to bits, as his clear-sighted Teacher instructed, then that karma would have been ended. If his corpse had been totally pulverized by being dragged on the ground, then in his next life he would have been a good emperor. But a monk senior to him in the group didn’t want him to be a good emperor. He wanted him to be an emperor who only made it half way through his term. Hence in the next life, that very monk wrested the throne away from him, since he became Li Zicheng.

Venerable Master: [to disciples] Your literal explanation of the text was pretty good, but you didn’t explain the hordes of demons very clearly, so I’ll explain the text again.  

更多文章：