{"id":862,"date":"2020-04-04T10:01:58","date_gmt":"2020-04-04T14:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bhide.net\/?p=862"},"modified":"2020-04-04T10:19:09","modified_gmt":"2020-04-04T14:19:09","slug":"hindu-vedantic-views-on-life-and-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/hindu-vedantic-views-on-life-and-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindu\/Vedantic views on life and death (rather personal!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

An oped in today’s WSJ about “Rage[ing] Against the \u2018Bioethicists\u2019 and the Dying of the Light”<\/a> reminded me how different Hindu\/Vedantic attitudes to life and death are from Judaic\/Christian ones.<\/p>\n

I had emailed this to a stressed friend about ten days ago (nobody had died btw)<\/p>\n

“I guess I am very Hindu about all this.<\/p>\n

“This is from the Bhagwad-geeta (P.Lal translation).<\/p>\n

\n

For death is sure of that which is born, and of that which is dead, birth is certain.<\/em>
\nWhy do you grieve over the inevitable ?<\/em><\/p>\n

“All things are unmanifest in the beginning, manifest in the middle and unmanifest at the end.<\/em>
\nIs this a cause for grief ?<\/em><\/p>\n

“This embodied atman, Arjuna, is imperishable. You have no reason to grieve for any creature.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Then there are other fine couplets from Tagore’s Geetanjali. eg<\/p>\n

And because I love this life<\/em>
\nI know I shall love death as well.<\/em>
\nThe child cries out when<\/em>
\nFrom the right breast the mother<\/em>
\nTakes it away, in the very next moment<\/em>
\nTo Find in the left one<\/em>
\nIts consolation.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

This was I believe the principle my mother lived — and died by.<\/p>\n

In 1999, my mother, then 67, decided to have ‘elective” surgery to have her gall bladder removed. She was having problems with gall stones and wanted to go to a conference in South Africa — where she had never been and was concerned about a gall stone attack when she was outside the country.<\/p>\n

She asked me to come to Bombay (I was teaching at HBS then) for her operation to “help out” which I duly did.<\/p>\n

\n

The night before the operation she told me although it was routine surgery, all surgery has its risks and she thought there was a 5-10% chance she’d die.<\/p>\n

But she said, she’d taken chances all her life. All in all it had been a good one. If she died now, so what?<\/p>\n

The operation seemed to go fine, but because of poor post-op care and\/or hospital hygiene, she did in fact die.
\nI dont think she made a bad “before the fact” bet. I suspect she’d think that too.<\/p>\n

I personally have unambiguous DNR instructions and have told my sister (a physician) that if there is the slightest ambiguity, not to intervene.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An oped in today’s WSJ about “Rage[ing] Against the \u2018Bioethicists\u2019 and the Dying of the Light” reminded me how different<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[31,6,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-blog","category-public-policy","category-ruminations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":864,"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862\/revisions\/864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bhide.net\/wordpress_files\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}