Dilemmas of Difference
Sallekhana in West Texas: One Jain Woman's Quest to Find Ancient Meaning in a Modern Death
Whitny Braun, MPH, PhD(c), Claremont Lincoln University
In the ancient Indic religious tradition of Jainism the ideal form of death is to forego the consumption of other souls and all acts of violence by engaging in isolation and slowly starving to death. This process is known as taking the vow of Sallekhana and this paper chronicles one Indian-American woman named Bhagwati and her journey towards Sallekhana following a diagnosis of colon cancer. For Bhagwati, as a devout Jain, she felt that to take the vow of Sallekhana was to give her death the most meaning and value and prepare her soul for reincarnation and eventual liberation.
For millennia the Jain end-of-life ritual of fasting to death, known as Sallekhana, has been a protected religious freedom in India. However all of that changed on September 24th, 2006 when human rights activists filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) with the High Court of Rajasthan. The PIL claims that Sallekhana is a social evil and should be considered akin to suicide under Indian Penal Code Section 309 and Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the right to life but not death. For eight years this legal issue has been fought over in the Indian courts. With no resolution in sight Bhagwati took action to ensure that her religiously prescribed method of death would be protected so that when she and other Jains decide to end their life through slow starvation they will not be prevented from doing so.
After carefully following the legal battle over Sallekhana in India in the newspapers and viewing an episode of the television program Taboo on the National Geographic channel which chronicled the final days and death of a Jain nun who had taken the vow of Sallekhana Bhagwati became more concerned that her desire to fast to death would not be socially accepted or legally sanctioned in her adopted community of Lubbock, Texas.
Because there is no legal precedent for the right to practice Sallekhana in the United States Bhagwati and her husband feared that they may be prevented from exercising this ancient spiritual ritual because it might be perceived as suicide or a lapse in mental soundness. In order to combat this the couple obtained a notarized document from a scholar of Indic studies and a lawyer, the first of this kind known in the United States, to attach to their wills and advanced directives, so that should they be incapacitated and hospitalized there documentation explaining their decisions would exist arguing that they are protected under first amendment rights to freedom of religion.
This paper explores the final days of Bhagwati’s life and the intersection between ancient tradition, religion, law and two cultures colliding in West Texas.
Conscientious Refusal to Participate in Evil: The Search for Health and the Care for Souls
Ryan Nash, MD, Ohio State University
Advocates on behalf of “public health”, “women’s health”, and “patient safety” increasingly seek a universal definition of health and human good to be imposed through the State. Such movements routinely seek to prohibit physicians from invoking a right of conscientious objection to refuse to participate in any legally available medical procedure (e.g., prescribing Viagra or providing abortion services or sedating dying patients). The result is a highly simplistic reduction of medical morality: “If the procedure is legal, then it is ethical; if it is ethical, then patients have a right to demand that all physicians provide it.” Physicians are recast as mere medical technicians - sometimes with their chaplain colleagues as mere psychological technicians.
This presentation critically reconsiders the right of physicians to refuse to participate in any medical procedure with which they have significant moral objection. It defends a more robust notion of health and good that is informed by foundational understandings of what it is to be human, what is to be in health, and what disease is. The presentation will argue that contrary to its common portrayal conscientious refusal may indeed be compassionately caring for souls. The presentation will consider the Saints and Fathers of Orthodox Christianity to begin to understand the relation of sin, disease, health, and healing. Finally, the presentation asks the questions should there be a particular Christian medicine and how might such exist in modern US culture.
Integrity of Being: Therapy, Theories, and Truth
Matthew Vest, PhD(c), Ohio State University
According to Phillip Sherrard, the art of the ancient Greek world, of India, of the Islamic world, or of the Christian world to the time of the Renaissance were all dedicated to the “expression or revelation of realities that are more than human or natural.” Such art was and is essentially religious, but unlike contemporary narrow sociological categories of religion, ancient religion spoke of a communion and harmony between two modes of reality: the natural and human, and the supranatural and more than human. For Heraclitus, a common principle of wisdom, a Logos, united these two modes of reality, and Plato associated opinion with the former—that which “begins and perishes”—while truth and knowledge belong to the latter—that “which ever is and does not begin.”
In contrast to such a religious life paradigm, the approaches of contemporary medicine regarding modes of reality and life are not difficult to see. Modern medicine is strikingly efficient, technological, and scientific—all to the great benefit of suffering patients. While excelling greatly amidst the science of the natural and human, however, contemporary medicine is unmistakably secular. Hence, we might naturally ask: is the thick, spiritual, religious life paradigm of the pre-Enlightenment world incompatible with the stirring scientific and technological advances of today? More specifically, can the practices of advanced, scientific medicine accord with authentic religion?
This essay seeks to address the above divide through the lens of Wittgenstein’s critique of theoretical philosophy. Wittgenstein is often read as a brilliant philosopher of logic and language who then later in life rejected his earlier work in favor of blind mysticism. A closer reading of Wittgenstein, however, reveals in Lebensform a methodology for language and philosophy that powerfully describes ways we may experience the tangible, every-day realities of this world as well as the Christian realities of saints, angels, and the Trinity.
Reflecting upon Wittgenstein challenges the discrete categories of both secular medicine and religious spirituality by addressing the theoretical ways we approach reality. “Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.” By questioning this dependence upon theory, Wittgenstein presents an alternate paradigm for understanding language and ethics, as well as science and religion. Rather than seeing all reality theoretically, Wittgenstein offers a two-fold way (1) of conditionally engaging the rules and forms of logic and nature without (2) speaking improperly about God (attempts to prove God’s existence, for Wittgenstein, were absurd).
Are the contemporary categories of science and religion theoretically based? If so, how might Wittgenstein’s paradigm address the contemporary divide between science and religion? What modes of knowledge beyond theory might allow science and medicine to flourish while simultaneously acknowledging and experiencing what St. Maximus describes as “experience” and “knowledge in act which takes place beyond all concept…[it is] participation itself in the object known, at a level above all thought.”
Whitny Braun, MPH, PhD(c), Claremont Lincoln University
In the ancient Indic religious tradition of Jainism the ideal form of death is to forego the consumption of other souls and all acts of violence by engaging in isolation and slowly starving to death. This process is known as taking the vow of Sallekhana and this paper chronicles one Indian-American woman named Bhagwati and her journey towards Sallekhana following a diagnosis of colon cancer. For Bhagwati, as a devout Jain, she felt that to take the vow of Sallekhana was to give her death the most meaning and value and prepare her soul for reincarnation and eventual liberation.
For millennia the Jain end-of-life ritual of fasting to death, known as Sallekhana, has been a protected religious freedom in India. However all of that changed on September 24th, 2006 when human rights activists filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) with the High Court of Rajasthan. The PIL claims that Sallekhana is a social evil and should be considered akin to suicide under Indian Penal Code Section 309 and Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees the right to life but not death. For eight years this legal issue has been fought over in the Indian courts. With no resolution in sight Bhagwati took action to ensure that her religiously prescribed method of death would be protected so that when she and other Jains decide to end their life through slow starvation they will not be prevented from doing so.
After carefully following the legal battle over Sallekhana in India in the newspapers and viewing an episode of the television program Taboo on the National Geographic channel which chronicled the final days and death of a Jain nun who had taken the vow of Sallekhana Bhagwati became more concerned that her desire to fast to death would not be socially accepted or legally sanctioned in her adopted community of Lubbock, Texas.
Because there is no legal precedent for the right to practice Sallekhana in the United States Bhagwati and her husband feared that they may be prevented from exercising this ancient spiritual ritual because it might be perceived as suicide or a lapse in mental soundness. In order to combat this the couple obtained a notarized document from a scholar of Indic studies and a lawyer, the first of this kind known in the United States, to attach to their wills and advanced directives, so that should they be incapacitated and hospitalized there documentation explaining their decisions would exist arguing that they are protected under first amendment rights to freedom of religion.
This paper explores the final days of Bhagwati’s life and the intersection between ancient tradition, religion, law and two cultures colliding in West Texas.
Conscientious Refusal to Participate in Evil: The Search for Health and the Care for Souls
Ryan Nash, MD, Ohio State University
Advocates on behalf of “public health”, “women’s health”, and “patient safety” increasingly seek a universal definition of health and human good to be imposed through the State. Such movements routinely seek to prohibit physicians from invoking a right of conscientious objection to refuse to participate in any legally available medical procedure (e.g., prescribing Viagra or providing abortion services or sedating dying patients). The result is a highly simplistic reduction of medical morality: “If the procedure is legal, then it is ethical; if it is ethical, then patients have a right to demand that all physicians provide it.” Physicians are recast as mere medical technicians - sometimes with their chaplain colleagues as mere psychological technicians.
This presentation critically reconsiders the right of physicians to refuse to participate in any medical procedure with which they have significant moral objection. It defends a more robust notion of health and good that is informed by foundational understandings of what it is to be human, what is to be in health, and what disease is. The presentation will argue that contrary to its common portrayal conscientious refusal may indeed be compassionately caring for souls. The presentation will consider the Saints and Fathers of Orthodox Christianity to begin to understand the relation of sin, disease, health, and healing. Finally, the presentation asks the questions should there be a particular Christian medicine and how might such exist in modern US culture.
Integrity of Being: Therapy, Theories, and Truth
Matthew Vest, PhD(c), Ohio State University
According to Phillip Sherrard, the art of the ancient Greek world, of India, of the Islamic world, or of the Christian world to the time of the Renaissance were all dedicated to the “expression or revelation of realities that are more than human or natural.” Such art was and is essentially religious, but unlike contemporary narrow sociological categories of religion, ancient religion spoke of a communion and harmony between two modes of reality: the natural and human, and the supranatural and more than human. For Heraclitus, a common principle of wisdom, a Logos, united these two modes of reality, and Plato associated opinion with the former—that which “begins and perishes”—while truth and knowledge belong to the latter—that “which ever is and does not begin.”
In contrast to such a religious life paradigm, the approaches of contemporary medicine regarding modes of reality and life are not difficult to see. Modern medicine is strikingly efficient, technological, and scientific—all to the great benefit of suffering patients. While excelling greatly amidst the science of the natural and human, however, contemporary medicine is unmistakably secular. Hence, we might naturally ask: is the thick, spiritual, religious life paradigm of the pre-Enlightenment world incompatible with the stirring scientific and technological advances of today? More specifically, can the practices of advanced, scientific medicine accord with authentic religion?
This essay seeks to address the above divide through the lens of Wittgenstein’s critique of theoretical philosophy. Wittgenstein is often read as a brilliant philosopher of logic and language who then later in life rejected his earlier work in favor of blind mysticism. A closer reading of Wittgenstein, however, reveals in Lebensform a methodology for language and philosophy that powerfully describes ways we may experience the tangible, every-day realities of this world as well as the Christian realities of saints, angels, and the Trinity.
Reflecting upon Wittgenstein challenges the discrete categories of both secular medicine and religious spirituality by addressing the theoretical ways we approach reality. “Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.” By questioning this dependence upon theory, Wittgenstein presents an alternate paradigm for understanding language and ethics, as well as science and religion. Rather than seeing all reality theoretically, Wittgenstein offers a two-fold way (1) of conditionally engaging the rules and forms of logic and nature without (2) speaking improperly about God (attempts to prove God’s existence, for Wittgenstein, were absurd).
Are the contemporary categories of science and religion theoretically based? If so, how might Wittgenstein’s paradigm address the contemporary divide between science and religion? What modes of knowledge beyond theory might allow science and medicine to flourish while simultaneously acknowledging and experiencing what St. Maximus describes as “experience” and “knowledge in act which takes place beyond all concept…[it is] participation itself in the object known, at a level above all thought.”