This is the first time that i have come across such a powerful and informative website such as yours. i am very grateful that i have found this today and am largely indebted to you for clearing so many confusions in my mind and my understanding of our religion. It is very sad that we have very little guidance about our religion and hence our unaware about most of the facts and the correct ways to do things. i was always a strong believer in donating organs for which my husband was always averse and i am glad that by reading your article, my thinking and many of my doubts have been cleared.

it is an amazing websited and teaches us such little things too that we never would have known.

Please continue to put in new articles which will keep educating us and draw us closer to our religion.

Ervadji could you also when time permits advice on my one should not get married to a non parsi. i have a son and it is very important that he knows the real reason why one is not allowed to marry outside our commumnity.

God bless !!

Arnavaz Baria

It would be very relevant for the diaspora living in Europe/North America. Although all prayers are conducted by competant Mobeds living here, the disposal choices are burial or cremation. How does that effect the moving forward of the soul?

Any guidance would be appreciated.
Thanks
Minoo

Thanks for your comments. You have every right to disagree, that is your personal choice. But I would like to correct a few of your statements which, in my opinion, and based on my over 2 decades of rigorous academic and spiritual study of our religion, seem wrong and misplaced.

The Zarathushtrian religion places great emphasis on leading a righteous life. The 70-80 years on Earth is one small part of the overall life cycle. However, since our physical mind is incapable of remembering or recalling the other phases of the lifecycle, we obviously tend to believe that the present is the most important (in some ways it is) and the life “well lived” is more important. But the religion also lays great stress on insisting that the life hereafter will be greatly moulded by our thoughts words and deeds in the physical life. Your comment on good thoughts, words and deeds is simplistic, naive and stated without understanding. Please refer to my post http://www.frashogard.com/does-the-zarathushtrian-religion-teach-only-good-thoughts-good-words-good-deeds to really understand what this means. By the way who defines”good”? Is it man-defined? Then it’s useless since man will twist good and bad to suit his convenience. Good and bad is always defined by God, through his Authorized Messengers, and encapsulated in all the Holy Scriptures. But man being the wily creature he is, suddenly decides that “oh, this rule is not applicable in the 21st century and this won’t be applicable 30 years hence!” In this manner, all rules are lost!

As I have written above, charity can only be done by giving away something which is your own. You cannot do charity from someone else’s fortune! The body is given to you by Ahura Mazda, and it needs to be returned to him in exactly the same manner as is was. You cannot decide, however noble your aims might be and I appreciate your humanism, to “donate” some part simply because it was only given to you for a limited purpose, and when that purpose is over, it goes back to its maker.

Mikhaila, the teachings and tenets of the Zoroastrian religion (and all others) are not constrained by the passage of time. The message of Zarathushtra is for all time. It cannot “evolve” because it is already perfect! Only human thoughts evolve because they are rising towards perfection, whereas Zarathushtra’s thoughts words and deeds are said to be of the most spiritual perfection! (Yanim mano, vacho, shyaothanem, see Yasna 28.0)

Please also let me make it very clear that I do NOT live on charity of others! My earnings comprise of the rightful fees of my own hard work and toil and the difficult life of a practicing priest of which you have no idea or comprehension. The very fact that a “learned degreed man” has written this should perhaps start you thinking that it could not be lightly written?

The point is, today’s modern world, with all its attendant ills has veered off the true path of religion and is on its way to self destruction by trying to play God with everything – plants, minerals, animals, and now, humans too! In just 100 years of “scientific progress” and “medical advances” we have raped Mother Earth to the point where the whole scientific community is itself warning that we are going too far. To avoid the guilt factor for all this, monstrosities like organ donation are tried to be explained away as “charity”, humanism and the like.

You can treat it that way and there is no one to stop you from going ahead. But the truth of Nature cannot be wished away and everyone has to answer for their thoughts, words and deeds. When we face our maker, only the truths of Nature will hold, not the hollow protestations of truth suited to man’s convenience and comfort.

Best regards and without any personal malice,
Ervad Marzban J. Hathiram

First of all, there is no way that our tenets could actually address the act of organ donation simply due to the ages during which the tenets were written. Because the concept of organ donation simply did not exist back then, it’s an obvious truth that it isn’t directly addressed in our faith. It is alarming that the simple absence of an idea can somehow be translated into a strong advocation against that idea. While the writings do state that maintaining the holistic nature of the physical body is important to our journey after death, there is nothing that suggests that choosing to take another charitable, noble path would compromise that journey. If you choose to interpret it that way, you are taking a significant interpretative leap from the actual teachings, and, in turn, denying many people life-changing help.

You write that participating in organ donation “will halt the onward progress of the Ruvan in a very retrograde manner, and put a spoke in the wheels of the ongoing march to Frashokereiti.” In turn I suggest that preachings like these halt the onward progress of our faith; indeed, statements like these–which small-mindedly define our great religion by the letter of the faith, rather than in a way that is spiritually meaningful, relevant, and practicable by Parsis today–are the very reason why our faith, and its practicing population, has dwindled to the point of extinction.

I ask you to consider this concept: history has repeatedly proven that if a faith is entirely unwilling to evolve, or to reconsider obsolete fragments of its beliefs, then it will inevitably fade away. For example, the prohibiting of marriage outside the faith may have been relevant 2000 years ago, but today its enforcement requires a very small population to continuously intermarry. Where the initial goal of this practice was to keep bloodlines pure and increase our population of our faith, today this practice does the opposite very effectively, by repeatedly introducing various cancers and genetic disorders to an increasingly weak, meager pool of offspring.

In fact, it’s even sadder that a Parsi priest would advocate strongly against organ donation when those same donations would help so many other Parsis who suffer from poor health and disease. I believe that, if the act of augmenting the health–and perhaps saving the life–of one of your own people after your own death is considered by our learned men to “result in a nightmare for us after death,” then perhaps we are placing far too much weight on our journey after death rather than the quality of other people’s lives before death. When did such outlandish, almost criminal selfishness become appropriate behavior for supposedly holy people, and why would you justify it — let alone strongly advocate it — by choosing to misconstrue the writings of our faith in such a way?

I am a Parsi and I grew up loving my faith. Today, I am an adult and, while I still love and respect the faith, I worry that the increasingly zealous, overly literal take on our faith will cause its ultimate demise. I mean no offense in this; I simply wish you would consider the repercussions of your above essay from the perspective of the thousands of people — including Parsis — that organ donation could help. And I hope that you don’t just easily dismiss my argument by thinking, “Well, a true Parsi would never accept an organ donation anyway,” because that means you’ve entirely missed the point. I hope you think this over.

I am happy that we did the right thing after reading your article.

thank you saheb!

I read your article on “Can Parsis donate organs or parts of body after death”. Permit me to ask you one question to a point which you have not clarified.

Can a Parsi in his life time be a recipient of an organ on grounds of health?

Sincerely yours,

Thank you very much for your valuable guidance. May be now I can start thinking fresh and most importantly in correct direction.

One more Question please,
Is it necessary for a parsi to conduct the ritual of Dokhmanashin compulsary for any part of our body that has been amputed due to some medical resons or lost during any accident?In that case our body is still not complete at the time of our natural death of the body?

Thanks Ervad Hathiram for sharing your knowledge, wisdom, interalia.

God Bless !