Eminent Tibetan Buddhist monks interviewed by Xinhua have expressed their grief over the recent deaths of Tibetans who set themselves alight.

"They do not even protect their own lives, which runs against Buddhist doctrine," Rinchen Amgyal told Xinhua.

The former abbot of the Tingkya Sangngak Choling, a monastery in Gonghe County of northwest China's Qinghai Province, said the most severe violation of Buddhist doctrine is to kill, and Buddhists should do good.

"It's a pity to lose such young lives," he said, adding that these suicide cases cannot represent Tibetans.

The Dalai Lama and his followers have argued that self-immolation is lofty and respectable for Tibetans who set themselves alight for the national cause instead of selfish ends.

However, Rinchen Amgyal said Tibetans are people who do good and tell the truth.

According to media reports, several self-immolations have occurred recently in Tibetan-inhabited regions in west China's Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu provinces bordering Tibet.

Lorang Konchok, a 40-year-old monk from an ethnic Tibetan area of southwest China's Sichuan Province, was found to have goaded eight people into setting themselves alight, three fatally, since 2009.

He acted on the instructions of the 14th Dalai Lama and his followers, according to police, who cited confessions and investigations.

In January, in an address that seemed to encourage self-sacrifice, the Dalai Lama told his disciples in a prayer meeting in India that Sakyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, cut off his own flesh to feed seven starving tigers. He died rescuing the tigers.

However, self-immolation has nothing to do with the Sakyamuni story, according to Palden Donyu, the former abbot of Sagya Monastery in Tibet Autonomous Region's second-largest city of Shigatse, the key temple for Tibetan Buddhism's Sagya branch.

"Life is so precious," he added, mourning those who self-immolated.

The fact that many self-immolators were youths makes Donyu especially sorrowful, with the Buddhist urging the generation born in the 1980s to improve themselves inwardly in order to avoid the emergence of severe problems.

The Dalai Lama himself has publicly applauded the "courage" of the people who died or were injured in self-immolations.