The most demanding application of ahimsa in Jain practice is not directed outward at all, but at the practitioner's own body, and it illustrates how far the principle's logic extends once non-harm is combined with the tradition's rejection of attachment to the body as such.
Sallekhana, also called santhara, is the voluntary ritual reduction and eventual renunciation of food and water, undertaken by a Jain ascetic or, more rarely, a layperson, when death from old age, terminal illness or severe incapacity is regarded as imminent. It is undertaken gradually, under a teacher's guidance, with the intention of dying in full awareness and detachment rather than fear, and it is presented as the logical conclusion of a life oriented toward non-attachment rather than as suicide, which Jain ethics classifies separately and condemns, since sallekhana requires the absence of passion, particularly the absence of a desire to die, the opposite of the aversion the tradition associates with suicide proper.
The practice has drawn sustained legal controversy in modern India. A 2015 ruling by the Rajasthan High Court held that sallekhana was legally indistinguishable from suicide and from abetting suicide, both offenses under Indian law, and banned the practice; the Jain community organized large protests, and the Supreme Court of India stayed the ruling later that year, allowing the practice to continue pending further proceedings. The dispute turns on exactly the distinction Jain ethics draws internally, between a disciplined relinquishment of a body no longer serving spiritual life and an act of despair, a distinction a secular legal system built around a general prohibition on assisting death has struggled to accommodate.