Sallekhana (ritual fast to death)

Sallekhana, also called santhara, is the Jain practice of voluntarily fasting to death at the very end of life, a gradual and deliberate withdrawal from food and drink undertaken when death is understood to be near and unavoidable. It is regarded within Jainism not as suicide but as the crowning act of a life devoted to non-attachment: the serene, conscious relinquishment of the body when it can no longer serve the pursuit of liberation, faced with complete equanimity and without desire for death or clinging to life. The Jain tradition draws this distinction sharply, suicide, in its view, springs from passion, despair or aversion and involves violence to the self, whereas sallekhana is passionless, undertaken in full awareness and with the consent of one's teacher and community, and aims at a death as free of attachment as the ideal life.

The vow is hedged with strict conditions. It is meant to be taken only when the body is failing through age or incurable illness and the normal purposes of life are exhausted, only with proper spiritual preparation, and only under the guidance of a mendicant teacher who judges the person ready. It is undertaken by ascetics and, more rarely, by devout laypeople.

Within Jainism sallekhana is held in the highest honour, memorialised in ancient inscriptions and regarded as an ideal death, the final expression of the ascetic values that structure the whole tradition. The practice is very old, attested in the earliest Jain texts, and the number who undertake it each year, though small, is treated by the community as a mark of exceptional spiritual attainment.

In the modern period the practice has drawn legal and ethical scrutiny. In 2015 a court in the Indian state of Rajasthan ruled sallekhana to be equivalent to suicide and therefore punishable under Indian law, prompting widespread protest from the Jain community, which argued that the practice is an essential and constitutionally protected part of their religion and is categorically different from suicide; the Supreme Court of India stayed the ruling shortly afterward. The episode brought into focus the difficulty of reconciling a rigorously argued religious ideal of a chosen, passionless death with secular law's concern to prevent self-killing and to guard against coercion of the vulnerable, a tension the tradition addresses through its insistence on strict conditions and communal oversight.