Reverence and Controversy

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.