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.