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1. A Life Worth Leaving: Fasting to Death as Telos of a Jain Religious Life
James Laidlaw
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3RF.
James Laidlaw teaches social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where he
is also a Fellow of King's College. He is the author of The Archetypal Actions of Ritual
(1994, with Caroline Humphrey) and Riches and Renunciation (1995), and the editor
of The Essential Edmund Leach (2 vols, 2000, with Stephen Hugh-Jones) and Ritual
and Memory (2004, with Harvey Whitehouse).
Keywords
Suicide, Religion, Jainism, India, Ethics, Agency
Abstract
This paper describes the practice of fasting to death in the Indian religion of Jainism.
It shows how and why this form of self-killing is a highly regarded and publicly
celebrated positive aspiration in Jainism. Through comparisons with some other
forms of self-killing found in South Asia, it highlights the moral complexities of issues
of volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies positions on
some universal ethical issues.

2. A Life Worth Leaving: Fasting to Death as Telos of a Jain Religious Life
James Laidlaw
Conceptions of a good life contain or imply ideals of a good death. This paper is
about a tradition in which the highest ideal of a good death is a form of self-killing.1
The Jain religion is a first cousin, historically and philosophically, to Buddhism:
founded at the same time (the 4th
c BC) in the same region of north India, and like it
a religion of world renunciation, although with a notably greater emphasis on
asceticism as a way of achieving spiritual purification and enlightenment. Lord
Mahavira, the 'Great Hero' who founded the religion at that time, was an elder
contemporary of Gautam Buddha, and the emaciated ascetics the latter joined for a
while before he discovered the more moderate 'Middle Way' are plausibly identified
as Jains. Today, small groups of monks and rather more such groups of nuns who
follow precepts laid down by Mahavira and his followers are the objects of veneration
and to some extent of emulation by a larger lay population. The renouncers live in
small single-sex groups of between two and at most a dozen or so, always travelling
between towns and villages, always walking barefoot, and carrying all their
possessions with them, teaching as they go the importance of the two cardinal Jain
religious and moral virtues, non-possession and non-violence. The laity is high-caste
and mostly affluent, concentrated especially in business, trade, and the professions.2

3. 3
The Death of a 'Real Jain'
During the fieldwork I conducted on Jainism in the 1980s and 90s, mostly in the
north Indian city of Jaipur, many people explained to me at different times what they
thought were the most important facts about their religion. They did so in a variety
of ways. Some told stories of the miraculous lives of great saints from the distant
past. Others described rules, customs, or practices they thought particularly
admirable, in contrast to what they knew of other religions. A large number
attempted a from-the-ground-up description of the fundamental axioms of Jain
theology and how the whole religion follows logically from these principles. And
others described real-life people: exemplars, as they saw it, of what the religion
ideally ought to mean in practice. These exemplars were both men and women, rich
and not so rich. They tended to be people my informants had actually met and
known from personal experience. They were, in addition, virtually all dead.
Now this might be because until someone does dies his or her exemplary status
cannot be wholly secure. You never know what such a person might do tomorrow.
But there is also another reason. When people came to describe why it was that the
person they had chosen was such a good example of how to live a good Jain life, the
manner of his or her death often played a prominent part in the story.
Let me take as an example Mr Amarchand-ji Nahar, who had lived in Jaipur city until
just a few years before I first went there. I was told about him by many of the
people I knew. And then I met his daughter, who is herself a Jain nun. Her father,
she said, had been a 'real Jain', even though he was a householder with a family,
rather than a celibate renouncer-monk. In his last years he had lived in many
respects the life of a renouncer, and was actually stricter in the application of many

4. 4
aspects of Jain teaching to his life even than some of them. He had been a successful
businessman, but had retired early in favour of his sons. I was shown by one of
these sons around the splendid urban mansion still occupied by his extended family,
and taken to the single, tiny, windowless room, which Amarchand-ji occupied for the
last several years of his life. It had been preserved as a kind of shrine, almost
exactly as it had been when he had lived there: bare floors and walls, a single thin
mattress, the single wooden bowl in which he had taken his food, and the clock he
had used to regulate his life. Times had been set for the prayers, confessions,
meditations and other ritual devotions with which most of his time, like that of a Jain
monk or nun, was largely taken up. And in addition to the clock was a calendar,
which he used to regulate his fasting.
Amarchand-ji kept a total fast at least every alternate day for the last years of his
life, and he also undertook repeated more extended fasts. Jainism provides a
complex repertoire of these, for both renouncers and lay Jains to follow. Even on
days when he did eat, Amarchand-ji always carefully weighed and measured his daily
allowance of grains and water, and progressively, as the years went by, simplified
and reduced his diet. He became known among pious Jains in the city as something
of an expert on fasting. People came to him for advice before embarking on a fast,
and even more commonly they came to him at the end, to take their first food from
his hands. Breaking a lengthy fast is dangerous, and Amarchand-ji was
acknowledged as an expert on how much of which kinds of food might be safely
taken.
On the mattress in his room there are now two large paintings, propped up against
the wall. One is of Amarchand-ji himself, sitting as he would have done for most of
the last decade of his life in the samadhi meditational position, wearing only a loin-

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cloth, cross-legged with his palms folded and turned upwards on his lap. Next to
him, dressed and sitting in the same fashion, is a similar large portrait of his hero
and model, a man called Raycandbhai Mehta, who lived across the turn of the
twentieth century in Bombay (Laidlaw 1995: 230-9, Banks 1997: 231-2, Dundas
2002: 262-5). Mehta too was a businessman who became a celebrated lay holy man.
He is partly famous because of his friendship with Mahatma Gandhi, who singled him
out in his writings as one of the three people of recent times who had influenced him
most (Gandhi 1927: 73-5, Iyer 1986: 139-54). But independently of this, Srimad
Rajcandra, as he is also known, has to this day quite a large lay following among
religious Jains. There is no marked facial resemblance between Amarchand-ji and his
more famous predecessor, but at first sight the two portraits look very strikingly
alike, because they are both so shockingly thin. On both, their shoulders, collar-
bones, and ribs stand out hard and bony under thin skin, their stomachs recede
deeply below their rib cages, their hands and heads look unnaturally large in contrast
with the rest of their bodies, and their eyes sit in deep sockets that are so dark as to
appear bruised.
At the age of thirty-two, Rajcandra ended his life by undertaking a fast to death, and
Amarchand-ji, although much older when he did so, ended his life in the same
fashion. This practice of fasting to death is called sallekhana (a word whose origins
are not agreed), or more commonly samadhi-maran (which literally means 'death
while in meditation'). Amarchand-ji's daughter swelled with pride as she described
his fast and death. Although he was already an old man, she said, his final fast
lasted for 36 days. For the last 24 days he did not take even water. People came
from all around to see him. Even on the final day he was sitting up and saying his
samayik (a meditational prayer) under his breath. 'At the end he said, "Now I will
die", and sat in the samadhi position and he died sitting like that. When he died

6. 6
people said there was rain of saffron and inside there was a sound of cracking and a
wound appeared in his head.'
I have already mentioned the importance of the principle and practice of non-
violence in Jainism. Yet, as the examples of these two men indicate, there is also
well-established doctrinal approval and indeed fulsome public celebration of what is
basically religious suicide – premeditated and deliberate self-killing. The practice is
described in detail and commended in some of the earliest canonical texts of
Jainism,3
and has been consistently portrayed as one of its highest ideals ever since.4
It is common to both the main sectarian traditions within the Jain fold, the
Digambars and the Svetambars, and to all their constituent branches.5
It has
aroused almost no dissent or controversy within the Jain tradition, and is vigorously
defended against any threat or criticism from outside (e.g. Tukol 1976). Almost
certainly in the beginning it was confined to renouncers. This changed fairly early.
Evidence from the medieval period makes clear that it was also a lay practice, and
this remains the case today. Renouncers and lay people still occasionally fast to
death and although suicide is illegal in India, such events are covered extensively in
the media. Large crowds gather and the fast is celebrated in lavish public
ceremonies, in which the person in the process of ending his or her own life is
explicitly identified as an exemplar of non-violence. In the last few days, devout
Jains living nearby sometimes decide to be more than onlookers, and themselves
vow to fast until the samadhi-maran achieves his or her goal, hoping both to express
their admiration and to share in the extraordinary religious merit generated by this
ultimate austerity.
My purpose in this paper is to describe the form of life, and the ethical sensibility, to
which this form of death belongs, and to show why it is not in tension but instead in

7. 7
harmony with the Jain value of non-violence - although Jainism, like any living
religious tradition, does of course contain logical contradictions and conflicting
values. For a Jain seeking to practise non-violence, fasting to death can appear to be
a self-evidently 'good death', and indeed an integral if not exactly a necessary part,
of a wholly good life. I shall make some comments on the distinctiveness of this Jain
practice, compared with ideas of virtuous death in other traditions, and some
observations on the complex role played in it by will and agency.
The Pervasiveness of Violence
Ask a devout practising Jain about almost any aspect of his or her daily religious life,
and if you elicit an explanation, it is likely that this will be expressed in terms of the
value of non-violence. Dietary restrictions, rules about clothing, appropriate times for
waking, sleeping, and eating, and many of the details of rites of meditation,
confession, and worship, may all be explained as ways of avoiding harm to living
things. Didactic stories drive home its importance, and also a sense of the
extraordinary pervasiveness of violence, pain, suffering, and death, in a world that is
conceived of as absolutely filled with living things. One of the oldest texts of the Jain
canon explains in detail why even plants, as they derive sustenance from the ground,
thereby destroy other creatures living in the soil (Jacobi 1895: 389). Each living
thing has an immaterial immortal soul which, if unencumbered by matter, would float
to the summit of the universe, there to subsist forever in a state of omniscient bliss.
But instead, innumerable souls are trapped in mortal bodies, which they make for
themselves by their own actions. Because and to the extent that these creatures
harm other living things, they in turn live lives of suffering. This is the Jain use of the
pan-Indic idea of karma, that a living thing's actions affect its future fortune for good
or ill, in this life and the next. All living things die, usually in pain and terror, and

8. 8
then they are reborn, always in pain and terror, and live another life of suffering in
another and different body. This might be as a human or as an animal or plant, or as
an insect, or it might be as one of countless invisible creatures that live and die in
just a few moments in fire, water, air, and in the ground. Even the gods who live in
an elaborate hierarchy of heavens and the equally stratified inhabitants of hell, live
as such only for finite periods, at the end of which they re-enter the cycle of death,
rebirth, and suffering.
Much emphasis is given to the idea that all Jains should ideally develop a vivid sense
of all of this, so that they each personally experience the space around them as
inhabited, and comport themselves so as to minimise the harm they cause to other
living things. So one lay teacher, for instance, interrupted a discourse he was giving
me on Jain philosophy and drew to my attention the scene in the street outside,
which was knee-deep in monsoon rain water. 'You see only rain outside, and people
rushing to get to work', he said, 'but Jain religion sees much more than that. Today
there is much violence being done'. All those people wading through the water, and
trying to start the engines of their cars or scooters, were heedlessly killing the
creatures living in the water. Jain renouncers would all stay indoors that day, even
though this meant that they could not collect alms from Jain houses and therefore
that they would have to fast. I should reflect on this until, like him, I learned
imaginatively to see the living things and therefore the violence around me.
Developing this 'right view' naturally leads to compassion for the living things being
killed around us all the time, to revulsion at the way we routinely harm them in
pursuit of our own desires, and so to a wish to escape involvement in this cycle of
death and rebirth. What blinds most of us to this realisation and makes us behave
with wanton disregard for other lives, and so for our own real interests, are our

9. 9
passions: our likes, loves, and attachments, our dislikes and feelings of revulsion,
anger, pride, delusion, greed, and so on. Even the most apparently trivial
enthusiasms can have momentous consequences. In one story, which I found in a
book for children, a man took pleasure and pride all his life in his ability to peel
mangoes so that the skin all came off in one piece. He was reborn as a criminal who,
when convicted, was condemned to be skinned alive.
Jainism is not of course the only tradition that has cultivated feelings of revulsion at
the world we live in, and in some of these there have been periods when such
feelings have inspired millennial movements with widespread or mass suicide, or
zealous seeking after martyrdom (for late antique Judaism and Christianity see
Droge & Tabor 1992, Boyarin 1999). What is perhaps unusual and distinctive about
Jainism is that such extreme action as actively seeking one's own death should be so
firmly and authoritatively established, and so calmly and consistently practised. Thus
we may contrast the Jain position with that which developed under persecution in
early Christianity, where a period of widespread active provocation of violent
martyrdom was succeeded, following the doctrinal lead from Saint Augustine, by an
outright condemnation of suicide that became more specific and vigorous over the
succeeding centuries (Murray 1998, 2000). In any case, however zealously early
Christians might have courted martyrdom, there remained an important sense in
which these martyrs' deaths were not their own actions. They depended, for their
heroic qualities and for their iconography of gruesome violence, on the ferocity and
the initiative of the persecutors. Hence the stories of aspirant martyrs impatiently
trying to provoke the authorities into giving them the opportunity to die for their
faith. The iconography of Jain religious suicide might suggest passivity, since the
dying samadhi-maran sits patiently in meditation, and there is none of the overt and
bloody violence of Christian martyrology, but in another sense the Jain religious

10. 10
suicide is active rather than passive, because death will nevertheless be the result
entirely of his or her own deliberation, decision, effort, and action.
The idea that religious action is difficult and painful effort is highly developed in
Jainism. Ascetic practices – most extensively fasting but also other physical
austerities together with rites of confession and penance and meditation – are
spoken of as 'work on the soul', and also as cleaning and purifying it by burning in
the 'heat' of austerity. This is often expressed by the idea that sacrifice, which was
and in altered ways remains a central rite of brahminical Hinduism, is internalised in
Jainism. One performs sacrifice within one's own body, in order to purify that body
and remove the accretions that keep the soul trapped within it (Jacobi 1895: 50-6;
138-41). So all asceticism is the arduous and painful application of sacrificial fire to
remove karma from the soul. The homology between internal and external sacrifice
is highlighted, for example, in the following description, from a Jain text, of a man
who, having listened to Lord Mahavira preach on the subject of a 'wise man's death',
embarks upon a fast. His body, we are told, became
withered, wizened, fleshless; he became a mere frame of bone and skin;
he grew so that his bones rattled, emaciated, overspread with veins. It
was by force of spirit alone that he walked and he halted. He was faint
after speaking, and in speaking, and before speaking ….like an [oblation-
devouring] fire confined within a heap of ashes he shone mightily with
glow [tapas], with lustre [tejas], and with the splendour of glowing lustre
[tapas + tejas]. (Barnett 1907: 57; see also Caillat 1977).
The word 'tapas' means heat and also firel 'tejas' means a glowing or shining quality,
but also strength, as in the strength or heat of fire. This man's body is withering
away, but it is also being strengthened and refined in fire.

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The imagery Jains use in describing the condition of the soul is strikingly physical
(Jaini 1980). Karmas, the effects of one's actions, are particles of matter that attach
themselves to the immaterial soul, causing it to be trapped in a body. The glue that
binds this matter to the soul is passion and desire. The stronger the emotion or
motivation behind an action, the more powerful and tenacious its karmik effects will
be, and the more sacrificial heat and effort will be required to remove them. But this
gives rise to a double-bind. Even asceticism, if motivated by desire and fuelled by
passion, may involve zealous inattention or wanton carelessness of other living
things, and so lead one to commit violence that will in turn cause further entrapment
of the soul. So ascetic effort must always be informed by the 'right view', and by
attentive watchfulness, self-monitoring, and discipline. Jain renouncers carefully
sweep the ground as they walk and before sitting down. They hold masks over their
mouths when they speak (in some sub-traditions they wear these strapped on all the
time) to remind them to speak only when necessary and so that they do not harm
creatures in the air as they do so. Even sleep should be discipline. One should lie
completely still, and not thrash about and risk crushing insects in one's sleep.
It follows from Jain doctrine on the omnipresence of living things, and the aspiration
to avoid harming them, that any physical action of any kind, indeed the very fact of
embodied existence, unavoidably involves committing violence. This is why the Jain
confessional rite of pratikraman, performed twice-daily by renouncers and also
though less regularly by laypeople, is punctuated by repeated short periods in which
one stops to examine one's clothes and the space around one and, with gentle
sweeping movements, symbolically removes any insects one would otherwise harm
as one carries out the rite. And it begins with confession and penance for the sins
one will commit, during the rite, in the effort to confess and repent (Laidlaw 1995:

12. 12
204-15). The potentially infinite regress this implies, and the impossibility of
embodied life without violence and sin, points logically to the fast to death.
Good for Health
For lay Jains, who do not follow the comprehensive regime laid down for monastic
renouncers, there is nevertheless an immense battery of vows and elaborately
enumerated practices they are enjoined to adopt, which, even if only fitfully and
intermittently, take them slowly along the same path towards the same goal of
purifying the soul of karmas. For instance, it is a common practice for very devout
lay Jains to adopt, either for fixed periods or permanently, a set of restrictions called
the Fourteen Disciplines (Laidlaw 1995: 181-2). Like all Jain austerities, one adopts
these by taking a binding vow. The Fourteen Disciplines involve restricting, for
example, the number of kinds of food one eats, the number of items of clothing one
wears, the number of pieces of furniture one uses, the number or kind of vehicles
one travels in, the directions and distances one moves in, and so on and so on.
The most important ascetic penance, however, is fasting. This comes in a variety of
forms, which impose various restrictions on diet up to and including prohibition of all
food of any kind including water for periods for instance of one, eight, fourteen, or
twenty-eight days. And there are more complex scripted fasts, usually with
associated mythological charters. A famous saint in Jain mythology is said to have
fasted for a year. Jains today emulate this, but their varshitap (yearlong fast)
involves alternate days of complete fast and of taking just one meal (Banks 1986:
86-8, Laidlaw 1995: 217-8, Cort 2001: 137-8).

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It is important to realise that all these austerities, restrictions, and periods of fasting,
are regarded quite literally as improving one's physical wellbeing. Jain popular belief
is unequivocally convinced that a vegetarian diet is healthier than an omnivorous
one, and one that observes tighter Jain dietary restrictions is still more healthy than
that. Although apparently pleasurable in the short term, stimulating and flavoursome
foods dissipate one's energies, dull the senses and critical faculties, and are
addictive. Dietary austerities are ways of cleaning, purifying, and strengthening the
body, making it more resilient and therefore a better instrument for the purification
of the soul. The body reduces in bulk, becomes harder and stronger, less prone to
illness, less needful of sleep, less prey to the infirmities and distractions of sexual
desire or desire for food, and sensations such as heat and cold. A recent newspaper
report from Bombay records a huge ceremony at which 250 monks and nuns were
among the crowd that witnessed some 1300 lay Jains successfully complete the
varshitap fast and take their fast-breaking meal of sugar-cane juice.6
Although it
may seem incongruous, this prolonged penance is celebrated a something that
actually enhances life. This is indicated not only by the lavish display and ceremonial,
but also by the fact that it seemed to the lay Jains in the crowd to be perfectly
natural for some eleven and a half thousand of them to take this opportunity to
make a blood donation for medical purposes.
On this kind of view a fast to death is the logical end point of a process of training.
There is certainly an apparent paradox in the idea of improving, strengthening, and
perfecting something, to the point where it ceases to exist, but Jain religious
iconography captures just this idea. In most Jain traditions regular temple worship
takes place before statues of deities and saints. The higher the religious status of the
figure depicted, the less personalised is the representation: the fewer the defining
features, and the more they look like each other. The twenty-four Jinas, the supreme

14. 14
saviours in Jainism, are almost all impossible to tell apart, and their statues are
distinguished by conventional symbols carved on the base. After the death and final
liberation of these greatest of saints they become, as I have already said, liberated
souls, entirely and forever freed from an actual body. But the way the liberated soul
is represented continues to use the human form. They are represented not as a
three-dimensional statue but as the empty outline of a human figure, standing or
more usually seated in the samadhi position, cut as a hole in an otherwise plain
sheet of standing metal (Banks 1997, Jaini 1979: 265, Laidlaw 1995: 230-74).
The greatest renouncer saints of Jain mytho-history are usually represented as
having belonged to spectacularly wealthy families. The more you have, the more
heroic it is to give it up. Similarly, although they mostly do so at the end of a long
full life, these saints are invariably represented as being in good health when they
embark on their final fast. Their deaths are a definite relinquishing of the fullness of
life. At the same time, the decision to die is the natural outcome of the state of
detached equanimity they have achieved, and their consequent indifference to
worldly pleasure and pain.
But a fast to death is also a perfectly legitimate response, for people today, to the
onset of infirmity and illness in old age. For instance, someone whose life is
regulated by one or more voluntary ascetic vows, such as the Fourteen Disciplines,
might find it increasingly difficult to continue to meet these obligations. The decision
to fast to death, rather than to break one's vows, may in this light appear not as a
dramatic or discontinuous one, but as a decision rather to continue on the path one
is already taking. Both circumstances are the same in that, without eagerness or
excitement, as much as without reluctance or fear, one takes the natural next step.

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Like all Jain austerities, samadhi-maran is initiated by a formal, binding vow. But it
can be and normally is approached by degrees, with progressive reduction of food
intake and renunciation of water only at the end. The final vow is almost always
administered, before witnesses, by a senior renouncer, who must ensure that it is
not just an 'ordinary suicide': not motivated by any of the passions of despair, rage,
or grief which, deriving from uncontrolled 'attachment', would be the antithesis of
the proper motivation for samadhi-maran. Thus a fast to death by a relatively young
person, such as Srimad Rajcandra, while spectacularly heroic and celebrated as such,
is also tinged with suspicion and not so wholly uncontroversial as that of an elderly
renouncer. By contrast, it has become accepted practice for very pious, elderly, lay
Jains to have a vow of samadhi-maran administered to them on their death-bed:
something of a fiction, but for those who have lived lives of disciplined self-control
and regular fasting, a seemly and fitting one.
So the Jain practice differs from commendation of suicide in Roman Stoicism in that
it is not so much an acceptance of the inevitability of death (although this is certainly
present) or escape from life that has become intolerable, as it is a positive aspiration
which, ideally, shapes the life that leads up to it. And this life also produces the body
that makes possible and sustains the final heroic fast. The most prestigious samadhi-
maran is one that results from a long fast. The body, as a result of a life-time of
religious practice, is strong and resilient. It ends with a heroic exercise of strenuous
and sustained effort, of 'work on the soul', which is why Amarcand-ji's daughter
emphasised the length of his final fast.
Thus the Jain practice of samadhi-maran is a logical and continuous culmination, the
natural and fitting end-point, of a virtuous religious life: the life that Jain tradition
recommends to all its followers. Few people go so far as actually to undertake it, of

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course, except when the body begins to fail them, but that is a matter of the frailty
of the human spirit and will. Every lay Jain understands and accepts that really, in
the end, to undertake a fast of this kind is the most wholly consistent and coherent
response to the Jain religious vision and the most fitting end to a Jain life.
A Life Worth Leaving
Suicide is no longer a crime in most Christian countries, or a mortal sin in most
Christian churches. On the face of it, with lively debates on the legalisation of
euthanasia and assisted suicide, contemporary Euro-American concerns with
securing a 'good death' and retaining autonomy and dignity in death, might seem to
bear comparison with Jain ideas and practice. Comparison brings home, however,
how deep the differences are. Indeed, the term 'euthanasia' can only partially
disguise the fact that its proponents in Europe and America today are not in fact
putting forward a positive conception of a 'good death', in anything like the full-
blown sense that this concept has in Jainism.
Debates in Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world about medical euthanasia and assisted
suicide are concerned quite largely with questions of what circumstances or
impairments make a human life no longer worth living. Suicide or euthanasia might
become justified, according to their supporters, when it is no longer possible for
someone to enjoy the good things that make life worth living. In the absence of
those goods (whatever they are agreed to be), ending one's life, or helping another
to do so, becomes potentially justified. Thus we find ourselves, for instance, invited
to consider video footage to judge whether a brain-damaged patient shows signs of
consciousness, or of human affection, or of pleasure. These are the goods –
consciousness, affection, pleasure – that we are asked to consider make human life

17. 17
worth living. If they are present, the life should be preserved (and specifically
medical professional ethics insist that it must be). If not, then for some at least,
especially for those whose ethical thinking is predominantly utilitarian, this provides
a justification for ending that life or the basis for a right to do so. Our public life,
especially public policy debate, is of course overwhelmingly dominated by utilitarian
reasoning, so these arguments are making discernible if still unsteady progress.
Such arguments work, in so far as they work, off a supposed negation of the
qualities that make life worth living. A life that is worth living should be prolonged.
And although we might all be dimly aware that however full and satisfying our lives
were, we would not actually want to live forever (Williams 1973), there is almost no
way in which that intuition, or any of its potential implications, finds its way into
public policy discussion or ethical debate. The debates are conducted as if it were
axiomatically obvious that a healthy and full life should be prolonged for just as long
as possible. A good death, on this utilitarian view, is one that saves us from the
inevitability of physical degeneration and pain, when they can no longer be put off in
any other way.
In the Jain case, samadhi-maran, as the ideal of a good death, stands in a
completely different relation to conceptions of a good life. It is justified and virtuous
in conventional Jain religious thinking just to the extent that you have achieved a
fulfilled and successful religious life. It is the next stage and fully successful
completion of such a life. There is no point of reversal, where life becomes no longer
worth living and the best that can be done is to salvage some dignity from the end.
Samadhi-maran becomes most glorious and most virtuous when the way you live
already points inexorably in that direction. A good life is one that, because it is good,
is a life worth leaving.

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Achieving Autonomy
In most respects Jain funeral rites exactly parallel those of Hindus of similar caste
and class (on these see Bayly 1981, Knipe 1977, Parry 1989, 1994). But one
important set of Hindu practices is missing from the Jain equivalents. One of the
most weighty duties of a Hindu man is to be present at a parent's cremation. Once
the fire is well under way, he takes a log and smashes the deceased's skull, releasing
the soul so that it can begin the journey to its next birth. It should not have to leave
through one of the body's existing, polluted, orifices. Thereafter, the son must make
an extended series of sacrificial offerings, called sraddha, to feed the now
disembodied soul and sustain it as it makes its way to a new life in a new body. The
kind of new body it is reborn in depends on it being properly provided for in this
period. Without these offerings, there is a danger that it will fail to be reborn
properly and become instead a malevolent ghost, who will haunt and persecute the
family members who neglected it.
Right up to and including the cracking of the skull, Jains perform the same rites, but
they never perform the sraddha ceremonies. I should emphasise that this is quite
notable – the rest of their death rituals, their marriage rites and the way they mark
the birth of children all follow common Hindu practice. But sraddha rites would
contradict Jain teachings on karma and rebirth. Jain teaching is that the soul
proceeds instantaneously at the time of death to its next body, and to a considerable
degree the body it goes to is determined by the state of mind at the moment of
death. To gain liberation, the mind must be completely tranquil, free from all fears or
desires, and basically the closer one is to equanimity in the last few moments of life,
the better will be the next rebirth (Jaini 1980).

19. 19
As Amarcand-ji's daughter's description of his death was clearly intended to convey,
death by fasting aspires to the attainment of equanimity and therefore a better
rebirth. Ultimately this will mean as a liberated soul, with no physical body at all. The
details of her account indicate her confidence about the extent of her father's
success. His skull cracked spontaneously, she said. He did not need a son to do this
for him after death. In effect, she is saying that he was able, simultaneously with
bringing about his own death, to perform his own funeral rites. Having attained such
a high degree of autonomy and detachment in life, his soul was able to escape its
now superfluous body, and to do so with the dignity of autonomous action, and in a
manner that maximally disassociates it from the pollution of the physical body. She
said that he died reciting the samayik prayer. Devout lay Jains take the best part of
an hour each morning to sit and recite this prayer and meditation. The final lines are
explicit in representing death as a positive aspiration.
Cessation of sorrow, Cessation of karmas
Death while in meditation, the attainment of enlightenment
O holy Jina! Friend of the entire universe, let these be mine
For I have taken refuge at your feet. (Jaini 1979: 226-7).
And the canonical Uttaradhyayana Sutra puts the case for samadhi-maran succinctly.
Death against one's will is that of ignorant men, and it happens (to the same
individual) many times. Death with one's will is that of wise men, and at best
it happens but once. (Jacobi 1895: 20).
Agency without Action
While samadhi-maran, as I have been describing it, is distinctively Jain, many of the
ideas that inform this practice – of karma and rebirth, of detachment and
renunciation, of asceticism and sacrificial purification, among others – are to some

20. 20
extent common currency in South Asia. And ideas of religiously-inspired suicide and
heroic self-killing are both venerable and current (see works by Hopkins, Keith,
Filliozat, Thakur, Young). There is the idea, for example, of suicide as a supreme
expression of religious devotion. So there are stories of Hindu devotees who drown
themselves in a sacred river or throw themselves from a mountain that is sacred to a
deity. And there is the idea of jauhar, important especially in Rajput tradition,
whereby the inhabitants of a besieged city commit mass suicide: the warriors riding
out to certain but honourable death in battle while the women immolate themselves
rather than be taken by their enemies. Then there is the 'fast unto death' as a sort of
protest or demonstration (dharna). And there is sati, the self-immolation of a widow
on her husband's funeral pyre. All these means of self-destruction have been
controversial. All have been described as heroic or divinely inspired, and all have also
been condemned, in Hindu contexts. The position of Jain religious teachers has been
distinctive (Caillat 1977; Thakur 1963: 49, 53). They have been remarkably
consistent in condemning all these practices other than samadhi-maran as 'impure'
forms of self-killing. But like samadhi-maran, these other more dramatic and bloody
forms of suicide continue to have resonance in contemporary South Asia, and they
are potent and fiercely contested components of the culture that contemporary Jains
inhabit.7
If we compare samadhi-maran with some of these, and consider the ways
in which the latter are controversial, we shall see that much turns, in Jain ethical
thinking, on questions of will and agency.
Let us begin with the 'fast unto death' as a form of moral suasion. People sit outside
the house of a debtor and vow to fast, till death if necessary, until the debt is paid.
Or they sit outside government offices vowing to fast until their grievances are
addressed. Some of Mahatma Gandhi's celebrated 'fasts unto death', none of which
in the end of course were actually 'unto death', appear to have been in this tradition.

21. 21
He several times announced that he would fast until a bout of communal violence
subsided, or until some political impasse had been overcome. It is interesting,
however, that he always denied that his fasts were protests or forms of moral
pressure, and preferred to give an account of them that aligned them much more
with Jain tradition (Alter 2000: 28-52).8
Gandhi rationalised and explained his own fasting, including his celebrated political
fasts, by insisting that he was not fasting in order to pressure or blackmail other
people to behave as he wished. He was working instead on himself, attempting by
the moral and spiritual force of his own self-purification to destroy his own bad
karma and, by a sort of radiating effect of this self-purification, to remove the bad
effects of his own sinful actions and faults on all those around him, thereby causing
them to behave better in turn. He sought, as it were, to clean and purify the world
around him, beginning with and by means of cleaning his own body through fasting
(Alter 2000: 42-3).
While mostly Jains think that their austerities affect only their own spiritual condition,
they agree that especially holy people by the practice of exceptional austerities can
do this kind of thing. Jain literature contains descriptions of general peace and
harmony arising in the vicinity of great Jain saints as they sat in meditation and
penance. And even for ordinary people the good effects of a religious fast are not
entirely individual. Women especially fast regularly for the health and wellbeing of
their families (see especially Reynell 1985). Gandhi's political fasts, then, were
fundamentally like those of a virtuous Jain parent seeking to protect his or her
family.

22. 22
The problematic aspect of this kind of thing, for Jains, is the question of desire and
purpose. A fast which someone undertakes in order to achieve some effect in the
world, whether it be the health of their family, getting a new job, passing an
examination, or even general peace and goodwill, because and insofar as it is an
expression of worldly desire and attachment, will be positively counter-productive in
terms of one's own spiritual progress towards enlightenment (Laidlaw 1995: 216-
29). So from this point of view Gandhi, like a mother fasting for the good of her
children, is well-intentioned in a worldly sense, but what he can achieve will be
limited at best to this-worldly effects and will not be a significant step towards
enlightenment and liberation.
The Jain fast must therefore not be directed to some purpose outside the self.
Indeed even to say that it is 'aimed at achieving' spiritual purification or
enlightenment is somewhat problematical. Such progress involves, among other
things, the diminishing of all capacity for desire, dislike, or fear. So although the fast
must begin with a very definite act of volition – a public declaration of intention and
adoption of a vow – as the fast proceeds, this volition is itself extinguished. The
declaration of the vow enables a Jain to some extent to do his or her intending in
advance. As the Jain texts invariably put it, having taken the vow and embarked on
the fast one 'waits without eagerness' for its conclusion.
This distinctive pattern of volition and agency is also one of the features that marks
the Jain samadhi-maran from the well-known practice of sati – the immolation of a
widow on her husband's funeral pyre.
In the early decades of the 19th
century sati was outlawed by the British government
in India.9
This was one of a number of issues relating to the rights and treatment of

23. 23
women in Indian society that became the focus of debate about the nature and
purposes of colonial rule and, at the same time, about the content of 'Indian
tradition'. Who had the right to say what 'tradition' consisted of? And what right did
the government have to regulate and reform 'traditional' practices?
The decision to outlaw sati was justified basically by two arguments. First, British
commentators, and even more energetically Indian reformers, contended that
instances of sati were not genuine expressions of Hindu tradition. The unfortunate
women who died in this way were, they claimed, coerced by unscrupulous in-laws
who wanted to be rid of a now superfluous female dependent. So they were really
cases of murder, more or less pure and simple. And secondly, prohibition was
justified on the grounds that sati was anyway a barbaric corruption of tradition. It
was late and inauthentic – often this was expressed by saying that it arose from
Muslim influence.
Supporters of the practice argued, by contrast, that the superficial materialist
viewpoint of westerners, and westernised élites, blinded them to the spiritual beauty
of the widow's goddess-like courage and devotion. The foreigners and reformers
could see only material self-interest because that is all their own world-view allowed
for. And anyway this show of protecting Indian women from Indian men was
transparent apologia for colonial rule: a presumptuous and paternalistic claim to
understand a tradition better than those who lived by it.
These arguments were revived in much the same form in the 1980s and 90s, with
the rise of the Hindu Right to political prominence in India. The secularist, post-
independence, mostly Congress governments until that time had continued and
indeed strengthened the prohibition on sati, along with all forms of suicide. Hindu

24. 24
revivalists portrayed this as internal colonialism. It was, they said, evidence of the
extent to which India's rulers were foreign in outlook if not any longer in blood.
Controversy focused especially around a particular case of sati that occurred in rural
Rajasthan in 1987. The husband of a very young and recently married Hindu couple
died and his widow, a woman called Roop Kanwar, was burned to death hours later
on his funeral pyre. Photographs purporting to show the event began to circulate in
nearby towns and cities almost immediately and huge crowds started to gather for
ceremonies that would celebrate the event and establish a temple and cult centre on
the site.
One of the largest and most wealthy Hindu temples in the region, in an otherwise
out-of-the-way town, commemorates a supposedly similar event in the 18th
century.
Opposition to the establishment of a new temple commemorating what they
regarded as the murder of an innocent young woman was led by women's groups in
the nearby city of Jaipur. They organised a march and took action in the courts to
compel the government in New Delhi to enforce the law. They persuaded the central
government to make aiding a sati a capital offence in Union law (it already was in
theory at State level) and in addition clearly to outlaw any 'glorification' of sati. The
dead woman's in-laws went into hiding, local police organised an ostentatiously half-
hearted attempt to track them down, and huge counter-demonstrations were
organised by regional and national Hindu revivalist groups, complaining of the
suppression of authentic Hindu religious tradition by 'mentally foreign' elite women
and other 'alien elements'.
The women's groups who campaigned on the issue found themselves recapitulating
almost exactly the arguments of their British and Indian reformist forebears in the
colonial debates of nearly two centuries before.10
In particular, in an attempt to avoid

25. 25
the accusation of neo-colonialism, they found themselves arguing on their
opponents' terrain: about the proper interpretation of Hindu mythological texts and
what were the oldest and therefore most authoritative strata of Hindu religious
tradition. And they found themselves casting around for priests and holy men who
would support their position that sati is a late and corrupt practice. They were of
course always unlikely to win in an argument of this kind, as they were not
themselves fundamentally committed to the terms in which it was conducted.
But more importantly, the argument they really wanted to engage in was completely
different. They were convinced that the girl had in fact been murdered. Her death
was not justifiable because it was not really suicide. Although they demanded the
application of the law, which prohibits suicide as well as any actions to facilitate or
celebrate it, they did so not principally from a conviction that suicide itself is wrong –
a question on which they were divided and uncertain, and they leaned on the whole
towards toleration – but because they believed that the case was really one of the
denigration, exploitation, and murder of women as women. Proving this meant
rejecting as fabrication all the evidence that aligned Roop Kanwar's death with the
established iconography of sati – the claim that the pyre ignited spontaneously when
she announced her determination to accompany her husband to heaven; the images
of her sitting serenely in the fire, cradling his head in her lap; and so on. And this is
what they largely concentrated on – collecting testimony that the girl was drugged to
subdue her, and/or tied to the pyre, and/or that she tried to run away and was
forced back into the flames.
Much of the iconography they were seeking to refute here is similar to that of
samadhi-maran, since these two practices share the underlying idea of extraordinary
virtue being able to will and regulate the manner of its own death, as well as the

26. 26
imagery of purifying death by sacrificial burning. And in fact many of the memorials
to Jain samadhi-marans, especially those of women, closely resemble memorial
stones for satis in Rajasthan. The difference is that, certainly to a sceptical or secular
sensibility, the Jain practice gives much more persuasive authentication that death
really is the person's own free choice and a result of his or her own action. This is
probably why, so far as I know, the legal prohibition of suicide has never led to police
or court intervention to prevent a Jain fast to death, although they are frequently
very well publicised as they proceed.11
Seen from the outside, and compared with sati, the fact that samadhi-maran is a
long, drawn-out, public spectacle helps to establish that it really is voluntary. But
from the Jain point of view, the situation is more complex than this because, as we
have seen, desire and volition are supposed not to be present at all. This is one of
the things about which the teacher who takes the vow is supposed to make sure. A
slow process of conquering desire culminates in a calm decision to abandon a now
superfluous body. Insofar as they are present at the outset, desire and volition are
supposed to wither away as the fast proceeds. Precisely this is a sign that the fast is
working, in terms of removing karma from the soul. Paradoxically, then, if the
supposed sati really were as Hindu supporters of the practice claim – an embodiment
of passionate devotion and an agent of pure and unconstrained will – her death
would be on that account from the Jain point of view a 'fool's death': in the
pejorative sense a suicide. And while secular observers attribute what they regard as
genuine volition and choice to the Jain samadhi-maran, and not to the sati, from the
internal religious point of view the progress of the fast should eliminate from the
former just these superfluous aspects of the self.

27. 27
So if the Jain fast is to be thought of as an exercise of 'agency', which in some
respects surely it must, this is a circumstance where being an agent equates with an
absence of desire, and is possible in what seems from the outside to be a state of
extreme passivity. Although administering the vow to an unconscious dying person is
clearly a somewhat unorthodox extension of the practice, the fact that it is regarded
as acceptable suggests that 'agency' is thought of less as a precondition than as an
outcome of samadhi-maran. It is only when the soul is released from its body that it
becomes omniscient, free, and truly itself.
The problem that it is self-defeating to desire equanimity, to strive for contentment
and peace of mind, has been grappled with in many philosophical and ethical
traditions, East and West. Jain tradition, in the practice of samadhi-maran, embodies
a particular resolution of these dilemmas. From the Jain point of view, the samadhi-
maran achieves the greatest degree of freedom that the human condition allows. The
pervasively inhabited nature of the world we live in means that all action, even the
mere fact of embodied existence, is inherently violent and sinful. And since karma is
bound to the soul by passion, even a determined commitment to renunciation can
become a kind of bond. The samadhi-maran begins with clearly stated intentions and
clearly formulated acts of will, and the vows taken or administered continue to
govern what the fasting person does, and to mark it as positive action, even as he or
she actually does less and less. When Jain teachers enumerate the qualities of the
liberated soul they say that it enjoys bliss (sukhya) and omniscience (keval gyan),
since it is no longer affected by the frailties of the physical body or the limited
powers of its senses. They also say that it has infinite strength or energy (virya),
which seems odd at first, since it does not ever do anything. It merely subsists, in
the eternal enjoyment of these very qualities. But this idea of agency without action

28. 28
– of human agency as, as it were, purely potential energy – does make sense as the
end-point of a fast to death.
Freedom from Necessity
Aristocrats condemned to death in Republican and Imperial Rome were
conventionally given the option of suicide, as a way of recovering or asserting the
dignity of their station. They were reduced to attempting to make a social virtue out
of an existential necessity. Plainly, when adopted by people in good health, the Jain
practice of samadhi-maran embodies a more ambitiously positive aspiration. But for
those who take the vow in old age or sickness, it might be thought that like those
aristocratic Roman suicides, their agency is limited to choosing the manner of their
death and marginally affecting its timing, where the fact of death is out of their
control. One final example illustrates that even in these situations samadhi-maran
can be a means for asserting and establishing agency.
In Jaipur there are at least three shrines in Jain temples dedicated to a much-
admired nun called Vicaksan-sri-ji who died there in the early 1980s (Laidlaw 1995:
262-7; see also Banks 1997; Shanta 1997: 584-90). Vicaksan is the only historical
rather than mythical example of a woman I know of who is now worshiped as a
temple statue. In her sixties she contracted breast cancer but in defiance of the
pleas of her many followers and the advice of her doctors she decided to refuse all
treatment. She declared that her illness was bad karma, earned by sinful actions in a
previous life. She would have to endure the consequences sooner or later, since only
in that way could she free her soul from its effects. So she actively accepted the
symptoms of her disease and the pain that went with it, as if it were a voluntary
austerity. She took to sitting all day in a meditational posture, telling her rosary, and

29. 29
asking her followers to be pleased for her since every moment of pain she endured in
this way was progress towards enlightenment and liberation. For her to take a vow
of samadhi-maran, and fast for her last few days, was only a minor development of
this position.
Vicaksan-sri-ji's samadhi-maran retrospectively confirmed the meaning she had
sought to assign to the preceding phase of her life. It confirmed her illness and
physical deterioration as a long religious penance, as something that strengthened
her, and that gave her, at the end, power over what happened on her death. Her
devotees are confident that she, like Amarchand-ji, chose the moment of her death
and effected the release of her soul through her skull. They are equally confident
that she has now achieved final and complete liberation. She is represented,
however, not as an abstract liberated soul but as a very specific individual. In a
departure from the usual conventions, her temple statues are vividly lifelike
portraits. They show her not in her youth but in the advanced months of her illness,
which is to say that they represent the uniquely powerful embodiment of a Jain
religious life which she chose to make of herself. She is shown sitting, wearing thick
spectacles and telling her rosary, and smiling. Devotees claim to be able to see, and
in worship to share, both her pain and also her experience of transcending it.
Vikaksan-sri-ji, according to all these accounts, took the fact that she was going to
die and the pain her disease gave rise to, and she so to speak consecrated that
suffering and misfortune by shaping it to the template of Jain religious suicide. She
placed her illness into a narrative of her religious life that assigned the fact of death
a subordinate position because it included her previous lives. In this narrative, the
illness ceased to be an unfortunate and essentially meaningless misfortune that
befell her, and which she could, at best, make the most of or endure with dignity. In

30. 30
this sense her response was not Stoic. Instead, she made it a positive opportunity,
one moreover that she had created through her previous actions, for her to 'do good
for her soul'. She made a fatal disease that happened to her into something that she
did.
Thus the practice of samadhi-maran embodies, in the distinctive idioms and values of
the Jain tradition, an uncompromising position on two sets of very general ethical
dilemma. The first of these concerns the question of how any ideals of detachment,
equanimity, acceptance, or contentment can be the object of aspiration or desire,
without being self-defeating. Jainism experiences this kind of dilemma in an extreme
form, and self-killing by fasting is of course by any standard an extreme resolution: a
form of action that leads to a state of non-action, a distillation of agency by means of
resolute non-execution, and a state of co-existence with the rest of the world
achieved by means to the extinction of one's own embodied life. The second
concerns the question of how to understand the extent of our capacity to affect our
lives, in the light of the extent of our sense of responsibility for the course our life
takes. The latter generally exceeds a common-sense understanding of the former.
We feel responsible for more than we normally feel able to control: for what happens
to us as well as for what we do. In fasting to death Jainism provides a way, though
at a cost, of extending the latter to include the former. From outside the Jain ethical
tradition the dignity and honour let alone the attraction of samadhi-maran can seem
hard to grasp, but the ethical predicaments it is concerned with are universal ones.

31. 31
Notes
1
I am grateful to the editors of this volume and to two anonymous readers for
helpful comments on an earlier draft. The paper was presented to the 2003
conference on 'scenographies of suicide' at Birkbeck College, and also to
anthropological theory seminars at the University of Cambridge, at the Queen's
University Belfast, and at the University of Malta. I am grateful for comments and
questions from participants at those seminars.
2
For excellent general studies of Jainism see Dundas 2002 and Jaini 1979. The
principal ethnographies on Svetambar Jainism, drawn upon here, are Reynell 1985,
Carrithers & Humphrey 1991, Banks 1992, Folkert 1993, Humphrey & Laidlaw 1994,
Laidlaw 1995, Babb 1996, Cort 2001, Kelting 2001, and Vallely 2002. On the
Digambars see Carrithers 1989, 1996, 2000.
3
See for instance the Acaranga Sutra (Jacobi 1884: 74-8), the Antakrddasah
(Barnett 1907: 63-77), and the Upasakadasah (Hoernle 1888-90).
4
Recent accounts of the Jain practice, drawn upon here, include Bilimoria 1992,
Caillat 1977, Chapple 1993: 99-109, Dundas 2002: 179-81, Jaini 1979: 227-40,
Settar 1989, 1990, Williams 1963: 166-72, and Young 1989.
5
The material presented in this paper concerns the Svetambars, but the practice is
equally central to Digambar Jainism. Indeed, some of the most celebrated acts of
samadhi-maran in recent decades have been by prominent naked Digambar monks.
See Carrithers 1989.
6
I am grateful to Jacob Copeman for drawing this report to my attention.
7
For example, in 1990 the Union government led by Mr V. P. Singh announced, to
general surprise, that it would immediately implement the recommendations of a
long-ignored report of a commission of inquiry into caste inequality. These

32. 32
recommendations involved radically increasing the proportion of university and
college places and government jobs reserved for persons identified as members of
disadvantaged or 'backward castes'. There were widespread protests by Hindus of
'higher' castes, especially by young, urban males, mostly from relatively poor
families, who believed that their already meagre chance of achieving a respectable
white-collar job would be significantly damaged by these proposals. And some of
these protests took a horrifying form, one that combined themes from some of the
forms of suicide I have just mentioned: the dharna protest, and the death by fire we
find in both sati and jauhar. Young men doused themselves in petrol and set
themselves alight. Several died from protests of this kind.
8
We should remember that, in addition to the influence of Rajcandra before the
latter fasted to death, Gandhi's mother was a Jain, and he grew up in a trading-caste
Hindu milieu in which inter-marriage with Jains is common and the general cultural
influence of Jainism very marked.
9
On the controversies around the practice of sati, in the early nineteenth and the
late twentieth centuries, see Mani 1987, Hawley 1994, Hawley (ed.) 1994, Sunder
Rajan 1990, van den Bosch 1990, Harlan 2001.
10
The arguments of the time were collected and summarised in three highbrow
publications, Economic and Political Weekly (7 November, 1987), Manushi (1987),
and Seminar (February 1988). See also the Economic and Political Weekly (27 April
1991) and Oldenberg (1994).
11
Concern that legal action might be taken did prompt a Jain judge to write a
treatise explaining why in his view the Jain practice, not being 'suicide', is not
covered by the law (Tukol 1976). During the controversy over the Roop Kanwar
case, some Hindu activists did raise the matter, in an attempt to show that the law
was being applied selectively against sati, but although this point was to some extent

33. 33
sharpened by the fact that one of the leading feminist campaigners in Jaipur was a
secular Digambar Jain, it did not get taken up in a sustained way. This might be in
part because political support for 'Hindu' parties and organisations is in fact very
strong among Jains in Rajasthan.

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