Economy and Society Volume 34 Number 2 May 2005: 178 /199
A life worth leaving: fasting
to death as telos of a Jain
religious life
James Laidlaw
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 around volition and agency. And it illustrates how the practice embodies
positions on some universal ethical issues.
Keywords: suicide; religion; Jainism; India; ethics; agency.
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 selfkilling.
The Jain religion is a first cousin, historically and philosophically, to
Buddhism: founded at the same time (the fourth century 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
James Laidlaw, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge
CB2 3RF, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
Copyright # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/03085140500054545
James Laidlaw: A life worth leaving
179
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.1
The death of a ‘real Jain’
During the fieldwork I conducted on Jainism in the 1980s and 1990s, 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 die 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 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
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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 more repeatedly 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-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 32, 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 thirty-six days. For the last twenty-four 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
James Laidlaw: A life worth leaving
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position and he died sitting like that. When he died 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,2 and has been consistently portrayed as one
of its highest ideals ever since.3 It is common to both the main sectarian
traditions within the Jain fold, the Digambars and the Svetambars, and to all
their constituent branches.4 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 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 nonviolence, 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
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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 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 minimize 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 blind most of us to this
realization and makes us behave with wanton disregard for other lives, and so
for our own real interests, are our 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
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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 and 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 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 internalized 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
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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 fire; ‘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.
The imagery Jains use in describing the condition of the soul is strikingly
physical (Jaini 1980). Karma s, 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: 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
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the same goal of purifying the soul of karma s. For instance, it is a respected
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). As with 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 (year-long fast) involves alternate days of complete fast and of
taking just one meal (Banks 1986: 86/8; Laidlaw 1995: 217 /18; Cort 2001:
137 /8).
It is important to realize that all these austerities, restrictions and periods of
fasting are regarded quite literally as improving one’s physical well-being. 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 even healthier. 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.5 Although it may seem
incongruous, this prolonged penance is celebrated as 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
pledge 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 personalized is the
representation: the fewer the defining features, and the more they look like
each other. The twenty-four Jinas, the supreme saviours in Jainism, are almost
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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 for ever freed from an actual body. But the way the liberated souls are
represented continues to use the human form. They are represented not
as three-dimensional statues but as the empty outlines of human figures,
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.
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 samadhimaran . 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 deathbed: 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 the 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 an 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
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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 emphasized
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 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 legalization 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 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.
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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 for ever (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.
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 weightiest 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, which 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 emphasize 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
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is to equanimity in the last few moments of life, the better will be the next
rebirth (Jaini 1980).
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 karma s
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 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 (1901), Keith (1908 /26), Filliozat (1963), Thakur (1963)
and Young (1989)). 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
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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.6 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, was actually ‘unto death’, appear to
have been in this tradition. 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).7
Gandhi rationalized 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 selfpurification 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 Jains mostly 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 well-being 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.
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
James Laidlaw: A life worth leaving
191
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 out from the well-known practice of sati / the
immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century sati was outlawed by the
British government in India.8 This was one of a number of issues relating to
the rights and treatment of 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, second, 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 Westernized 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 a 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
1990s, with the rise of the Hindu Right to political prominence in India. The
secularist, post-independence, mostly Congress governments until that time
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had continued and indeed strengthened the prohibition on sati , along with all
forms of suicide. Hindu 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 wealthiest Hindu temples in the region, in an
otherwise out-of-the-way town, commemorates a supposedly similar event in
the eighteenth 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
organized 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 organized an ostentatiously
half-hearted attempt to track them down and huge counter-demonstrations
were organized by regional and national Hindu revivalist groups, complaining
of the suppression of authentic Hindu religious tradition by ‘mentally foreign’
élite 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.9
In particular, in an attempt to avoid 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
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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 imagery of purifying death by sacrificial burning. And in
fact many of the memorials to Jain samadhi-maran s, especially those of women,
closely resemble memorial stones for sati 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, as 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 publicized as they
proceed.10
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 on that
account, from the Jain point of view, be 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.
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.
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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 samadhimaran , 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 / 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 muchadmired 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
worshipped 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
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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 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 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 very general
ethical dilemmas. 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 nonaction, a distillation of agency by means of resolute non-execution, and a state
of coexistence 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
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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 samadhimaran can seem hard to grasp, but the ethical predicaments it is concerned
with are universal ones.
Acknowledgements
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.
Notes
1 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 and Humphrey (1991), Banks (1986), Folkert (1993), Humphrey and
Laidlaw (1994), Laidlaw (1995), Babb (1996), Cort (2001), Kelting (2001) and Vallely
(2002). On the Digambars, see Carrithers (1989, 1996, 2000).
2 See for instance the Acaranga Sutra (Jacobi 1884: 74 /8), the Antakrddasah (Barnett
1907: 63 /77), and the Upasakadasah (Hoerle 1888 /90).
3 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).
4 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).
5 I am grateful to Jacob Copeman for drawing this report to my attention.
6 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 longignored report of a commission of inquiry into caste inequality. These 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.
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7 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.
8 On the controversies around the practice of sati , in the early nineteenth and the late
twentieth centuries, see Mani (1987), Hawley (1994a, 1994b), Sunder Rajan (1990), van
den Bosch (1990) and Harlan (2001).
9 The arguments of the time were collected and summarized 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).
10 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 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 organizations is in fact very strong among Jains in
Rajasthan.
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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).