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JAINISM AND WORLD PROBLEMS
It may not be news to some of your readers that in Europe itself suicide was legalised and practised, quite freely, in the ancient days, though now and then a voice was raised against the custom to check its prevalence. Plato permitted it "when the law required it, and also when men had been struck down by intolerable calamity."* Epicurus exhorted men to "weigh carefully whether they would prefer death to come to them or would themselves go to death." Thus, as Lecky has shown (The History of European Morals), a general approval of suicide floated down through most of the schools of philosophy, and even to those who condemned it, it never seems to have assumed its present aspect of extreme enormity. As a general proposition, the law recognized it as the right of an individual to put an end to his life whenever he chose. Among those who approved of the practice was Musonius who delivered himself thus: "Just as a landlord who has not received his rent pulls down the doors, removes the rafters, and fills up the well, so I seem to be driven out of this little body when nature, which has let it to me, takes away, one by one, eyes and ears, hands and feet. I will not, therefore, delay longer, but will cheerfully depart as from a banquet." It is Senecca, however, whose views come up nearest to the Jaina sallekhana. He says: "He who waits the extremity of old age is not far removed from a coward I will not relinquish old age if it leaves my better part in tact. But if it begins to shake my mind, if it destroys its faculties, one by one, if it leaves me not life but breath, I will depart from the putrid and tottering edifice. I will not escape by death from disease as long as it may be healed, and leaves my mind unimpaired. I will not raise my hand against myself on account of pain, for so to die is to be conquered. But if I know that I must suffer without hope of relief, I will depart, not through fear of pain itself, but because it prevents all for which I live."
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Lecky's History of European Morals, Chap. II.
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