ing religiously motivated suicide. Gautama Buddha, in his
personal search for salvation, deliberately chose against the
practice of fasting unto death. Nonetheless, under certain ex-
traordinary circumstances, Buddhists see religiously motivat-
ed suicide as an act of sacrifice and worship. Indications of
this positive attitude toward suicide, or self-sacrifice, are
found in some of the accounts of the Buddha’s previous lives
contained in the Jatakas (Birth Tales). The stories of the
Buddha’s previous lives as a hare (S ́a ́sa Ja ̄taka) and as a mon-
key (Maha ̄kapi Ja ̄taka) both describe suicide as an act of self-
sacrifice to benefit another, and only in the story of the mon-
key does this act lead to death. Another famous account is
that from the Suvarn:aprabha ̄sa, a Maha ̄ya ̄na su ̄tra, which de-
scribes the suicide or sacrifice of the Buddha, during his life
as the prince Maha ̄sattva, in order to feed a hungry tigress
unable to care for herself. Following this model, Buddhism
in its various forms affirms that, while suicide as self-sacrifice
may be appropriate for the person who is an arhat, one who
has attained enlightenment, it is still very much the excep-
tion to the rule.
Confucianism based its attitude toward suicide on an-
other consideration, that of filial piety and obligation. The
person who commits suicide robs his ancestors of the venera-
tion and service due them and demonstrates his ingratitude
to his parents for the gift of life. The duty of a gentleman
is to guide his life according to li, the code or rules of propri-
ety. In rare cases, suicide was required of the gentleman who
failed to uphold these rules. In some instances a gentleman
might commit suicide to protest improper government, since
above all a gentleman was obliged to uphold the virtue of hu-
maneness. Thus, in these unusual instances suicide was the
correct way to demonstrate adherence to the precepts of
Confucianism.
Although the Japanese tradition of seppuku, or harakiri,
should be regarded in its voluntary form as heroic rather than
as religiously motivated suicide, it nonetheless does contain
certain religious elements. The standard by which all acts of
seppuku (disembowelment) were judged was set by the heroic
Minamoto Yorimasa during a desperate battle in 1180.
While suicide was usually performed as an individual act by
a noble warrior or samurai, there are examples in Japanese
history of mass suicides, such as that of the forty-seven ronin
who accepted the penalty of seppuku in order to avenge the
death of their lord in 1703.
While Christian missionaries in Japan, from the time of
the arrival of the first Jesuits, sought to prevent seppuku, the
Zen Buddhist tradition continued to regard it as a form of
honorable death. The selection of the hara, or belly, as the
point at which the sword was plunged into the body reflected
the belief that the abdomen is the place where one exercises
control over one’s breathing and is, indeed, the central point
of self-discipline. More generally, as Ivan I. Morris states in
his book The Nobility of Failure, the abdomen was consid-
ered in the Japanese tradition as “the locus of man’s inner
being, the place where his will, spirit, generosity, indigna-
tion, courage, and other cardinal qualities were concentrat-
ed” (Morris, 1975, p. 367). Thus, by committing oneself to
the performance of seppuku, which became a clearly defined
ritual, one demonstrated in this final act the greatest degree
of self-control, discipline, and courage.
CONCLUSION. This article has focused directly on religiously
motivated suicide. It has omitted references to suicide among
elderly Inuit (Eskimo) and among young Tikopia islanders,
to cite only two examples from a vast number of possibilities.
In these cases, as in many others, although the suicides may
be heroic or altruistic, they do not demonstrate a clear reli-
gious motivation. Suicides by reason of financial failure, or
loss of honor or of a loved one, occur among the Kwakiutl
and Iroquois Indians, as well as among Bantu-speaking peo-
ples of Africa. Occurrences of suicide are not limited by ge-
ography or time, but of the many suicides that have taken
place throughout the ages, only a small proportion can be
judged to be religiously motivated.
The examples of religiously motivated suicide discussed
here demonstrate the wide variety of forms and purposes that
the act may take. Many of the examples, from both East and
West, illustrate the difficulty in distinguishing between sui-
cide that is religiously motivated and suicide that is motivat-
ed by heroism, altruism, or fear of persecution and suffering.
The deaths at Jonestown in 1978 raise anew the problem of
how to differentiate between religiously motivated suicide
and suicide induced by paranoia and terror. There is no sim-
ple distinction between suicide and martyrdom, on the one
hand, or between suicide and sacrifice, on the other. In for-
mulating these distinctions and in evaluating the morality
and religious value of certain acts that result in death, each
person brings to bear his or her own religious and ethical val-
ues and tradition. Such personal judgment must, however,
be conjoined with the awareness that what may be perceived
by one observer as needless self-sacrifice or even self-murder
may be judged by another as the noblest example of reli-
giously motivated suicide in behalf of beliefs, values, or
tradition.SEE ALSO Martyrdom.BIBLIOGRAPHY
There is a vast literature on suicide, but relatively little of it focuses
on the act as religiously motivated. Any student of the topic
must begin with Émile Durkheim’s Le suicide, translated by
John A. Spaulding and George Simpson as Suicide: A Study
in Sociology (New York, 1951). It is the classic work on the
varieties of suicide analyzed from a sociological viewpoint.
Jacques Choron’s chapters on “Suicide in Retrospect” and
“Philosophers on Suicide” in his volume Suicide (New York,
1972) are quite helpful in understanding the place of suicide
in the West at different times. A volume edited by Frederick
H. Holck, Death and Eastern Thought: Understanding Death
in Eastern Religions and Philosophies (Nashville, 1974), con-
tains several chapters that refer to suicide. Alfred Alvarez also
discusses the themes of religious motivation for suicide and
religious prohibition of the act in his book The Savage God:8832 SUICIDE