Non-harm (ahiṃsā) is one of the most important features of the Jain worldview. This principle has been applied with logical rigour to menstruation. In textual sources developed over the last two and a half thousand years menstruation is considered harmful in that living beings (jīva) in the menses are killed as a result of sex (Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra 2.79) and when the blood leaves the body. Menstruation is considered voluntary in the sense that it is occasioned by feelings of desire or faults (kaṣaya) that are eradicated as one becomes more spiritually pure and progresses through the spiritual stages (guṇasthāna). In comparative context, there are hints towards stopping menstruation in the Haṭha Yoga corpus, and systematic accounts of spiritual amenorrhea in Chinese female-oriented inner alchemy (Nüdan). As yet, I have found no Jain textual sources describing how to stop menstruation or instructing women to do so. However, I have gathered stories through interviewing Jain women not only on views of menstruation but on examples of menstruators halting their menses for religious and spiritual purposes. This paper presents preliminary findings on Jain textual sources and lived religious anecdotes on menstruation and amenorrhea in Jain communities. I explore the religious affordances of non-menstruation and consider the implications for the gendered body in saṃsāra and the perfected (siddha) body.

This paper approaches sallekhanā, the voluntary fast until death, as a distinctly Jain technology of the body oriented toward ontological subtraction. In Jain karma theory, bondage occurs through activity conditioned by the passions (kaṣāya), binding subtle material particles to the soul (jīva). Classical descriptions of sallekhanā as “thinning” or “scraping” articulate a terminal discipline in which the attenuation of bodily substance is aligned with the deliberate minimization of karmic accretion and the stoppage (saṃvara) and shedding (nirjarā) of existing karmas. Rather than an inertly passive withdrawal, the vow intensifies ascetic vigilance at the threshold of irreversible decline. The dying body becomes a potent final site of karmic modulation, its diminishing metabolism synchronized with the aspiration to diminish attachment. These dynamics position sallekhanā as a Jain technology of the body within a subtractive ethics, in which the fast functions as a kind of metabolic exit. In this light, death is not treated as a singular event but as a durational threshold, an extended ethical interval in which the dying body becomes the final terrain for the management of karmic entanglement. Furthermore, although the liberated soul is ultimately beyond sex, embodied existence is structured through sex differentiating karmas that render the fasting body irreducibly gendered while oriented toward transcendence of its condition. Sallekhanā reveals Jain technologies of the body as a subtractive mode of ethical embodiment in which sexed, metabolizing life is methodically contracted at the threshold of death, rendering the durational labor of dying the final and most exacting site of karmic release.