Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing

In early China, the perception and conceptualization of suicide, and especially of honour-related suicide, is substantially positive. This despite the fact that suicide is in principle an unfilial act, since the body is considered a sacred gift received by one’s parents, the integrity of which has to be protected at any cost. Under certain circumstances however, self-immolation is the only possible choice left for someone to preserve one’s dignity and reputation. In particular, in early Confucianism “protest suicide” is not only accepted, but openly promoted as the ultimate resolution that a true scholar might find himself to make in order to restore one’s tarnished reputation from unjust accusations, or to strongly re-affirm one’s moral stance and dignity against a general situation of corruption and moral decay. This paper addresses the principle of “protest suicide” of a scholar as an ultimate response to a personal or socio-political crisis in early Chinese sources, with an ultimate focus on received texts associated with the Confucian tradition.