<br> One of the foremost communities to have paid serious attention to death are the Jainas of India. Indeed, their preoccupation with it has been so intense that without understanding their philosophy of death, It is almost impossible to make out their notion of life. The Jainas did not consider death a subject of intellectual excercise; they held it as a force that permeates the social, religious and philosophical sinews of life. <br><br><br><br> <br> The codified rules of the art of inviting death, descriptive accounts of Puranic and historical personalities who embraced it, and an interesting body of epigraphical and archaeological remains, provide a rich corpus of information on those who voluntarily terminated their lives. Inviting Death presents this history spread over a millennium and half, on the Samidhi-betta or the Sepulchral Hill or Sravana Belogola, the foremost of the Digambara Jaina centres in the world. <br><br><br><br>