As one of the important means to circumvent the risk of rural endowment,satisfy rural elders’ material and spiritual needs and get subsistence autonomy,self endowment is of practical significance permitting no neglect.Based on a systematic carding of the existing literatures,this paper reviewed the concept,forming reasons and the practical types of rural self endowment,and prospected the research directions of the rural self endowment in the future.This paper found that weakening rural household care and lack of social nursing service are the main reasons for the increasing popularity of self endowment.Moreover,land self endowment,mutual assistance in self endowment,reemployment for self endowment and saving for self endowment are the main types of practice,With the change of rural endowment views and endowment demand,an urgent need is to strengthen research on self endowment to form a complete research system