Ajivika

Doctrine

The Ajivika position, as reported by hostile sources, was strict determinism. Every event, including liberation, is fixed by niyati, fate. Effort, action and moral striving change nothing; a soul passes through a vast but predetermined series of births and is released when that series is exhausted, as a ball of thread unwinds to its end.

This inverted the assumptions of both the Vedic tradition and the other shramana movements. If nothing can be affected, then karma in the moral sense does not operate, and the Buddhist and Jain accounts of action and consequence are wrong. Both traditions attack the position vigorously, which is most of the reason it is known at all.

Practice

The determinism did not lead to indifference. Ajivikas were ascetics of extreme severity, going naked, undertaking prolonged fasts, and in some accounts ending life by starvation. Why a doctrine of fatalism should produce rigorous austerity is a genuine puzzle; one suggestion is that the austerities were understood as part of the predetermined sequence rather than as a means of altering it.

History

The order's founder is given as Makkhali Gosala, a contemporary of the Buddha and Mahavira. Ajivikas received substantial patronage under the Mauryas: Ashoka's grandfather is associated with them, and Ashoka and his successor Dasharatha dedicated the rock-cut Barabar and Nagarjuni caves in Bihar to Ajivika ascetics — the earliest surviving rock-cut architecture in India, and the most solid evidence for the order's standing.

They persisted in south India for centuries, with inscriptions and references in Tamil literature into the medieval period, before dying out entirely.

Sources

Nothing of the Ajivikas' own literature survives. Everything known comes through Buddhist and Jain texts written to refute them, through inscriptions, and through incidental references. A. L. Basham's study of 1951 remains the standard reconstruction, and it is candid about how much of the picture is drawn from enemies.