Makkhali Gosala

The accounts

Jain sources describe Gosala as an associate of Mahavira for some six years, who broke with him and set up as a teacher in his own right, and they record a hostile final encounter. Buddhist sources list him among the six teachers whose doctrines are set out and dismissed in the Samannaphala Sutta.

Both traditions treat him as a serious rival with a substantial following, and both are frankly polemical: the Jain account in particular is a hostile biography whose details cannot be taken at face value.

The doctrine attributed to him

The position ascribed to Gosala is niyati, strict determinism: that beings are defiled and purified without cause, that no act of will affects anything, and that all beings pass through a fixed number of births before release, which arrives on schedule regardless of conduct.

The Buddha is reported to have regarded this as the most dangerous of the rival doctrines, on the grounds that it removes the basis of moral effort. The Jain sources are equally hostile. That the same doctrine is reported in similar terms by two independent and opposed traditions gives some confidence that it is roughly what he taught.

Assessment

Gosala is among the clearest cases in Indian religious history of a figure known entirely through opponents. No Ajivika text survives, and his teaching is available only in the form given it by those refuting it — which means the account may be a caricature, and there is no way to check.

What is not in doubt is that his order lasted, held royal patronage under the Mauryas, and survived in the south for more than a thousand years, which is not the record of a marginal figure.