Ajivika

The Story

Founded by Makkhali Gosala, a contemporary of both Mahavira and the Buddha, the Ajivikas flourished in the very same Ganges valley debates of the 6th century BCE. They were among the six great teachers of that age whom the Buddhist and Jain scriptures record — respected enough to be argued with, feared enough to be remembered.

The Ajivika doctrine was niyati — destiny. The universe, they taught, unfolds according to a fixed cosmic law: every soul must transmigrate through millions of existences, rising and falling, until after a precisely determined span it reaches liberation — for everyone, without exception, and without anyone's effort mattering. Even the gods were bound by the same iron necessity.

Their lifestyle was extreme: naked asceticism, total indifference to comfort, begging, and a life of astonishing discipline. Their fatalism did not make them lazy — by all accounts they practised an asceticism as intense as any in Bhārat. Accepting fate, they seemed to say, is not surrender; it is clarity.

Ajivika centres existed across Bhārat, from Bihar to Karnataka, and the Mauryan emperor Bindusara was said to be sympathetic to them. But without monasteries of scriptures to preserve them, the order slowly faded, leaving only fragments quoted in the texts of their rivals.