Ajīvika school

The claim

Niyati — destiny — governs everything. There is no cause of defilement and no cause of purification; beings are defiled and purified without cause, and no act alters the outcome.

What it held

The Ajivikas held the most thoroughgoing determinism anyone has proposed, and they held it in a religious culture organised around karma, which makes it startling. Effort is not merely ineffective; the idea of effective effort is a mistake.

Makkhali Gosala's image, as the Buddhist texts report it, is a ball of thread thrown across a floor: it unwinds until it is done, and nothing hurries or delays it. Every being passes through a fixed number of births, and at the end is released — not by merit, since merit does not exist, but by exhaustion.

The obvious puzzle is why they were ascetics. If nothing can be changed, why the extreme austerities the sources describe? The likely answer is that the austerities were not means to anything; they were what these people were fated to do, and living out the sequence knowingly is not the same as trying to shorten it.

The Buddha considered this the most dangerous of the rival doctrines and said so in unusually sharp terms — which is itself evidence of how seriously it was taken.

How it argued

Assertion and dialectic against the karma doctrine, in a culture of wandering teachers who debated in public.

What it was arguing against

The Buddhist and Jain claim that action determines outcome, and the whole apparatus of moral causation.

Where it disagreed with itself

Almost everything, since the sources are hostile. Whether the Ajivikas had a positive metaphysics or only the determinist thesis.

Common misconceptions

That fatalism made them libertines. Every source describes extreme asceticism, including a practice of fasting to death — which is difficult to square with the caricature and suggests we have the doctrine only in outline.

How it began

Makkhali Gosala, a contemporary of the Buddha and Mahavira, with whom he is said to have travelled for six years before a violent falling-out.

What became of it

Survived in south India into the fourteenth century, then vanished. Ashoka's inscriptions name them among the sects he patronised, so they were once substantial.

Lasting influence

Chiefly as a target. The Buddhist and Jain refutations of determinism were written against them, and preserved them.

Why it still matters

Hard determinism combined with a religious practice is a genuinely unusual position, and the question of what a determinist is doing when they act is still live.

Put another way

A ball of thread thrown across a floor, unwinding until it stops.

Where to start

Basham. There is no primary text and the sources are all opponents.

The surprising bit

Ashoka's rock edicts list the Ajivikas alongside Buddhists and Jains as recipients of imperial caves. A school we now know almost nothing about was once one of the three great heterodox movements.

In their own words

Connections

Opposed by

Early Theravada Buddhism, Jainism (Syetvada/Anekantavada)

The verdict

The most rigorous determinism in ancient thought, surviving only in the words of people refuting it.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy