Concept

Ājīvika

Overview

Ajivika (Sanskrit: आजीविक, IAST: Ājīvika) is an ancient nāstika, or 'heterodox,' Indian school of absolute fatalism or extreme determinism. The Ājīvika school is known for its Niyati ("Fate") doctrine and for the premise that there is no free will, that everything that has happened, is happening and will happen is entirely preordained and a function of cosmic principles.

Believed to have been founded in the 5th century BCE by Makṣali Gośāla, it was a Śramaṇa movement and a major rival to other contemporary orthodox and heterodox movements within the Indian philosophical milieu. Ājīvikas were organized renunciates who formed discrete communities. The precise identity of the Ājīvikas is not well known, and it is even unclear if they were a divergent sect of the Buddhists or the Jains.

Original scriptures of the Ājīvika school of philosophy may once have existed, but these are currently unavailable and probably lost. Their theories are extracted from mentions of Ājīvikas in the secondary sources of ancient Indian literature. The oldest descriptions of the Ājīvika fatalists and their founder Gosāla can be found both in the Buddhist and Jaina scriptures of ancient India. Scholars question whether Ājīvika philosophy has been fairly and completely summarized in these secondary sources, as they were written by groups (such as the Buddhists and Jains) competing with and adversarial to the philosophy and religious practices of the Ājīvikas. It is likely that much of the information available about the Ājīvikas is inaccurate to some degree, and characterizations of them should be regarded carefully and critically.

The predetermined fate of living beings was the major distinctive doctrine of their school, along with withholding judgement on how to achieve liberation (moksha) from the eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, instead believing that fate would lead us there. Ājīvikas further considered the karma doctrine as a fallacy. They were mostly considered as atheists; however, they believed that in every living being there is an ātman—a central premise of the Vedas.

The metaphysics of Ājīvika included a theory of atoms, where everything was composed of atoms, qualities emerged from aggregates of atoms, but the aggregation and nature of these atoms were predetermined by cosmic laws and forces. It was not until the later Avisakya Sūtra that the Jains, whose atomic theory was closest to that of the Ājīvikas, began claiming to have been the first to formulate an Indian theory of atomism. A similar type of atomistic theory is also found in the Vaiśeṣika school. However, according to Basham, the Vaiśeṣika doctrine of atomism was significantly different, and more complete and thorough than that of both the Ājīvikas and the Jains.

Ājīvika philosophy, otherwise referred to as Ājīvikism in Western scholarship, reached the height of its popularity during the rule of the Mauryan emperor Bindusara, around the 4th century BCE. This school of thought declined but survived for nearly 2,000 years through the 13th and 14th centuries CE in the Southern Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. The Ājīvika philosophy, along with the Cārvāka philosophy, appealed most to the warrior, industrial, and mercantile classes of ancient Indian society.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Other methods of deliverance from evil are in the excessive acts of penance performed by the Indians, to which a retreat within themselves is added. Now when the Indian thus internally collects himself, and retreats within his own thoughts, the moment of such pure concentration is called Brahma, the one and the clearly supersensuous state, which the understanding calls the highest possible existence. When this is so…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Ājīvika is.
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This, placed in the castle of its own simplicity, hath determined manifold ways for doing things; which ways being considered in the purity of God's understanding, are named Providence, but being referred to those things which He moveth and disposeth, they are by the ancients called Fate. The diversity of which will easily appear if we weigh the force of both. For Providence is the very Divine reason itself, seated…
Boethius, The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy
States what Ājīvika is.
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Then change and motion begin and all this evolution goes on. This state of things is going on cyclically, periodically; that is to say, there is a period of disturbance of the balance, when all these forces begin to combine and recombine, and this universe is projected; and…
Swami Vivekananda, Jnâna Yoga, Part II
States what Ājīvika is.
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