Ājīvika

Ajivika (Sanskrit: आजीविक, IAST: Ājīvika) is one of the nāstika or "heterodox" schools of Indian philosophy. Believed to have been founded in the 5th century BCE by Makkhali Gosāla, it was a Śramaṇa movement and a major rival of Vedic religion, early Buddhism, and Jainism. 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 Ājīvika school is known for its Niyati ("Fate") doctrine of absolute fatalism or determinism, 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. 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.

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 Vaisheshika school. However, according to Basham, the Vaisheshika doctrine of atomism was significantly different, and more complete and thorough than that of both the Ājīvikas and the Jains. Ājīvikas were mostly considered as atheists. They believed that in every living being there is an ātman—a central premise of Vedic religion and Jainism.

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.