Descriptions of the Ajivikas in surviving sources are fragmentary, yet they consistently portray a renunciate community with a recognizable ascetic discipline, even against the backdrop of a radically deterministic worldview. Ajivika practitioners are depicted as strict ascetics who often went unclothed, rejecting garments and possessions as forms of attachment. They lived as wandering mendicants, begging for alms and maintaining a lifestyle of extreme simplicity. Accounts also speak of severe physical austerities: long periods of standing or remaining in difficult postures, deliberate exposure to heat and cold, and prolonged fasting and other forms of self-mortification. These practices were not understood as changing destiny, but as the particular hardships that fate had allotted to them and that they were bound to endure.

There is evidence that Ajivika communities were organized into monastic groups, supported at times by lay patrons. Rock-cut cave complexes, such as those donated by powerful rulers, are associated with Ajivika use and suggest communal spaces for residence, retreat, and meditative practice, though they do not display elaborate ritual arrangements. Within such settings, contemplative practices appear to have centered on niyati, the inexorable law of fate and the predetermined unfolding of saṃsāra. Meditation and reflection were directed toward seeing and accepting the inevitability of the cosmic process, rather than toward altering karmic outcomes or securing liberation through effort.

This deterministic orientation shaped their attitude toward ritual. Unlike Vedic orthodoxy, which invested sacrificial rites with transformative power, Ajivika thought denied that moral or ritual action could truly modify the course of transmigration. As a result, there is no clear indication of complex sacrificial or devotional rituals aimed at producing specific results. The “practice” of an Ajivika lay less in performing efficacious rites and more in embodying an ascetic way of life that was itself understood as part of a fixed cosmic script. Their path can thus be seen as a disciplined consent to what is already written, expressed through nudity, austerity, mendicancy, and contemplative acceptance of fate.