Within the Ajivika vision, daily life unfolds under the unyielding law of niyati, or fate, so that every event is regarded as fixed and inevitable. Followers move through pleasure and pain, gain and loss, with a cultivated resignation, seeing each circumstance as part of a predetermined cosmic sequence rather than as the product of personal choice. This outlook encourages a deep acceptance of one’s social position, relationships, and material conditions, reducing anxiety about the future and remorse over the past, since both are understood as unavoidable. Emotional equanimity thus becomes a spiritual discipline: one learns to endure what comes, not in passive despair, but in lucid recognition that resistance cannot alter the ordained course.

Ethical life under this doctrine takes on a distinctive character. Moral and immoral actions are not denied, yet they are interpreted as arising from cosmic necessity rather than from autonomous free will. Responsibility, in the conventional sense of shaping one’s destiny through virtue or vice, is greatly diminished, and deliberate moral striving loses the central importance it holds in many other traditions. For monastics, disciplined conduct and adherence to communal rules are maintained, but these are understood as expressions of one’s destined role within the order, not as instruments for changing karmic outcomes or hastening liberation. Lay followers, similarly, may engage in family life, work, and trade, yet success and failure in these domains are viewed as already written, encouraging a pragmatic acceptance rather than restless ambition.

This deterministic framework also informs the ascetic dimension of Ajivika practice. Severe austerities—such as fasting, exposure to hardship, and other forms of self-denial—are undertaken not as techniques to transform fate, but as manifestations of the path that has been allotted. The ascetic does not imagine that such practices will directly secure liberation; instead, they are embraced as the particular mode through which destiny is to be lived out with clarity and detachment. Underlying this is a long-range trust in the cosmic process: liberation is regarded as ultimately guaranteed after a fixed sequence of rebirths, so each day’s experiences, however harsh or gentle, are interpreted as necessary steps in an already charted journey toward eventual freedom.