Ajivika teaching revolved around a radical doctrine of niyati, an all-encompassing determinism that left no room for genuine freedom of choice. Everything in the cosmos—every joy and sorrow, every rise and fall, every birth and death—was held to be fixed in advance by this impersonal principle of fate. Human effort, moral resolve, and spiritual striving were seen as incapable of altering the course already laid down. In this vision, the universe unfolds like a perfectly ordered sequence, not because a creator deity wills it so, but because it cannot be otherwise.

From this determinism followed a distinctive stance on karma and moral causation. Ajivikas denied that intentional actions, whether virtuous or harmful, could shape the trajectory of rebirths or hasten or delay liberation. Merit and demerit, in the usual sense, were regarded as ultimately ineffectual in determining future lives. Pleasure and pain, success and failure, were distributed according to fate rather than earned through past deeds. Yet, despite this rejection of karmic efficacy, Ajivika communities maintained disciplined ascetic lives, suggesting that conduct was embraced as part of what was destined, not as a means to secure a different future.

Ajivika thought also affirmed an enduring self that transmigrates through a predetermined series of existences. Each being was believed to pass through a fixed number of births, moving through different forms of life in accordance with an unalterable pattern. Liberation from the cycle of rebirth was not something to be attained through insight or practice, but an automatic outcome that arrives when this finite sequence is exhausted. The cosmos itself was understood as eternal and governed by impersonal laws, its elements and processes combining and separating in strict obedience to niyati.

Within this framework, Ajivika ascetics embraced severe austerities—wandering, often naked, living on alms, and enduring hardship with equanimity. These practices were not undertaken to transform destiny but to live out, with clarity and endurance, the life allotted by fate. The wise practitioner, in this tradition, recognizes the futility of striving to bend the universe to personal will and instead cultivates a detached acceptance of whatever arises. In such acceptance, the Ajivika path sought a kind of inner poise amid an unchangeable cosmic order, trusting that even liberation itself is already written into the fabric of things.