Within the Ajivika tradition, niyati was not a peripheral idea but the very axis around which their entire vision of existence revolved. It was understood as an immutable, impersonal cosmic force that predetermined all events, actions, and experiences. From this perspective, the unfolding of the universe was already fixed, and every being’s journey through birth, death, and rebirth followed a script that could not be edited or revised. Pleasure and pain, success and failure, even spiritual attainment itself were all seen as expressions of this inexorable order.

Because niyati governed everything, human agency was radically curtailed in Ajivika thought. Moral choices, ascetic discipline, and meditative practice were not denied as phenomena, but they were stripped of any power to alter the final outcome of one’s destiny. Karma might describe patterns of experience, yet it did not function as a causal mechanism that could reshape the future. The Ajivika view thus stood in sharp contrast to the more effort-centered paths of their contemporaries, for whom ethical conduct and spiritual practice were transformative.

A particularly striking implication of this doctrine was the Ajivika understanding of liberation. Moksha did not arise from insight, austerity, or virtue in any efficacious sense; rather, it occurred only when niyati decreed that a being had completed a predetermined sequence of lives. The duration and character of one’s sojourn through samsara were fixed from the outset, including the precise point at which freedom from that cycle would manifest. Spiritual practices, therefore, were not instruments that brought about liberation, but events already woven into the fabric of fate.

From such a standpoint, Ajivika asceticism takes on a distinctive hue. The rigorous lifestyle of its adherents was not a means to bend destiny but itself an expression of destiny’s unfolding. Their determinism was thus not a casual fatalism, but a radical affirmation that every moment, every act, and every attainment is nothing other than niyati revealing itself.