Surviving glimpses of Ajivika thought feel a bit like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing. Most of what’s known comes from rival traditions—especially Buddhist and Jain texts that painted Ajivikas as rigid fatalists. Those accounts, inevitably colored by polemic, tend to overstate determinism and downplay any spiritual nuances Ajivika teachers might’ve offered.

A few solid anchors do exist. The Barabar Caves inscriptions—carved under Mauryan patronage—carry Ajivika dedications in ancient Brahmi script, offering rare firsthand evidence of monastic life and organizational structure. Beyond that, a handful of references in rock edicts and later Chinese pilgrim diaries hint at rituals and community roles, though details remain frustratingly scant.

Bias in source materials is unavoidable. When Buddhist scriptures describe Ajivikas, something of a theological tug-of-war emerges, with each side casting the other as unbalanced. Modern scholars lean on comparative philology and archaeology—examining cave art, epigraphic layers and even digital text-mining of Pāli and Sanskrit manuscripts—to sift polemic from plausible practice. That detective work has sparked fresh debates at international conferences and inspired a few recent papers (2024 saw at least two on Ajivika cave architecture).

Overall, historical reliability hovers in the moderate-to-low range. Enough concrete clues survive to sketch broad contours of Ajivika doctrine and daily life, but core teachings must still be inferred through a filter of opponent narratives. The picture remains tantalizing—more mystery than manifesto.