Ajivika thought stands within the broad landscape of early Indian cosmology yet reshapes it in a strikingly deterministic direction. Like other traditions of the śramaṇa milieu, it accepts a vast, cyclical universe, moving through immense periods of creation, existence, and dissolution. Within this shared framework of multiple lives and repeated world-cycles, the Ajivikas place at the center not moral law but niyati, an impersonal and unalterable principle of fate. The cosmos is not merely recurring; it is pre‑programmed, unfolding according to an invariant pattern that admits no genuine contingency.

This deterministic reading of cosmology extends to the journey of the soul. Ajivikas affirm transmigration and the passage of beings through various realms and forms of life, yet these transitions are not governed by ethically efficacious karma in the usual sense. Karma may function as a descriptive language for experience, but it is not the true engine of rebirth or liberation. Every event in an individual’s career—birth, suffering, insight, and final release—is fixed in advance by niyati, like a script already written across the vast expanse of cosmic time.

In this light, early Indian cosmology becomes, for the Ajivikas, a grand stage whose entire sequence is already settled. The cycles of worlds, the rise and fall of beings, and even the appearance of spiritual teachers occur as necessary expressions of an impersonal order rather than as responses to moral striving. Where other traditions moralize the structure of the universe, linking cosmological position to ethical causality, Ajivika thought strips that structure of purposive moral meaning. The result is a vision of reality as a closed, deterministic system in which the cosmos and every soul’s path through it are unalterably set from the outset.