Ajivika determinism, centered on the doctrine of *niyati* (necessity or fate), rested on a set of philosophical reflections about the structure of reality and the limits of human agency. Ajivika thinkers affirmed that the universe is governed by a single, impersonal principle of fixed order, rather than by divine whim or genuinely free individual choice. The regularity of nature and the predictable unfolding of cosmic cycles were taken as signs that events follow a rigid pattern, not an open-ended field of possibilities. Within this vision, every being’s nature, experiences, and ultimate destiny are regarded as fixed from the outset, so that what appears as decision or effort is simply the manifestation of an already determined script.

From this perspective, the Ajivikas offered a sustained critique of moral and ascetic effort as a means to alter one’s fate. They drew attention to the evident mismatch between virtue and outcome: good people suffering, wrongdoers prospering, and ascetics failing to attain liberation in the very life of their strenuous practice. Such observations were used to argue that the karmic idea of a reliable moral law of reward and punishment does not hold up in experience. If the duration of saṃsāra and the number of births are fixed for each being, then no amount of good or bad action can shorten or lengthen that journey; all intermediate events are simply predetermined stages along a fixed itinerary.

Ajivika teachers also reflected on the nature of choice and responsibility in a more analytic way. If choices arise from prior causes—such as inherited dispositions, circumstances, and previous mental states—then they are not truly free in the sense of being independent of conditions. Yet if choices were somehow uncaused, they would be random and unintelligible, and thus not a sound basis for praise, blame, or moral desert. On this reasoning, what is called “choice” is only another link in an unbroken chain governed by *niyati*, and the strong karmic notion of moral responsibility becomes philosophically incoherent. The observable consistency of character and fortune from birth, not easily explained by present-life decisions, further reinforced the sense that each life unfolds according to an unalterable design.

In dialogue with rival traditions, Ajivikas used these considerations to challenge the practical and doctrinal status of karma. If karmic causation truly governed outcomes, disciplined asceticism should reliably yield better conditions, yet lived experience often fails to display such a clear correlation. For the Ajivika, this gap between moral intention and actual result suggests that karma is a conceptual overlay on a world already ruled by necessity. Liberation, on this account, does not hinge on transforming oneself through effort, but arrives inevitably when the preordained sequence of states has been fully exhausted.