Ajivika thought centers on the conviction that everything unfolds according to an inexorable principle of destiny (*niyati*), such that no event, choice, or spiritual practice can alter what is already fixed. This stance finds a strong echo in what modern philosophers call hard determinism: the view that all events, including human decisions, are determined and that genuine free will does not exist. In both perspectives, the sense that one “could have done otherwise” is regarded as illusory, and the usual basis for moral responsibility is deeply undermined. Ajivika teaching thus aligns with incompatibilism, the position that if determinism is true, then free will and traditional moral responsibility cannot be sustained.

At the same time, Ajivika determinism bears a closer resemblance to philosophical fatalism than to more nuanced forms of causal determinism. Fatalism suggests that whatever is destined to occur will occur regardless of human effort, and Ajivika doctrine similarly portrays human striving as ultimately powerless to change the destined outcome, including the timing of liberation. By contrast, many modern causal determinists maintain that reasons, deliberation, and effort are themselves causally efficacious, even if fully determined. Ajivika thought tends instead toward a kind of soteriological quietism, in which liberation arrives only when a fixed cosmic sequence has run its course, independent of moral or ascetic exertion.

There are also interesting structural resonances with certain broader currents in Western philosophy. Some aspects of Ajivika determinism parallel the necessity found in Stoic and Spinozist visions of a cosmos governed by an unbreakable order, where events could not ultimately be otherwise. Yet those later traditions typically affirm the value of rational effort and virtue within that order, whereas Ajivika teaching denies that such effort can function as a genuine causal path to salvation. In this way, Ajivika determinism represents a particularly radical and uncompromising form of fatalistic and incompatibilist thought, one that pushes the logic of determinism to the point where ethical and spiritual practices are stripped of instrumental power, even as the cosmic process itself is seen as perfectly ordered.