Ajivika thought is best understood as a radical affirmation of *niyati*, an all-encompassing determinism in which every event, action, and experience is fixed in advance by fate or cosmic law. Within this vision, individual free will is regarded as illusory, and human effort is held to be powerless to alter what has already been ordained. Pleasure and pain, moral and immoral deeds, success and failure all unfold according to a predetermined sequence. This strict determinism extends to the spiritual path itself: even the impulse to practice asceticism or to seek liberation is seen as something that occurs only because it, too, has been fated.

Flowing from this determinism is a distinctive understanding of rebirth and liberation. Ajivika teachers held that each soul passes through a fixed and finite number of births and deaths, moving through various forms of existence in a strictly ordered way. The cycle of transmigration is thus not open-ended but precisely determined, and once this predetermined sequence is completed, liberation from suffering inevitably occurs. Liberation is therefore not a reward for virtue or effort, but the automatic outcome of a cosmic schedule that no being can hasten or delay.

This worldview also reshapes the meaning of moral action and karma. Actions are not seen as morally efficacious causes that shape future experience in the way that Buddhist and Jain traditions propose. Rather, they are part of a mechanistic unfolding in which traditional categories of good and evil lose their usual force, since every deed is already fixed by fate. Some accounts describe karma less as a moral law that can be influenced and more as a description of what is destined to occur. In such a setting, ethical striving, charity, or ritual observance cannot alter one’s ultimate destiny, even though they may still appear in a person’s life as predetermined events.

Ajivika cosmology reinforces this sense of inevitability by portraying reality as composed of eternal, indivisible atoms that combine and separate according to fate. These atoms, including those associated with elements and with experiences such as joy and sorrow, form all phenomena without the need for a creator deity. The universe is thus governed not by divine will but by an impersonal order, and even gods, if acknowledged, are subject to this same inexorable law. Within such a universe, Ajivika ascetics embraced rigorous discipline—nudity in some groups, fasting, wandering, and severe restraint—not as a means to attain liberation, but as the particular role allotted to them within an unalterable cosmic drama.