Determinism, in the context of Ajivika thought, is the doctrine that all events are fixed and inevitable, bound by an unbroken chain of cause and effect or by an overarching principle of fate. Nothing occurs by chance, and nothing could be otherwise than it is. Human actions, decisions, joys, and sorrows are not genuinely chosen; they are the necessary unfolding of what has already been set. This view leaves no real scope for free will or genuine choice, because every experience is simply the manifestation of what was predetermined.

Within Ajivika philosophy, this deterministic outlook is articulated as niyati, the rule of fate or cosmic law. Every aspect of existence—birth and death, suffering and happiness, spiritual progress and final liberation—is regarded as fixed in advance. Individual effort, moral discipline, and spiritual practice are ultimately powerless to alter the destined course of events. Liberation itself occurs at a predetermined point, as part of a fixed sequence of lives and experiences, rather than as the fruit of deliberate striving.

Such a vision portrays the universe as a perfectly ordered process in which each event arises exactly as it must, with no remainder of contingency. Human agency, from this standpoint, appears as a kind of illusion, since what is taken to be “choice” is merely the playing out of prior causes and fate. Moral actions do not change future outcomes but are themselves woven into the same inexorable pattern. For the Ajivika, to understand determinism is to recognize that fate, not personal will, is the decisive factor in everything that happens.