A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c20.s1.5

c20.s1.5

Another sect outside the pale of Hinduism, which continued to count some adherents in South India though it had disappeared elsewhere, was that of the Ājīvikas. Founded by Gośāla Maskariputra, a contemporary of the Buddha and Mahāvīra, this strictly deterministic school was influential in the Mauryan period in the North, and Aśoka and his successor Daśaratha presented fine rock-cut caves to it. They believed in an inexorable Niyati (Destiny) which man was unable to counteract. The South Indian Ājīvika monks practised severe asceticism, and probably influenced by Hinduism and Mahāyāna Buddhism, came to look upon Gośāla as ‘an ineffable divinity’; they also developed the ‘view that all change and movement were illusory, and that the world was in reality eternally and immovably at rest’. The inscriptions show that they were sometimes subjected to a special tax levied on them at least by the Cholas.