History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c14.s1.59

c14.s1.59

The solitaries, whether hermits or wanderers, must by their very nature have been laws unto themselves. That they often held certain doctrines and followed certain practices in common might be expected from the basic similarity of human temperaments and the imitative propensities of the human animal. But there is no reason to believe that they were bound by any rules other than self-made ones, such as vows taken on embarking on their careers of mendicancy. The disciplinary innovations of the reforming leaders consisted partly in persuading some of these independent roving philosophers to accept common rules, and in linking them to hermit communities and giving them coherence by insisting on their residence in *vihāras* during the rainy reason. We believe that these wandering sophists and ascetics, rather than hermits or non-existent ascetic "orders", played the biggest part in the development of the heretical *saṅghas* of Buddhism, Jainism, and Ājīvikism.