History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c23.s5.6

c23.s5.6

Thus by the dispensation of Niyati the ultimate salvation of all souls was assured, and thus the gloomy reaches of Gosāla's cosmos were lighted by a faint gleam of optimism. This has been stressed by Barua, anxious to present his "Pre-Buddhistie Indian Philosophers" in the most favourable light possible.¹ But the doctrine that all beings reach ultimate and inevitable perfection raises certain awkward questions, which must have occurred both to the friends and the opponents of Ājīvika fatalism. If all souls are ultimately removed from the material universe of saṃsāra what becomes of that universe? Either it remains uninhabited, or it is absorbed in some sort of pralaya, or new souls must be continually coming into being to replace those entering nirvāṇa. Again, if the period of the soul's existence in the universe is 8,400,000 mahākappas, a time unconscionably long, but certainly not infinite, the soul's existence must have had a beginning. Either at the beginning of its course in the cosmos it was created out of absolute nothingness, or it was in some way injected into the universe from the ground or substratum underlying space and time, to which it returns on its nirvāṇa.