History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c25.s4.4

c25.s4.4

Similarly the Ājīvikas deserve credit for their doctrine of *Niyati*. This represents a very real recognition of orderliness in a universe on the human level apparently wholly unpredictable and disorderly. The same, it is true, may be said of the other new sects of the period, all of which, reviving in one way or another the Vedic concept of *ṛta*, but incorporating with it an atheistic or impersonal first principle, posited a framework of *karmic* cause and effect, within which the soul moved. It was for the Ājīvikas to drive this doctrine to its extreme conclusion, and replace the chain of causation, new links of which might be forged by the free will of the individual, by the single determining principle, *Niyati*, which denied free will altogether. The pragmatic value of this doctrine was slight, or even negative, but at least Makkhali Gosāla may claim the doubtful honour of anticipating by over two thousand years the now rather unfashionable world view of the nineteenth century physicist.