History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c5.1

c5.1

This is the first full-length study of the Ājīvikas, who, up to the present, have received little attention from students of Indian history and religion. Until the publication of Hoernle’s article in the *Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics*¹ there existed no connected account of the sect whatever, and the student in search of information was confined to brief references or appendices in works on Buddhism and Hinduism.² Hoernle’s article was the first to give a coherent summary of Ājīvika history and doctrine, as they appear in the Pāli and Jaina sources, but it contains a number of errors, notably in the theory that the term Ājīvika was regularly employed in the sense of Digambara Jaina, and that the former sect merged with the latter at an early date. Brief articles by Drs. K. B. Pathak and D. R. Bhandarkar³ criticized this conclusion. A further short article supplementary to that of Hoernle appeared in 1913 from the pen of Professor J. Charpentier.⁴