History and Doctrines of the Ajivikas: A Vanished Indian Religion c9.s1.17

c9.s1.17

The religious reformer rarely devises the central tenets of his new faith without any basis of older belief on which to build; rather he restates, modifies, or throws a fresh light upon earlier teaching, and this restatement has for his contemporaries the force and novelty of a new revelation. We may feel confident that fatalist teachings, out of which the doctrine of Niyati developed, had existed before the time of Makkhali Gosāla, as indeed is indicated by various references in both Buddhist and Jaina texts.¹ A belief in fate, the inevitability of important events, or of events with dire consequences, seems to arise at an early stage of religious development in many cultures. Parallel with it arises the belief in the efficiency of magic, spells, sacrifice, and prayer, to circumvent the effects of fate.² Certain peoples, notably the earlier Semites, almost consistently rejected determinism and fatalism. Thus for the Babylonians ". . . the fates . . . were not believed to have been fixed from the beginning, but were pictured as in hourly process of development under the personal supervision of the supreme deity".³ Similarly Hebrew monotheism, while based firmly on the almightiness of God, asserted, implicitly and explicitly, the power of the individual to affect his own destiny by pursuing courses of conduct pleasing to the Almighty. The early development of astrology in the Middle East does not seem to have led to the logical conclusion that the fortune of the individual, if predictable and correlated to the regular movements of the stars, must be rigidly determined.