Other Religious Sects and the Bhakti Roots

A sect that rejected free will outright once rivalled Buddhism and Jainism for royal patronage. Ashoka himself carved caves for its monks. Within a few centuries it had all but disappeared from most of India.

The Ajivikas: A Serious Rival Need to Know

• The Ajivikas were a heterodox ascetic sect, contemporary with the early years of Buddhism and Jainism.
• Their founder was Makkhali Gosala. He also appears in sources as Maskarin Gosala or Gosala Mankhaliputta.
• According to the Jain Bhagavati Sutra, Gosala travelled as a disciple and companion of Mahavira for about six years.
• The two split over a philosophical dispute, reportedly about whether a burnt plant could regenerate, and more broadly about fate versus effort.
• Gosala’s death is dated by the historian A.L. Basham to around 484 BCE, based on the Mahavamsa.
• A genuine caution applies here. Almost everything known about Gosala comes from Buddhist and Jain texts, both openly hostile rival traditions.
• Treat vivid details about him with that in mind. They may be coloured by the sects arguing against him.

The Niyati Doctrine Need to Know

• The Ajivikas’ central teaching was niyati, usually translated as strict determinism or fate.
• Everything that happens, in their view, is already fixed. Human striving cannot change the outcome.
• This put the Ajivikas at odds with both of their major rivals, in a specific and important way.
• Buddhism and Jainism both centre on karma: your actions shape your future, and disciplined effort matters.
• The Ajivikas rejected that link outright. Suffering and liberation alike were simply predetermined.
• This is the detail worth remembering for a quick comparison. Ajivikas: fate decides everything. Buddhists and Jains: your actions decide your fate.
• Despite denying that effort mattered, Ajivika monks still practised severe asceticism, a tension later writers noted.

The Barabar Caves Good to Know

• The clearest physical evidence for the Ajivikas is the Barabar Caves in present-day Bihar.
• An inscription records that Ashoka assigned four caves on Barabar hill to Ajivika monks in 261 BCE.
• His grandson Dasaratha continued the patronage, cutting three more caves nearby on Nagarjuni hill around 232–224 BCE.
• These are counted among the oldest surviving rock-cut caves in India.
• The best known is the Lomas Rishi cave, famous for its carved doorway imitating timber construction in solid rock.
• That doorway is the earliest known example of the chaitya arch, a design later repeated at Ajanta and Kanheri.
• The Lomas Rishi cave itself was left unfinished, and carries no Ashokan inscription, unlike its neighbours.
• A royal emperor personally granting shelter to a rival ascetic order is a real sign of the Ajivikas’ standing at the time, whatever their later fate.

Charvaka: A Different Heterodoxy Good to Know

• Not every heterodox sect argued for determinism. Charvaka, also called Lokayata, took the opposite route.
• It accepted only direct perception as valid knowledge, and rejected the Vedas, God, the soul and any afterlife.
• Where the Ajivikas denied free will, Charvaka denied any unseen world at all, this one included the results of action.
• For the full picture, see AncHist0116 — Charvaka (Lokayata), which covers this materialist tradition in depth.

The table below lines these four movements up side by side. The sharpest divide is not who believed in a soul. Ajivikas and Jains both did. It is whether personal effort has any power to change what happens to that soul.

Movement	Founder	Core Teaching	Effort and Liberation
Ajivika	Makkhali Gosala	Niyati: strict determinism, everything is fixed in advance	An eternal soul exists, but passes through a fixed cosmic cycle of births regardless of what anyone does. Effort changes nothing.
Jainism	Mahavira, the 24th Tirthankara (a reformer within an existing lineage, not a sole originator)	Ahimsa and strict ascetic discipline to burn off accumulated karma	An eternal soul (jiva) exists. Liberation depends entirely on the individual’s own sustained ethical and ascetic effort.
Buddhism	Siddhartha Gautama	The Middle Way and the Four Noble Truths	Rejects a permanent unchanging soul (the doctrine of anatta). Liberation still depends on one’s own sustained effort, along the Eightfold Path.
Charvaka	Traditionally Brihaspati, a semi-legendary figure; the school’s own founding text is lost	Materialism: only direct perception counts as knowledge	No soul survives the body, and no afterlife exists at all. The question of “liberation” does not meaningfully arise.

Read that last column carefully. It is the fastest way to tell these four positions apart in an exam setting, faster than trying to recall each founder’s biography.

Test Yourself

The Earliest Roots of Bhakti Great to Know

• Personal devotion to a chosen deity, the heart of Bhakti, did not begin with the medieval saints most people know.
• An early theistic tradition, the Bhagavata religion, centred on devotion to Vishnu-Krishna well before that.
• Its clearest surviving evidence is the Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar, near modern Vidisha.
• Heliodorus was a Greek ambassador, sent from Taxila to the court of a local king, around the late 2nd century BCE.
• He raised the pillar himself and named himself a Bhagavata, a devotee of the god Vasudeva.
• This matters beyond the religious history. It shows a foreigner adopting the practice as his own, not merely observing it.
• For the fuller history of this tradition, see AncHist0081 — Vaishnavism.

The Alvars and Nayanars Great to Know

• The next major step toward Bhakti as a movement came from South India, roughly the 6th to 9th centuries CE.
• Twelve poet-saints called Alvars composed Tamil hymns devoted to Vishnu.
• Sixty-three poet-saints called Nayanars did the same for Shiva.
• They came from across the social scale, including potters, weavers and hunters, not only priests and scholars.
• Composing in Tamil rather than Sanskrit, rather than performing formal Vedic ritual, was itself a significant shift.
• It made devotion directly accessible, without requiring ritual specialists or a scholarly language.
• This early southern devotion is what later feeds into the better-known medieval Bhakti movement.
• That movement’s fuller story, including Kabir, Chaitanya, Mirabai, and the Alvars and Nayanars’ own later flowering, belongs to MedHist0011 — The Bhakti Movement.
• This article stops at the roots. That one picks up the tree.