ANCIENT FATALISM

Gosala Mankhaliputta was an ascetic teacher of ancient India who was born in 484 BCE.  His contemporaries included Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, and Mahavira, the 24^th and last Tirthankara of Jainism.  Gosala was the leader of a group who believed in fatalism.  Fatalism is the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable.

The ancient Indian philosophy and ascetic movement called Ajivikas believed in fatalism as well.  It held that a person’s reincarnation was determined by a precise and impersonal cosmic principle called niyati.  Niyati was completely independent of a person’s actions; it was not dependent on karma.
 
This form of fatalism had intriguing implications.  If all future occurrences were rigidly determined, then coming events could be said to exist already.  The future existed in the present, and both existed in the past.  Time, therefore, was illusory.   All phases of a process were always present.  Nothing was destroyed and nothing was produced.  If all things were already determined, it meant that their change and development were likewise an illusion.

What attitude should one assume if he agrees with fatalism?  An option is amor fati.  Amor fati is a Latin phrase meaning roughly “love of fate” or “love of one’s fate.”  It describes an attitude in which a person sees everything that happens in his life, including any suffering and loss he may experience, as good, or, at the very least, necessary.  They are the facts of his life and so are always “necessarily there,” whether he likes them or not.  As a result he is accepting and content with his life.