Ajita is an early materialist voice known through Buddhist and Jain opponents, associated with denials of an afterlife, karmic retribution, and a self distinct from the body.
Intellectual setting
Ajita appears among the rival śramaṇa teachers in early Buddhist literature, where the preservation of his views is inseparable from a controversy over asceticism, karma, and liberation.
Key ideas
Body and person
The account attributed to Ajita treats a person as a compound of material elements rather than an enduring soul that survives death.
Rejection of karmic recompense
In the hostile report, gifts, sacrifices, and morally good or bad actions have no otherworldly result, a claim that invited later polemic.
Legacy
He is important less as the founder of a securely continuous school than as evidence for early South Asian materialist and annihilationist positions whose transmission is fragmentary and contested.