Bhagya, kismat and free will: who actually writes your life?

We use bhagya and kismat almost interchangeably for "fate," rarely noticing they come from different worlds. Bhagya is Sanskrit, from bhaga — a share, a portion, an allotment. Kismat is Arabic, from qisma — a division, a lot. Strikingly, the Greek word for fate, moira, also literally means "portion." Three languages, one buried image: the slice of life handed to you.

But handed by whom, and how fixed? That is the oldest argument in philosophy, and almost every tradition has taken both sides. The surprise, for anyone raised on "sab kismat ka khel hai," is that most Indian schools came down hard on the side of effort. Pure fatalism — the claim that striving is useless — was a minority position even in ancient India.

This is the story of that fight: between fate and effort, decree and freedom, the readiness potential in your brain and the choice you feel you are making. It has never been settled, and the most durable answers refuse to pick a pure side.

Around the 5th century BCE, in the same churning age that produced the Buddha and Mahavira, a teacher named Makkhali Gosala founded the Ajivika school. His doctrine was niyati — fate, in the strongest sense. Everything that has happened, is happening and will happen is preordained; there is no free will at all.

Gosala pushed it to a conclusion most found chilling: effort is powerless. "The wise by diligent effort cannot shorten their bondage to the round of rebirths, nor do the foolish by their negligence lengthen it." Liberation, he taught, arrives only after one passes automatically through every fated stage — not through striving, yoga or austerity.

This is why the Ajivikas matter: they are the foil. In the Buddhist Samaññaphala Sutta, Gosala appears among six rival teachers, and his fatalism is attacked precisely for destroying moral effort. Both Buddhism and Jainism defined themselves partly against him — insisting that what you do genuinely changes where you end up.

Once you line up the positions, the debate stops looking foreign — every culture argued the same axis.

The Stoic answer is the cleverest. They defined fate as "an everlasting ordering and sequence of causes," yet refused fatalism. Chrysippus answered the "Lazy Argument" — if all is fated, why call the doctor? — with the idea of co-fated events: recovering and seeking treatment are fated together. Epictetus then drew the line we still quote: within our power are "opinion, motivation, desire, aversion… whatever is of our own doing"; not in our power are "our body, our property, reputation, office." Fix your effort on the first column; release the second.

Here is the knot most people tie: they treat karma and kismat as synonyms. In the technical doctrine they are not, and the difference is the whole escape hatch. Hindu thought splits karma into three ledgers, and only one of them is closed:

1. Sanchita — the entire accumulated store of every past action, the full balance carried silently across lives.
2. Prarabdha — only the slice now ripening and being lived out; this is the part that behaves like "destiny," the hand you have already been dealt.
3. Agami (or kriyamana) — the fresh karma you are generating right now, through today's choices, which flows back into the store and shapes what comes next.

So only one of the three layers is fixed; the third is an open, unwritten column. The Yoga Vasistha builds an entire treatise on exactly this opening, arguing that what people call daiva (fate) is nothing but the paurusha (effort) of past lives — and therefore "self-effort of today becomes the destiny of tomorrow." Even the Gita, so often quoted as surrender, affirms the right to action while only releasing attachment to the fruit. Fate names the cards; effort still plays the hand.

The fatalism most people carry around does not actually match the traditions they inherit.

The argument never died; it changed laboratories. In 1983 the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet found that a "readiness potential" stirs in the brain roughly half a second before a person presses a button, while the conscious feeling of deciding shows up only about 200 milliseconds before the act. Headlines declared free will dead.

The twist is that the new evidence settled nothing. Libet read his own result as compatible with freedom. Later researchers (Schurger and colleagues, 2012) suggested the readiness potential may be spontaneous neural noise rather than a decision forming in the dark. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy still files the whole free-will-versus-determinism question as open. Two and a half thousand years on, the verdict is the same as the Ajivikas got: contested.

It would be tidy if one side had won. The lasting value is that neither did — and the traditions that aged best are the ones that held both halves at once. The cards may be dealt: your body, your birth, the slice the Greeks called moira. The play is still yours: the assent the Stoics guarded, the kriyamana karma the Hindus left open, the veto Libet thought he saw.

This matters beyond metaphysics because pure fatalism and pure control are both corrosive. "Sab kismat ka khel hai" can excuse every failure to try. Its opposite — "you alone build everything" — quietly blames the unlucky for their luck and crushes anyone whose circumstances were genuinely stacked. The layered view is kinder and truer: effort is real and bounded.

That is the through-line worth carrying. The point of the 2,500-year argument was never to crown fate or freedom. It was to keep us honest about which is which — to spend our striving on the open column, and make a wary peace with the one that is not.