Live these five—don’t harm, don’t hoard, don’t steal, don’t chase desires, stay aware—right where you are; they make you peaceful inside and kinder outside, so the whole community improves.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, for the practice of the five great vows—ahimsa (nonviolence), aparigraha (non-possessiveness), achaurya (non-stealing), akam (desirelessness), and apramad (alertness)—to bear fruit, and for the all-round development of the individual and society, what can your proposed new vision of sannyas contribute? Please explain in detail.
Ahimsa, aparigraha, achaurya, akam, and apramad are the fundamental sutras of the “art of sannyas.” And sannyas is an art. All of life is an art. Only those who master the “art of living” become available to sannyas. Sannyas is the art that takes you beyond life. Those who experience life in its totality naturally enter sannyas; it must be so—it is simply the next step in life. God is the temple reached by climbing the very staircase of the world. So first let me make it clear: there is no conflict between “the world” and “sannyas.” They are two stations on one journey. It is in the world itself that sannyas develops and blossoms. Sannyas is not the hostility of the world; it is the deep experience of the world. The more deeply one experiences the world, the more one finds one’s feet moving toward sannyas. Those who do…
30. Self-restraint, the first step of yoga, is comprised of the following five vows: nonviolence, truthfulness, honesty, sexual continence, and nonpossessiveness.
31. THESE FIVE VOWS, WHICH CONSTITUTE THE GREAT VOW, EXTEND TO ALL THE SEVEN STAGES OF ENLIGHTENMENT REGARDLESS OF CLASS, PLACE, TIME, OR CIRCUMSTANCE. Brahmacharya means: trying to understand sex energy, trying to understand how it moves in your being, trying to understand why it gives you pleasure, trying to understand from where pleasure really comes -- whether it comes from sexual congress, sex release, or it comes from somewhere else. If you are an observer, soon you will realize and discover it is coming from somewhere else. When you are in a sexual intercourse a deep shock happens to the whole body. It is a shock, because so much energy is released; the whole body trembles in a shock. In that shock thoughts stop. It is just like an electric shock. A man goes mad; you go to the psychiatrist and he gives him an electric shock. For what?…
A friend has asked: Osho, Gandhi has urged the practice of vows such as ahimsa (nonviolence), satya (truth), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacharya (celibacy), and asangraha/aparigraha (non-possessiveness), and Patanjali too has emphasized them. So is it necessary to cultivate these before samadhi? Or can one reach samadhi without them?
Gandhi used to say continually, “I have no doctrine, no ideology. There is no such thing as Gandhism.” It sounded very humble. In Karachi there was a conference where Gandhi was speaking. Communists waved black flags and shouted, “Down with Gandhism!” Gandhi was at the microphone. Always, whenever anyone spoke of Gandhism, he would say, “There is no such thing.” But that day, when the slogan “Down with Gandhism!” was raised and the black flags waved, it suddenly burst out of his mouth, “Gandhi may die, but Gandhism is immortal!” What was hidden in the unconscious surfaced. It had been pushed down in some inner corner; hard to detect. We are not even aware of the corners of our own minds—what lurks where. It can slip out in an unguarded moment. It is necessary to understand Gandhi’s life very correctly. Gandhi’s life is a great failed experiment—a great experiment, and…
Nonviolence, nonpossessiveness, nonstealing, desirelessness and awareness are the fundamental vows of the art of sannyas. Sannyas like life is an art. Only those who are experts in the art of life can achieve sannyas. The art of sannyas goes beyond life. Only those who can experience life in its totality are able to enter sannyas. It is the next step of life. God is that building which is reached by ascending the ladder of samsar -- worldly life. So the first point I would like to make clear is that there is no opposition -- no contrast between the samsar and the sannyas. They are the two camps of the same journey. Sannyas evolves and blooms in the samsar itself. There is no enmity between the sannyas and samsar, on the contrary the sannyas is the fruit of deep and wide experience of the samsar.
Osho, isn’t it possible that among them there was someone like that?
It is impossible, isn’t it! It’s like someone asking, “If a man gouges out his eyes, will he then be able to see?” Understand my point. I would say that whether he gouges his eyes for twenty-five hundred years or twenty-five thousand years, after gouging them out he will not be able to see. And only the one who has become afraid of seeing, who does not want to see, gouges out his eyes. What does a vow mean? A vow means your state of mind is one thing, and you take a vow that is the opposite of it. A vow is a rule of suppression. I am full of lust, I take the vow of celibacy; full of violence, I take the vow of nonviolence; full of possessiveness, I take the vow of non-possessiveness. No one has to take a vow of possessiveness, nor of violence, nor of…