Is sannyas taken only by those who have become aware of the futility of life?

Is sannyas taken only by those who have become aware of the futility of life?

And who else would? Sannyas is not a pastime. Sannyas is not a child’s game. Those who have become aware of life’s futility, who have seen that no matter how much you run you arrive nowhere; no matter how much you accumulate, in the end all gaining turns out to be losing. Those who have seen that the drums sound sweet from afar but, when you come close, everything turns hollow; those who have recognized life’s mirage—only they become sannyasins. What does sannyas mean? Awareness of the futility of the world is sannyas. You ask quite an extraordinary question: “Is sannyas taken only by those who have become aware of the futility of life?” Those who still have hope in life—why would they take it! It’s a straightforward matter. A mechanic had been repairing the clock in a clock-tower for a long time. When he had finished, he climbed down…

Beloved Osho, what is sannyas?

Sannyas is hope -- hope against all hope. People have lost all hope; they are living hopelessly. They are living simply because they are cowards and cannot commit suicide. The existentialist philosophers are right when they say that the most important philosophical problem is suicide: to live or not to live, to be or not to be. If this is life that ordinary people are living, then it does not seem to be worth living at all. What is the point of getting up every morning and going through the same empty gestures you have gone through thousands of times? The same breakfast, the same nagging wife, the same ugly husband; the same suspicions, the same possessiveness, the same jealousy, the same anger, the same ambition; rushing to the office, the same boss -- everything is the same, a constant repetition. And again coming back home and sitting in front…

Sannyas is a quantum leap, a jump into the unknown, a great courage to become discontinuous with your own past. It is a rebirth. It is a change so great... as if the old dies, and dies utterly and totally and the new comes into being from nowhere, from nothingness, out of nothing. If the new comes from the old it remains the old. If the new is continuous with the old then it is only a modification of the old -- maybe a little bit colored and decorated and changed, with a new dress, with a new mask, but it is not a revolution, it is not a conversion. And sannyas to be true has to be a revolution so total that the old identity is simply dropped -- just as the snake slips out of the old skin and never looks back.

To me, sannyas is not something very serious. Life itself is not very serious, and one who is serious is always dead. Life is just an overflowing energy without any purpose, so to me, sannyas is to lead life purposelessly. Live life as a play and not as a work. If you can take this whole life just as a play, you are a sannyasin; then you have renounced. Renunciation is not leaving the world, but changing the attitude. That is why I can initiate anyone into sannyas. To me, initiation itself is a play. And I will not ask for any qualifications -- whether you are qualified or not -- because qualifications are asked when something serious is done.

The deepest meaning of sannyas is this. First: the one who takes the world to be his home is a householder, and the one who takes the world to be only a wayside halt is a sannyasin. The world is a stopover, a midway station; it is not the final destination. Whoever begins to see this becomes a sannyasin. Then he passes through the world just as you pass along a road. You travel on the road, fine; but you do not make the road your dwelling. The same road can be walked by one for whom the road itself has become the goal, who mistakes the road for the destination. We pass through the same world. And the person who feels that the world is the end is a householder. By householder I mean: one who has taken the world to be home.