According to Osho, taking sannyas means courageously stepping into the unknown, accepting him as a friend in darkness while retaining total responsibility for your own transformation. It is an individual, risky commitment—like offering a blank check he never uses—breaking from the crowd, refusing security, and walking alone. Only such authentic courage ignites alertness, inner rebirth, and the emergence of the new man.
It means bravely choosing your own path to grow inside, trusting a guide for support but keeping the steering wheel of your life in your hands.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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.
Beloved Osho, what is sannyas?
Sannyas is rebellion against all slavery; it is living life in absolute freedom. To live life in absolute freedom, without traditions, without conventions, without religions, without philosophies, without ideologies -- political, social, and others -- to live unburdened is sannyas. But it will look crazy to the whole world. Freedom looks crazy because everybody is living an imprisoned life. To prisoners, the person who escapes from the prison looks crazy, because for them prison is comfortable, convenient, secure, safe. A Hungarian secret police colonel was inspecting a strip of the border. "Too many people have been slipping across at this point," he informed the guards. "I have been ordered to test your security precautions." After deploying the guards at strategic points, the colonel began creeping on all fours toward the barbed wire. "Can you see me now?" he called out. When they cried back "Yes," he started again. On the…
And the second meaning is handsome, beautiful. A harmonious person is bond to be cheerful and bound to be beautiful. That is inevitable, because there is nothing more beautiful than cheerfulness, there is nothing more graceful than harmony. Sannyas is nothing but an effort to bring harmony to your being. The society has divided it into many parts, it has cut you into fragments. But cutting you into fragments it destroys your integrity, it makes you impotent so that it can rule over you. That is the basic political strategy. It has been followed by society for centuries: cut every individual into segments. When he is not whole he cannot stand on his own, he cannot be rebellious, he cannot have any individuality. He is reduced to a slave. He becomes dependent, always fearful. He forgets all about freedom, he forgets all about truth, he forgets all about himself.
Anand Nishanto. Anand means bliss; nishanto means the end of the night. Sannyas is the end of the night and the beginning of a new dawn. To live in the ego is to live in darkness. Sannyas means surrendering your ego, saying "I am no more," becoming a nobody, dropping all nonsense about being somebody. Sannyas is a declaration that, "I am nothing, I am anonymous..." Just as rivers are, mountains are, stars are, animals are, birds are, with no name, with no fame. To be a sannyasin means again becoming part of this infinite nature. Once you drop the ego, you become part of the whole. The ego keeps you separate, it keeps a boundary between you and the whole, a wall.
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.