According to Osho, taking sannyas is not receiving ready-made answers but entering a living connection where your questions and the ego that breeds them are dismantled. The master breaks the mind's habits, uproots 'you,' and in that inner emptiness the Answer of answers dawns: samadhi, a silence, clarity, and wholeness from which life resolves itself without borrowed beliefs.
You don't get new answers; you lose the noisy questions and 'me,' and a quiet inner knowing appears.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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.
Question: First question: Osho, I want to take sannyas; when should I take it? And you ask, “I want to take sannyas; when should I take it?” Don’t ask “when” at all. Let me tell you a small story. In South India there was an extraordinary sannyasin named Sadasiva Swami. He was living in his master’s ashram, young then, not yet a renunciate. He had gone to learn wisdom. Often it happens that you go to learn knowledge and you return having learned sannyas. That is what a master is: you go for one thing, and he hands you something else. People go to get their questions answered, and the master solves them instead. People go to become a little more informed, a little more scholarly, and passing through the alchemy of the master they do not remain what they were; they return new.
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…
Osho, how can I take sannyas? I cannot get jealousy, ego, anger—anything at all—out of my mind. And you keep appearing before me day and night in dreams! What should I do?
Why does jealousy arise? Because someone seems to be getting ahead of you. Someone has bought a better sari, more beautiful jewelry, built a new house, gathered more money in a safe. Jealousy is born because your ego is bruised. A fire flares up inside, smoke begins to rise. You climb onto your own funeral pyre. Anxiety is born inside you. Anger means someone blocks your ego. You set out on a journey of conquest and someone stands in your way, a stone falls in your path because of someone, someone shoves you aside—someone becomes an obstacle. Anger erupts. Anger and jealousy are not very different—two sides of the same coin. Anger is a bit crude; jealousy a bit more civilized. I have heard a Rajasthani tale. A proud Rajput, full of swagger, would twirl his moustache all day long. His arrogance was such that he never allowed anyone else…
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.