According to Osho, after enlightenment one can live as a king or a beggar—it makes no spiritual difference. He chose to live like a king because he was born poor and wanted to complete the 'fourth possibility,' the only untried alternative, to show that awakening is free, playful, and beyond roles. 'Why not?'—somebody had to fulfill the remaining option.
He lives like a king to show that enlightenment can wear any costume, and he picked the last unused one.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
My whole teaching is that you can start being a king from this very moment. If you start enjoying life, you become a king. It has nothing to do with money or kingdom. It has nothing to do with power over people. And if somebody waits to enjoy life only when he has so much money, and so much power, and such a big kingdom, then he is never going to enjoy. He will die a beggar. [Osho told the story of alexander the great, meeting the mystic, Diogenes. Alexander felt envious of Diogenes' obvious contentment with life, but said he first had to conquer the world before he could enjoy life like diogenes. See 'dance your way to god', wednesday august 19th where Osho recounts the story in full.
Man is born to be a king. That is our very destiny, but very few people ever try to fulfil it. They take life for granted, they don't take it as an opportunity. They think that just to be born is enough, that just to be born is to be alive. It is not so. Birth is only a beginning, the beginning of an opportunity. You can use the opportunity, you may not use the opportunity. And many people live in vain; they live superficially, without ever knowing who they are, without ever understanding the meaning of life, without ever even thinking about why they are here, from where they come, to where they are going. I have heard about a man who became retired at the age of sixty. On the first day of his retirement his wife said 'Should I prepare your breakfast? -- boiled eggs, etcetera?
Yes, I am the beginning of something new. You can call it religiousness, but don't call it religion. Q: YOU SAY YOU ARE A BUDDHA, AND HIS TEACHING WAS BASED ON SIMPLICITY, A SIMPLE LIFE. YOURS IS BASED ON COMFORT AND LUXURY. WILL YOU PLEASE COMMENT ON THAT? A: It is a significant question, with tremendous implications to be understood; one is that there is no difference. You will be surprised to hear it, because you don't understand the inner mechanism of transformation. Buddha was born a king. He got fed up with his palaces, with his richness, with his luxury; he became a beggar. In the middle of one night, he renounced his kingdom and went into the forest as a beggar. I was born as a poor man. I got fed up with up poverty.
Osho, Buddha says: live on the minimum, only on what is absolutely necessary. You say: don’t live stingily or lukewarm; live to the maximum, in excess. How are we to reconcile the two?
Movement doesn’t happen like that. Movement is in one direction. Choose west—then west it is. Forget that the other three directions even exist. Granted, they exist. Granted, some people are walking there. But you have left those directions. Now you go west. Don’t let one hand go east, the other west, and one leg south. That “coordination” won’t set; in attempting it, you will be badly fragmented. This has become humanity’s condition. Earlier, when the world was not so close-knit—before the earth became a small village, before religions were mutually familiar—many realized the ultimate. As the earth shrank and people became acquainted with one another’s religions, religiosity declined. Why? Because all directions entered everyone’s mind. You read the Quran and you read the Gita. You drown in neither. When you read the Quran you remember the Gita; when you read the Gita you remember the Quran—and you keep trying to…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] [You've got to be absolutely dying for sannyas, only then will you find life worth living was the gist of the message in Deva Parinito's name.] Sannyas is a marriage to god -- and marriage in the real sense of a love affair, not the ordinary kind of marriage that we have become accustomed to. That is a plastic thing, a pseudo affair, a social institution. Sannyas is a mad, mad love affair with god. Unless it is a love affair and unless it is a mad love affair, there is no possibility of knowing god. God cannot be known by thinking. There is no bridge between your head and god. God can only be known by intense, passionate feeling.