According to Osho, the value lies not in producing children but in loving them. He himself has none, yet he emphasizes that it is good to love children and not good to have them. For him, true care is non-possessive: cherish, support, and celebrate children’s being without turning them into extensions of your desires. Parenthood isn’t a necessity; compassionate, unowned love is.
Care for kids with love, but you don’t need to make or own them.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Why don't you have children of your own blood?
The world is already too populated. To have children is a crime -- and the very idea of your own blood is possessive, monopolistic, capitalistic. Why my own blood? What speciality has my blood got? The blood of a beggar and the blood of an emperor are not different; it is not that the blood of the poor is water and the blood of the emperor is pure gold. I love children; it does not matter to whom they belong. In fact, it is easier to love the children of other people than your own children; they are such a pain in the neck. To love somebody else's children is perfectly good: they are always nice, beautiful, angels. But if you are thinking of your own blood, those same angels will turn into devils. I love children -- and there are so many children in the world, what is the…
Osho, when I went to Rajneeshpuram in July, in your discourses you said that in India no children should be born for many years. I repeated this to many people when I came back to Hindustan. Different people had different reactions, but most women said, “The maternal feeling in a woman—how is she to satisfy it?” Some said, “A woman does not attain fulfillment until she becomes a mother.” Please say something about this, Osho.
Second, it is true that a woman’s fulfillment is in her becoming a mother. That is why, when I began giving sannyas, the traditional name for a male renunciate was “Swami.” There was no name for a woman—because in India, for thousands of years, woman has been suppressed and erased so badly that she was never given the chance to be initiated into sannyas. There wasn’t even a name. After much search I accepted “Ma” as that name, because in “Ma” lies her fulfillment. But this fulfillment as mother is proof that your love has risen so high that the whole world becomes, for you, as if they are your children—even your husband. This is the blessing of the rishis of the Upanishads. Whenever a couple came to a rishi for a blessing, there was a very unique blessing, found in no other scripture in the world. The rishi would…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, AND A WOMAN WHO HELD A BABE AGAINST HER BOSOM SAID, SPEAK TO US OF CHILDREN. AND HE SAID: YOUR CHILDREN ARE NOT YOUR CHILDREN. THEY ARE THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF LIFE'S LONGING FOR ITSELF. THEY COME THROUGH YOU BUT NOT FROM YOU, AND THOUGH THEY ARE WITH YOU YET THEY BELONG NOT TO YOU. YOU MAY GIVE THEM YOUR LOVE BUT NOT YOUR THOUGHTS, FOR THEY HAVE THEIR OWN THOUGHTS. YOU MAY HOUSE THEIR BODIES BUT NOT THEIR SOULS, FOR THEIR SOULS DWELL IN THE HOUSE OF TOMORROW, WHICH YOU CANNOT VISIT, NOT EVEN IN YOUR DREAMS. YOU MAY STRIVE TO BE LIKE THEM, BUT SEEK NOT TO MAKE THEM LIKE YOU. FOR LIFE GOES NOT BACKWARDS NOR TARRIES WITH YESTERDAY. YOU ARE THE BOWS FROM WHICH YOUR CHILDREN AS LIVING ARROWS ARE SENT FORTH.
A friend has asked: Osho, if sex departs in this way, what will happen to progeny in the world? If, in this way, everyone experiences samadhi and becomes established in brahmacharya, what will happen to children?
Through brahmacharya, too, children will come—but they will not be by-products of sex. For those children, sex will be a vehicle, a mere medium. Sex itself will have no other role. As when a man travels somewhere in a bullock cart—does he have any real concern with the cart? Or he flies by airplane—do you have any bond with the plane? You board here and land in Delhi. Do you have any relationship to the airplane? None. Your relationship is with going to Delhi. The airplane is only a vehicle, only a means. When people attain to brahmacharya and the journey of intercourse reaches samadhi, they can still desire children. But the birth of those children will be true creation; they will be the product, the srijan, the creative act. Sex will be only the medium. And in the same way that until now we have tried—listen carefully—to avoid children…
When two people move higher and higher in love, and a point comes where their personalities are no longer separate and boundaries dissolve, then they give birth to children. Then the children come from a higher plane. They have a personality of love -- they are not only by-products of sex. They carry a deep harmony within them, and if you become aware, you can see whether the child is a by-product of a sexual meeting or a by-product of love. A different aura surrounds the child, a different vibration, because he has to carry that original quality of oneness. When a child is born out of love you give something to the world. When a child is just from a sexual meeting, you simply over-populate the world; you don't give anything. Remember also, that when you give birth to a child out of deep love?