When is the right time to become a sannyasin?

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.

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 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…

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.

Osho, is the time ripe for me to become a sannyasin? Can I ask when the time is ripe?

IT HAPPENED ON A JOURNEY BY SHIP: the parrot felt terribly bored and was really happy when one day he discovered that there was also a monkey on board. To pass the time the parrot said, "Let's play hide-and-seek." The monkey said, "I don't know this game. How does it go?" So the parrot explained, "It is very simple. You close your eyes, face a wall and count to a hundred. In the meantime I hide and when you reach one hundred you start looking for me." So they did. But it happened that the ship exploded at the same moment that the monkey reached one hundred. The parrot managed to find a plank floating in the sea. After a while he saw the monkey as he swam towards the plank totally exhausted. When the monkey had climbed up he looked at the parrot and said, "What a stupid game!"…