Renunciation was the wrong answer.
The old sannyasin dropped the world. Rajneesh told his to keep the job, the marriage and the appetite and drop the identification instead — same robe, opposite instruction.
The Sanskrit word sannyasa names the fourth stage of life: the man who has finished with household and property and goes out with a bowl. Rajneesh kept the word, the ochre robe and the initiation, and inverted the content. His sannyasins married, took jobs, ran businesses and, in the Pune years, filled therapy groups imported from California. He argued that the renouncer is still organised around the thing renounced, and that only someone with no quarrel with the world can stop identifying with it. Traditional Hindu authorities regarded the appropriation as an insult and said so. His own term for what he had made was neo-sannyas, which conceded the point about novelty while keeping the borrowed authority.
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.