Osho,
So many dull and crazy religions once started with a wonderful and enlightened person. Please tell me, will your sannyasins become as dull and crazy as all the other stupid religions? I am afraid to fall into another institution.

It is a significant question. There are many implications in it. Each implication has to be deeply pondered over.

First, have you ever loved a woman? Have you ever fallen in love with a woman? If you have ever fallen in love with a woman, have you thought before falling in love that every woman dies one day? All the women have died before; this woman will also die. Why are you falling in love with a person who is going to die? Prevent yourself. Stop yourself. In fact, have you ever thought that you yourself will be dying one day? Then why go on living? When one has to die, what is the point of living at all? Die right now. Why go on living in a corpse? Because this body will become a corpse one day. It may be sooner or later burned or buried, so why take care of it? Why look in the mirror in the morning? Why clean it? Why feed it? Why you are serving a corpse? But you have not asked these questions. In fact, these questions will make you very uneasy.

Making love to a woman is making love to a future corpse. Even the thought of it will be enough to put you off. But before taking sannyas, all these great philosophical questions arise in you. If they are authentic, then they will arise in other directions also; they will arise everywhere.

Yes, every religion sooner or later will die – that is the nature of things. That is simply the way of Tao, nothing is wrong about it. When your wife dies, it is not that you did something wrong by loving her while she was alive; it was perfectly right to love her while she was alive. And now it is perfectly right not to go on keeping her dead body in the house, otherwise it will stink. It won’t allow you to live, it won’t allow you…even your neighbors to live. It will become impossible to love this woman now. It was perfectly good to make love to her while she was alive, but you need not be any more concerned with the past. The past is over, now there is nobody inside the body, the soul has left. It is better to bury or burn it, and the sooner you do the better. And you are not doing any betrayal. It is perfectly right. Just as we accept life, we should accept death. Anything that is born is bound to die.

We accept it about people, but we don’t accept it about religions – that’s where we go wrong. When there is a Jesus walking, alive, a religion grows around him like a foliage growing around a tree – green leaves, flowers, fruits – because the tree has roots. Jesus is rooted in God, hence the tree is alive. Enjoy the beauty of the tree, enjoy the fragrance of the tree. Lie down in its shade while it is hot. Eat its juicy fruits. Don’t be worried that one day this tree will die and there will be no more green leaves, no more flowers will come, spring will not have any meaning to it – don’t be bothered with that! That is natural.