Sannyas: Orange and Mala: Difference between revisions

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[[image:plasticmala.jpg|200px|right|thumb|Plastic malas]]
[[image:plasticmala.jpg|200px|right|thumb|Plastic malas]]
[[image:stonemala.jpg|200px|right|thumb|Wooden mala with stone beads and a silver commune pendant]]
[[image:stonemala.jpg|200px|right|thumb|Wooden mala with stone beads and a silver commune pendant]]
The Colour of Magic
Psychotherapy, meditation, creativity, mysticism...it’s a huge synthesis. And a synthesis existing not just as theory but as a quasi-political, international movement, with people at very different stages of their own individual development.
What can hold it all together?
I spent ages trying to think my way through this, while all along the answer was under my nose.
Really, it couldn’t have been more obvious. For what was the bottom line of sannyas? What happened when you ‘took sannyas’ in the old days? The basic thing? The most obvious thing? You wore orange...You adopted the centuries- old colour of the spiritual misfit in India. You dressed like a sadhu. In fact that was all there was to taking sannyas, that and the mala: the rest was optional, the lecture, the meditations, the groups. At darshan I remember Osho telling people, O.K., go down to Goa;- hang out on the beach, get stoned if you must, nothing wrong with it...nothing wrang with it, rolling his eyes horribly...just wear the orange.
In fact the orange was the only thing about which Osho put his foot down.
Dharm Jyoti illustrates the point vividly in her memoir of Osho in his Bombay days. At the time Osho first introduced the idea of wearing orange she and several of her friends did everything they could to avoid doing any such thing. Having put off getting an orange dress from one day to the next, finally she went round to see Osho in his flat. He was sitting in his room, waiting for her with a large bolt of orange cloth he had just bought in the bazaar. Producing a pair of tailor’s scissors, he invited her to cut the cloth for her robe there and then.102 You can’t get much more hands-on than that.
Not that Dharm Jyoti was alone in her resistance to the idea. In fact it was precisely the orange, that and the mala, which most got up people’s noses about sannyas. Wearing orange seemed the very hallmark of a cult: as though people were almost gratuitously flaunting their servility: their desperate need to belong.
Perhaps at the time a lot of people who took sannyas in the West weren’t aware of the associations of that particular colour in India. In Indian society, orange clothes signalled, and signalled without the slightest ambiguity, one thing and one thing alone: drop-out.
Culturally this went back thousands of years. Traditional Hindu society had assigned orange to the criminal outcaste; and even in the late twentieth century orange robes – orange rags and tatters more like – were still the hallmark of the sadhu;- and it was the life-style of the sadhus, rather than any particular aspect of Buddhism or Hinduism which was the orginal Hippie turn-on to Eastern spirituality. It was the sadhus who brought a whole new dimension to the idea of ‘dropping out’ and being ‘on the road;’ they showed that at least one version of the alternative society could work. And there were extraordinary numbers of them: even when I was first in India figures of fifteen to twenty million throughout the sub-continent were still being bandied about.
Sadhus were a sort of anarchists’ union. All varieties of God-obsession – fakirs, bhaktis, gnani yogis – jostled with downright rogues, potheads and madmen. Some were genuine saints and visionaries, others sort of Boy Scouts noir. Some were based in a particular ashram, others seemed to be permanently on the road, either wandering along the old pilgrimage trails in the Himalayas, sleeping under the stars, or hitching incredible distances across the plains to temples deep in the South. In its way, it was a life of pure celebration. No one owned anything, just a pot or a blanket maybe, but they lived and meditated, without needing to work, in some of the most dramatically beautiful country in the world...
Admittedly, the first thing wearing orange in the West brought about was a sense of group cohesion. But what’s wrong with that? At this point, anyone can see the central psychological feature of this society is that it is isolating everyone – isolating each one of us, and robbing us of our power – and it was just this process that wearing orange threw into reverse. Like-minded people began to stand up in public and be prepared to be counted: suddenly you were meeting more people than you’d ever met in your life, and a whole social underground was yours for the asking. Orange provided that most basic function of culture, it brought people together.
But that was only half the story. Because at the same time as it brought people together it also set you apart. Let’s face it, the basic thing wearing orange did was...make you look a complete dickhead. Orange put you on the spot. Suddenly you had to stand up for yourself. Suddenly you had to walk your talk. “A sense of humour” Osho observed “should be the foundation stone of the future religiousness of man.” Well, the first time you wore your orange to the supermarket you found out exactly what that meant. The mayhem wearing orange caused overturned any Us/Them applecart. Far from being the most cultic thing about sannyas, it was the least cultic thing of all. What wearing orange was, was probably the most powerful, and certainly the funniest of all the meditation techniques Osho invented: it brought inside and outside together.
For the major part of his career, Osho was to insist that the energy generated by this played an irreplaceable role in sannyas. Only with the collapse of the Ranch did he give up on it;- and, in retrospect, you can see that it was from this point onwards that all the real fight was knocked out of sannyas. It lost its edge when it lost its street presence. It lost its cheek. It lost its balls. In fact it started, from precisely this point, to become a cult...secretive, hierarchic, and basically conformist.
There’s no need to be hung up about the colour orange per se, as though it were some dogma. Though I must admit I’m tempted...this could still prove the kicking-off point for a new and particularly virulent sannyas fundamentalism: the Dynamic, orange, free love...But I’d best back off, and do no more than stress the richness, the multiplicity of the functions the colour played. Perhaps there’s something else which could do the same thing today;- though personally I’d be at a loss to suggest what it could be... Other emerging cultures have had the guts to stand up and be counted in some such manner – Hippies did it with Levis, Rastas with dreadlocks – but the orange has something both more archaic and more...more child-like, more playful about it than that. That’s what the sadhus say about their bleached- out orange and apricot rags: that they are the colours of the first rays of the rising sun. That there’s a new day coming;- and these are its colours.
(Sam, [[Life of Osho]], p 255-259)

Revision as of 09:38, 16 February 2015

The Sep-Oct 1970 meditation camp in Manali (Himachal Pradesh) was the occasion of Osho's first sannyas initiations.
"BHAGWAN,
WHY DO SANNYASINS HAVE TO CHANGE THEIR NAMES AND WEAR A MALA?
First: there is no reason why sannyasins are in orange and wear a mala except that I am eccentric about it. I am a little in love with the orange and I am in love with myself, hence the mala. This is the truth, if you understand. If you need some rationalisation you can ask my disciples."
(Osho, Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 1, 18 Feb 1977)


Sannyas - Come On, Such a Little Jump
First oval malas
Wooden malas
Plastic malas
Wooden mala with stone beads and a silver commune pendant