Osho on Authentic Sadhus, An authentic sadhu is one to whom the world has become unreal

Question : Then how can one tell if a Sadhu is AUTHENTIC OR NOT?

Osho – There is no need. If someone becomes a sadhu, it is his own private affair. There is no need to pay any attention to him. Whether he is fake or authentic, it is his affair. His belief is a private affair, his being a sadhu is a private thing. Once it becomes public, there will always be fakes, there will always be false people who will exploit.

If one is a poet it is his own affair, if one is a dancer it is his own affair, if one is a sadhu it is his own affair. He should not be worshipped – not even if he is authentic. If the authentic is worshipped, then the false will follow automatically and there will be those who exploit the phenomenon.

The need to recognize who is an authentic sadhu arises only when you want to worship someone. If you want to worship, then you have to know whether the person is authentic or false. But if you are not going to worship, there is no need to question whether the person is authentic. He may be, he may not be. It is his affair.

Unless and until we learn that to be a sadhu is one’s own affair – no one else need be concerned with it – the false cannot be stopped from exploiting. And because of the false, the authentic is lost.

The moment there is no worship, Only through respect and worshipping can the false exploit. To the false, being a sadhu is not the attraction. The attraction comes from the worshipper. No one should be worshipped. Sadhus must not be treated with any special awe. Once they are not given any special attention, the false will disappear and only the authentic will remain.

An authentic sadhu is one to whom the world has become unreal, to whom another dimension has come into existence, to whom this mara is not the reality. This is not a belief; it is his experience. The whole existence has become divine. That is what the person has experienced; it has been an existential experience.

To me, this is a sadhu. No outward criteria will be applicable because an authentic person will never be an imitation. He will not be an imitation Buddha, he will be himself. So it is not important what he wears, what he eats, how he behaves. All that will come spontaneously to him. Only the false can imitate, never the authentic. The authentic is always individual so there can be no models and no predecessors.

This is also to be noted; that only a false sadhu will behave like a sadhu. The authentic will behave like himself. That’s why, when a Jesus appears, he seems like an upstart. Upstarts never seem like upstarts because they follow a fixed pattern. But an authentic man appears to be an upstart because he is not following the traditional pattern of other sadhus. He is himself.

So you will always think that the authentic man has gone wrong, be has gone to the devil, while the false man goes on being worshipped because he can imitate; it is not difficult. Every type of criteria can be imitated. Then the personality becomes double: when the public is watching he is one person, he imitates the outward manifestations of a religious man: and when he is alone, he is someone else.

There is a division: a public face and a private face. But as far as a real sadhu is concerned, he has no private self and no public selves. He is one. That becomes his difficulty. Whatsoever he is, he is always. He is bound to be anti-traditional, bound to be a non-conformist. So the irony is that the false will be worshipped, and the real will be condemned.