Rajneesh

• 1. Introduction

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  Rajneesh, born Chandra Mohan Jain, has an epitaph that says he was never born and never died. It adds that he only visited this planet Earth, between 1931 and 1990. The man behind those words was an Indian philosopher, mystic and teacher, later known around the world as Osho. He was a controversial figure throughout his life, and the controversy did not end when he died. How did a village boy who devoured communist literature become the head of a spiritual movement? Why did a man who rejected organised religion end up directing companies, lawyers and a city built for his followers? And when crimes were committed in his movement's name, who knew what, and when? The answers depend on whom you ask, and the evidence points in more than one direction.

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• 2. A Rebellious Boyhood

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  Kuchwada is a small village in the Raisen District of Madhya Pradesh, and it is where Chandra Mohan Jain was born, at his maternal grandparents' home. His parents, Babulal and Saraswati Jain, belonged to a Jain family. Babulal was a cloth merchant, and Chandra Mohan was the eldest of their eleven children. The name Rajneesh began as a childhood nickname. It joins the Sanskrit words for night and lord.

  His parents followed a Digambar Jain monk named Taran Svami, yet they sent their son to live with his grandparents for his earliest years. Rajneesh later said this shaped him deeply, because his grandmother freed him from imposed schooling and restrictions. When he was seven, his grandfather died, and he moved to Gadarwara to join his parents. A second blow came when he was 15. His childhood girlfriend Shashi died of typhoid. Death preoccupied him through much of his childhood and youth.

  At school he was gifted and rebellious, and he earned a reputation as a formidable debater. According to Vasant Joshi, reading was his primary interest. He took an interest in Marx and Engels, was branded a communist, and was threatened with expulsion. With the help of friends he built a small library, mostly of communist literature. His uncle Amritlal said he also gathered young people to discuss communist ideas and to oppose religion.

  Looking back, Rajneesh called this his first entry into the intellectual world. He said, "I have been interested in communism from my very childhood." Then, "finding that it is a corpse I became interested in anarchism." The anarchists who drew him were Prince Kropotkin, Bakunin and Leo Tolstoy. He also experimented with breath control, yogic exercises, meditation, fasting, the occult and hypnosis. For a short time he associated with socialism, the Indian National Army and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Each time he drifted away, because he could not submit to any external discipline, ideology or system. At 19 he enrolled at a college in Jabalpur, where that stubbornness would soon cost him his place.

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• 3. The Roving Professor

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  On the 21st of March 1953, Rajneesh said, he became enlightened while sitting under a tree in the Bhanvartal garden in Jabalpur. He was 21. His student career was already stormy by then. Hitkarini College had asked him to leave after conflicts with an instructor. At D. N. Jain College he proved so argumentative that he was excused from classes except for examinations. He used the free time to work for a few months as an assistant editor at a local newspaper.

  Since 1951 he had also been speaking at the annual Sarva Dharma Sammelan, the Meeting of all faiths, held in Jabalpur and organised by the Taranpanthi Jain community. He kept appearing there until 1968. He also resisted his parents' pressure to marry.

  He completed a BA in philosophy in 1955 and earned an MA with distinction at the University of Sagar in 1957. His first job was at Raipur Sanskrit College, but the vice-chancellor soon asked him to seek a transfer. The vice-chancellor feared for his students' morality, character and religion. From 1958 Rajneesh lectured in philosophy at Jabalpur University, and in 1960 he became a professor. Colleagues regarded him as exceptionally intelligent, and students found him popular.

  Alongside the job, he travelled across India as Acharya Rajneesh, a title meaning teacher or professor. He journeyed so much that he later struggled to sleep on an ordinary bed, having grown used to the rocking of railway berths. His lectures attacked socialism, Gandhi and institutional religion. In a 1969 speech he called Gandhi a masochist reactionary who worshipped poverty. India, he argued, needed capitalism, science, modern technology and birth control. He dismissed orthodox religions as dead, ritual-filled and oppressive. This brought controversy, but it also brought a loyal following, including wealthy merchants and businessmen. They paid donations for individual consultations about their spiritual lives.

  From 1962 he led meditation camps lasting three to ten days. The first meditation centres, called Jivan Jagruti Kendra, grew up around a teaching then known as the Life Awakening Movement. After a controversial speaking tour in 1966, he resigned from his university post at the request of the university. In a 1968 lecture series, later published as Sex Matters: From Sex to Superconsciousness, he called for a freer acceptance of sex. Hindu leaders were scandalised, and the Indian press dubbed him the "sex guru".

  The following year he was invited to the Second World Hindu Conference, despite misgivings among some Hindu leaders. There he said, "Any religion which considers life meaningless and full of misery and teaches the hatred of life, is not a true religion. Religion is an art that shows how to enjoy life." He compared the treatment of lower caste shudras and women with the treatment of animals. He also described brahmins as motivated by self-interest. The Shankaracharya of Puri tried in vain to have the lecture stopped.

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• 4. Bhagwan of Pune

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  On the 26th of September 1970, Rajneesh initiated his first group of disciples, whom he called neo-sannyasins. Earlier that year, at a public meditation event, he had introduced Dynamic Meditation for the first time. It combined very fast breathing with music and dance. At the end of June he left Jabalpur for Mumbai. Becoming a disciple meant taking a new name and wearing the saffron dress of traditional ascetics, with a mala, a beaded necklace carrying a locket with his picture. Yet the sannyasins were encouraged to live in celebration rather than self-denial. He did not want to be worshipped. He described himself as "a sun encouraging the flower to open".

  His first disciple and secretary was Laxmi Thakarsi Kuruwa, who took the name Ma Yoga Laxmi. Her father, a wealthy Jain, had been a key supporter of the Indian National Congress, with ties to Gandhi, Nehru and Morarji Desai. Laxmi raised the money that let Rajneesh stop travelling and settle down. In December 1970 he moved to the Woodlands Apartments in Mumbai, where he gave lectures and received visitors, including his first Westerners.

  In 1971 he adopted the title Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Bhagwan means blessed one, a term of respect for a person in whom the divine is apparent. Rajneesh explained the change years later: "The day I called myself Bhagwan, they stopped." He meant the people who came only to collect knowledge. He said the word sorted his audience, leaving seekers who were ready to dissolve with him.

  In Mumbai he developed diabetes, asthma and numerous allergies. In 1974 he moved to Koregaon Park in Pune, to a property bought with help from Ma Yoga Mukta, Catherine Venizelos, a Greek shipping heiress. Two adjoining houses and six acres became the nucleus of an ashram. The property is still the heart of today's OSHO International Meditation Resort. The ashram could record his discourses on audio, and later on video, for distribution around the world. Western visitors arrived in rising numbers.

  The day began at six in the morning with Dynamic Meditation. At eight, Rajneesh gave a spontaneous lecture of sixty to ninety minutes in the Buddha Hall, commenting on religious writings or answering questions. Hindi series alternated with English ones until 1981. In the evenings, at sessions called darshan, he spoke with individual disciples and visitors and initiated new ones. From 1975, therapists from the Human Potential Movement arrived, and therapy groups became a major source of income.

  Some early groups, such as the encounter group, were experimental. They allowed physical aggression and sexual encounters between participants, and the press reported injuries. Richard Price, a prominent therapist and co-founder of the Esalen Institute, found that participants were encouraged to be violent rather than to play at being violent. He is alleged to have left the ashram with a broken arm. His Esalen colleague Bernard Gunther fared better, and wrote Dying for Enlightenment. In January 1979 the ashram announced that violence had "fulfilled its function". Work in the ashram was modelled on the community led by the Russian mystic Gurdjieff in France. It meant hard unpaid labour under supervisors chosen for their abrasive personalities. Allegations of drug use among sannyasins also began to damage the ashram's image.

  By the late 1970s the ashram was outgrowing Pune, but plans for larger sites in Kutch and northern India stalled. The government of Prime Minister Morarji Desai denied land-use approval and stopped issuing visas to foreigners naming the ashram as their destination. It also cancelled the ashram's tax-exempt status retroactively, producing a claim estimated at $5 million. By 1980 Indira Gandhi, back in power, would not intercede. In May 1980 a young Hindu fundamentalist, Vilas Tupe, tried to kill Rajneesh during a discourse. Tupe claimed he believed Rajneesh was a CIA agent. In 1981 the ashram hosted 30,000 visitors a year. That spring Rajneesh stopped giving discourses, and Ma Anand Sheela replaced Laxmi as his secretary.

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• 5. Meditation, Ego and Paradox

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  Ten minutes of rapid breathing through the nose open Dynamic Meditation. Performed with eyes closed or blindfolded, it has five stages, and music accompanies four of them. The second stage is ten minutes of catharsis, in which the meditator lets whatever arises come out through laughing, shouting, screaming, jumping or shaking. In the third, ten minutes of jumping with raised arms, the meditator shouts "Hoo!" on each landing. Then everything stops. For fifteen minutes the meditator stays completely motionless, witnessing what happens. The final fifteen minutes are for dancing and celebration. It has been called a microcosm of his outlook.

  He taught more than a hundred techniques in all. Others included the Kundalini shaking meditation and the Nadabrahma humming meditation. In Gibberish sessions, disciples blabbered meaningless sounds, which he said cleared garbage from the mind. His later meditative therapies lasted days. OSHO Mystic Rose ran for three weeks. The first week brought three hours of laughing each day, the second three hours of weeping, and the third silent meditation. He believed modern people found it hard to simply sit, so cathartic methods were needed to give a first glimpse.

  Behind the methods lay a view of the self. Rajneesh held that every human being is a Buddha, capable of unconditional love. The ego, he said, gets in the way by identifying with social conditioning and inventing false needs. He saw the mind as a survival mechanism that repeats strategies that worked before. "The mind has no inherent capacity for joy," he said. "It only thinks about joy." He argued that repression only makes feelings return in disguise, and that sexual repression produces societies obsessed with sex. Understanding this intellectually was not enough, since the mind would store it as one more piece of information. Meditation was the remedy.

  He wanted a "new man" who combined the spirituality of Gautama Buddha with the zest of Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek. He called this figure Zorba the Buddha. The new man would be as objective as a scientist, as sensitive as a poet, and rooted like a mystic. Rajneesh said that man would be utterly ambitionless, and so would make a poor soldier. He applied the idea equally to women, and most of his movement's leadership posts were held by women. He called himself the rich man's guru and said material poverty was no genuine spiritual value.

  He also loved paradox. Sociologist Lewis F. Carter saw roots in Hindu advaita. Observers found echoes of Heraclitus, Freud, Gurdjieff, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich. Rajneesh turned his own authority into a joke, declaring his teaching a game. Once, in his early days as Acharya Rajneesh, a correspondent asked for his Ten Commandments. He replied that he opposed commandments, but "just for fun" he listed ten. Among them were that truth is within you, that life is now and here, and that one should not swim but float. He underlined four: truth is within you, live wakefully, die each moment, and do not search.

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• 6. The Oregon Experiment

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  On the 13th of June 1981, John Shelfer, the husband of Sheela, signed a purchase contract for a ranch in Oregon at a price of US$5.75 million. The property covered more than 64,000 acres across Wasco and Jefferson counties and was known as the Big Muddy Ranch. It was renamed Rancho Rajneesh, and Rajneesh moved there on the 29th of August. He had arrived in the United States on the 1st of June on a tourist visa, ostensibly for medical treatment of a prolapsed disc. He spent several months at Kip's Castle in Montclair, New Jersey. Yet he never sought outside medical treatment during his time in the country, which led the Immigration and Naturalization Service to argue he had always meant to stay.

  Local reactions ranged from hostility to tolerance, depending on distance from the ranch. Legal battles over land use began within months. According to the source, the commune leadership behaved impatiently and confrontationally, and repeated changes to its stated plans looked to many like deception. In May 1982 the residents voted to incorporate the ranch as the city of Rajneeshpuram. The organisation 1000 Friends of Oregon spent six years pursuing court and administrative actions to void the incorporation and called for the city to be dismantled. A group called Citizens for Constitutional Cities formed in March 1982. The Oregon legislature passed bills aimed at slowing the city, and Governor Vic Atiyeh said that unwelcome neighbours should leave Oregon. In 1983 the state's attorney general sued, arguing that the city violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. At one point the commune brought in large numbers of homeless people from American cities in a failed attempt to sway an election.

  Through this period Rajneesh stayed out of public view in what the commune called silence. He later explained that he had wanted to shed the people who clung to his words. "I wanted people who can be with me even if I am silent," he said. Videos of his discourses were shown to commune audiences. He lived in a trailer beside a covered swimming pool and greeted followers in a Rolls-Royce drive-by ceremony. His collection of Rolls-Royces eventually reached 93, and followers reportedly wanted to buy him 365, one for each day of the year.

  He had given Sheela limited power of attorney in 1981 and removed the remaining limits the next year. In 1983 she announced that he would henceforth speak only with her. Many sannyasins doubted she truly spoke for him, and dissidents left in protest at the autocratic leadership. Visa difficulties pushed administrators to declare him head of a religion, Rajneeshism. Urgency grew around his warnings of nuclear war or other disasters in the 1990s. A 1983 newsletter described Rajneeshism as a Noah's Ark of consciousness. In March 1984 Sheela announced his prediction that two-thirds of humanity would die of AIDS, and sannyasins were required to wear rubber gloves and condoms during sex.

  During these years he dictated three books, Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, Notes of a Madman and Books I Have Loved, under the influence of nitrous oxide given by his private dentist. Sheela later claimed he took sixty milligrams of valium daily and was addicted to nitrous oxide. Rajneesh denied this to journalists. Above the commune sat a web of companies, including the Rajneesh Investment Corporation and Rajneesh Services International, incorporated in the UK but based in Zurich.

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• 7. The Fall of Sheela

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  Early in 1984, as tension in the inner circle peaked, Rajneesh held a private meeting with Sheela and his house staff. According to his dentist, Swami Devageet, he declared that his house, not hers, was the centre of the commune. On the 30th of October 1984, he ended his silence, promising to speak his own truths. On the 19th of December he said, "I will not leave you under a fascist regime." The next day, the team that edited his talks was told the tapes had been irreparably damaged. Sheela produced her own transcript, with the references to fascism removed.

  In September 1985 Sheela and her management team suddenly left for Europe. On the 16th of September, Rajneesh held a press conference and labelled them a "gang of fascists". He invited authorities to investigate crimes he said were committed without his knowledge. They included the attempted murder of his personal physician, poisoning of public officials, and wiretapping and bugging within the commune and his own residence. The most shocking was a bioterror attack that sickened 751 citizens of The Dalles with Salmonella, intended to influence county elections. Outside observers were initially sceptical, but the investigation confirmed the accusations and led to convictions of Sheela and several lieutenants. The salmonella attack is considered the first confirmed case of chemical or biological terrorism in the United States.

  On the 30th of September 1985, Rajneesh denied being a religious teacher. His disciples burned 5,000 copies of Rajneeshism: An Introduction to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and His Religion, which defined Rajneeshism as "a religionless religion". Sheela's robes were added to the fire. He said the burning aimed to remove the last traces of her influence.

  Whether he shared the guilt remains disputed. Some commentators believed Sheela was a convenient scapegoat. Sheela had bugged his quarters and handed over tapes as part of her plea bargain, yet no evidence has surfaced that he took part in her crimes. U.S. Attorney Charles Turner and Oregon Attorney General David Frohnmayer acknowledged they had little evidence of his involvement. Frohnmayer nonetheless called him and Sheela "genuinely evil". A disciple, Ma Ava, testified that Sheela played a tape in which Rajneesh seemed to say that killing people might be necessary to stay in Oregon. His attorney Philip Toelkes later argued that Sheela had edited the recording and prepared its transcript herself. Ava also testified that Sheela told her circle they would have to lie to Rajneesh if he asked.

  On the 23rd of October 1985, a federal grand jury indicted Rajneesh and several disciples for conspiring to evade immigration laws. Five days later he was arrested aboard two rented Learjets at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina. Authorities said the group was heading to Bermuda to avoid prosecution. They found $58,000 in cash and 35 watches and bracelets worth a combined $1 million. On the 8th of November, in Portland, Rajneesh pleaded not guilty to 34 charges and was released on $500,000 bail.

  On his lawyers' advice, he later entered an Alford plea, which concedes there is enough evidence to convict without admitting guilt. It covered one count of concealed intent to remain in the United States and one count of conspiring to arrange sham marriages. He received a ten-year suspended sentence and five years of probation. He paid $400,000 in fines and costs and agreed to leave the country. The source argues that the legal basis for the preconceived-intent charge was shaky.

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• 8. Exile and Afterlife

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  Rajneesh landed in Delhi on the 17th of November 1985 to a hero's welcome from his Indian disciples. He denounced the United States, saying the world must "put the monster America in its place". After six weeks in Manali, he considered buying a South Pacific atoll that Marlon Brando was trying to sell. His followers dropped the idea after realising hurricanes struck the area. Visas for non-Indians in his party were revoked, so he moved to Kathmandu and then to Crete, where Greek intelligence arrested him within days.

  He flew to Geneva, Stockholm and London, and was refused entry at each. Canada refused too, and his plane refuelled at Shannon in Ireland, where he stayed two weeks in a Limerick hotel on condition he gave no talks. A Uruguayan identity card and provisional residency awaited him, and in Punta del Este he spoke publicly until the 19th of June 1986. He was then invited to leave. Jamaica gave him twelve hours. In all, 21 countries denied him entry. He returned to Bombay on the 30th of July 1986.

  In January 1987 he went back to the Pune ashram and gave evening discourses daily, except during ill health. The ashram became a Multiversity, where therapy was meant to bridge to meditation. He devised new methods such as the Mystic Rose. Red and orange clothing were largely abandoned, though maroon robes returned in 1989 for use on ashram grounds. He believed his declining health came from poisoning by US authorities while in custody. His doctors and attorney Philip Toelkes suggested thallium or radiation from a mattress but offered no hard evidence. U.S. attorney Charles H. Hunter called the claim complete fiction. From 1988 he spoke only about Zen. In 1989 he dropped Bhagwan, took the name Osho Rajneesh, and shortened it to Osho that September. The honorific means "on whom the heavens shower flowers". He gave his last public discourse in April 1989 and afterward simply sat in silence with followers.

  At the age of 58 he died at the Pune ashram. The official cause was heart failure, but his commune said that living in the body had become a hell after an alleged poisoning in US jails. His ashes were placed in his bedroom in Lao Tzu House.

  Indian opinion warmed after his death. In 1991 an Indian newspaper counted him among the ten people who most changed India's destiny, alongside Gautama Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi. In Nepal there were 60 centres with almost 45,000 initiated disciples by January 2008. More than 650 books are credited to him, mostly renderings of taped discourses, in over 60 languages. The Osho International Foundation has run stress management seminars for clients such as IBM and BMW. In 2016 a satirical Italian Facebook page matched his photographs with humorous captions about national politics and passed a million followers.

  In 2022, allegations emerged that he had sexually abused followers. Deeksha, a senior disciple in his inner circle, described in a podcast a young Japanese follower who emerged distressed from a private meeting and said he had raped her. Deeksha also said she herself experienced unwanted touching at a darshan session, and that other women told her they felt pressured into sexual acts. Another former disciple wrote that she had believed her encounters with him were a sacred exchange between master and disciple. These accounts remain allegations. Meanwhile the resort in Pune where he is entombed calls itself the Esalen of the East.

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