Osho (pronounced [ˈoːʃoː] ; born Chandra Mohan Jain; 11 December 1931 – 19 January 1990), also known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Acharya Rajneesh, and simply Rajneesh, was an Indian godman, and founder of the new religious movement, the Rajneesh movement. He rejected institutional religions, insisting that spiritual experience could not be organized into any one system of religious dogma. As a guru, he advocated meditation and taught a unique form called dynamic meditation. Rejecting traditional ascetic practices, he encouraged his followers to embrace life fully while remaining unattached to worldly desires.
Osho said he experienced a spiritual awakening in 1953 at the age of 21. Following several years in academia, in 1966 Osho resigned his post at the University of Jabalpur as a lecturer in philosophy, and began traveling throughout India, becoming known for his criticism of the orthodoxy of mainstream religions, as well as of mainstream political ideologies and of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1970, Osho spent time in Mumbai initiating followers referred to as "neo-sannyasins". During this period, he expanded his spiritual teachings and commented extensively in discourses on the writings of religious traditions, mystics, bhakti poets, and philosophers from around the world. In 1974, Osho relocated to Pune, where an ashram was established and a variety of therapies, incorporating methods first developed by the Human Potential Movement, were offered to a growing Western following. By the late 1970s, the tension between the ruling Janata Party government of Morarji Desai and the movement led to a curbing of the ashram's development and a back tax claim estimated at $5 million.
In 1981, the Rajneesh movement shifted its focus to the United States, where Osho established a commune called Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon. The movement ran into conflict with county residents and the state government, and a succession of legal battles concerning the ashram's construction and continued development curtailed its success. In 1985, Osho publicly asked local authorities to investigate his personal secretary Ma Anand Sheela and her close supporters for a number of crimes, including a 1984 mass food-poisoning attack intended to influence county elections, an aborted assassination plot on U.S. attorney Charles H. Turner, the attempted murder of Osho's personal physician, and the bugging of his own living quarters; authorities later convicted several members of the ashram, including Sheela. That year, Osho was deported from the United States on separate immigration-related charges in accordance with an Alford plea. After his deportation, 21 countries denied him entry.
Osho returned to Mumbai in 1986 and, after a period of public discourse, moved back to Pune in January 1987 to revive his ashram, where he died in 1990. Osho's ashram, now known as the Osho International Meditation Resort, and all associated intellectual property, is managed by the registered Osho International Foundation (formerly Rajneesh International Foundation). Osho's teachings have had an impact on Western New Age thought, and their popularity increased after his death.
Childhood and adolescence: 1931–1950
Osho, who from childhood was called Rajneesh (a nickname from the Sanskrit रजनी, rajanee, "night", and ईश, isha, "lord") was born Chandra Mohan Jain into a Jain family to Babulal and Saraswati Jain. He was the eldest of eleven children of a cloth merchant. He was born at his maternal grandparents' home in Kuchwada, a small village in the Raisen District of Madhya Pradesh state in India. His parents were followers of the Digambar Jain monk Taran Svami. They arranged for him to live with his maternal grandparents until the age of eight. According to Rajneesh, this profoundly influenced his development, as his grandmother gave him complete freedom from imposed education or restrictions.
When he was seven years old, his grandfather died, and he went to Gadarwara to live with his parents. Rajneesh was profoundly affected by his grandfather's death, and again by the death of his childhood girlfriend Shashi from typhoid when he was 15, leading to a preoccupation with death that lasted throughout much of his childhood and youth. In his school years, he was a gifted and rebellious student, and gained a reputation as a formidable debater. Rajneesh became critical of traditional religion, took an interest in many methods to expand consciousness, including breath control, yogic exercises, meditation, fasting, the occult, and hypnosis. According to Vasant Joshi, Rajneesh read widely from an early age; although he played sports as a young boy, reading was his primary interest. After showing an interest in the writings of Marx and Engels, he was branded a communist and was threatened with expulsion from school. According to Joshi, with the help of friends, he built a small library containing mostly communist literature. Rajneesh, according to his uncle Amritlal, also formed a group of young people that regularly discussed communist ideology and their opposition to religion.
Rajneesh was later to say, "I have been interested in communism from my very childhood...communist literature – perhaps there is no book that is missing from my library. I have signed and dated each book before 1950. Small details are so vivid before me, because that was my first entry into the intellectual world. First I was deeply interested in communism, but finding that it is a corpse I became interested in anarchism – that was also a Russian phenomenon – Prince Kropotkin, Bakunin, Leo Tolstoy. All three were anarchists: no state, no government in the world."
He became briefly associated with socialism and two Indian nationalist organisations: the Indian National Army and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. However, his membership in the organisations was short-lived as he could not submit to any external discipline, ideology, or system.
University years and public speaker: 1951–1970
In 1951, aged 19, Rajneesh began his studies at Hitkarini College in Jabalpur. Asked to leave after conflicts with an instructor, he transferred to D. N. Jain College, also in Jabalpur. Having proved himself to be disruptively argumentative, he was not required to attend college classes at D. N. Jain College except for examinations and used his free time to work for a few months as an assistant editor at a local newspaper. He began speaking in public at the annual Sarva Dharma Sammelan (Meeting of all faiths) held at Jabalpur, organised by the Taranpanthi Jain community into which he was born, and participated there from 1951 to 1968. He resisted his parents' pressure to marry. Rajneesh later said that he became spiritually enlightened on 21 March 1953, when he was 21 years old, in a mystical experience while sitting under a tree in the Bhanvartal garden in Jabalpur.
Having completed his BA in philosophy at D. N. Jain College in 1955, he joined the University of Sagar, where in 1957, he earned his MA in philosophy (with distinction). He immediately secured a teaching position at Raipur Sanskrit College, but the vice-chancellor soon asked him to seek a transfer as he considered him a danger to his students' morality, character, and religion. From 1958, he taught philosophy as a lecturer at Jabalpur University, being promoted to professor in 1960. A popular lecturer, he was acknowledged by his peers as an exceptionally intelligent man who had been able to overcome the deficiencies of his early small-town education.
In parallel to his university job, he travelled throughout India under the name Acharya Rajneesh (Acharya means teacher or professor; Rajneesh was a nickname he had acquired in childhood), giving lectures critical of socialism, Gandhi, and institutional religions. He travelled so much that he would find it difficult to sleep on a normal bed, because he had grown used to sleeping amid the rocking of railway coach berths.
According to a speech given by Rajneesh in 1969, socialism is the ultimate result of capitalism, and capitalism itself, of revolution that brings about socialism. Rajneesh stated that he believed that in India, socialism was inevitable, but fifty, sixty or seventy years hence, India should apply its efforts to first creating wealth. He said that socialism would socialise only poverty, and he described Gandhi as a masochist reactionary who worshipped poverty. What India needed to escape its backwardness was capitalism, science, modern technology, and birth control. He did not regard capitalism and socialism as opposite systems, but considered it disastrous for any country to talk about socialism without first building a capitalist economy. He criticised orthodox Indian religions as dead, filled with empty rituals, oppressing their followers with fears of damnation and promises of blessings. Such statements made him controversial, but also gained him a loyal following that included a number of wealthy merchants and businessmen. These people sought individual consultations from him about their spiritual development and transforming their daily lives, in return for donations and his practice snowballed. From 1962, he began to lead 3- to 10-day meditation camps, and the first meditation centres (Jivan Jagruti Kendra) started to emerge around his teaching, then known as the Life Awakening Movement (Jivan Jagruti Andolan). After a controversial speaking tour in 1966, he resigned from his teaching post at the request of the university.