Osho

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain on 11 December 1931 and dying on 19 January 1990, was an Indian spiritual figure who founded the Rajneesh movement. He went by several names, including Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Acharya Rajneesh, and simply Rajneesh.

He did not believe in organized religion, arguing that spiritual experience could never fit into a fixed system of dogma. As a teacher, he promoted meditation and developed a distinctive practice he called dynamic meditation. He also told his followers to reject traditional asceticism and instead live fully, without becoming attached to worldly things.

University years and public speaker: 1951–1970

Osho claimed that in 1953, when he was 21, he underwent a spiritual awakening. After spending some years in academia, he left his job as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Jabalpur in 1966. He then traveled across India, becoming known for attacking mainstream religions, political ideologies, and Mahatma Gandhi. In 1970, he stayed in Mumbai, where he began initiating followers he called neo-sannyasins.

Pune ashram: 1974–1981

During this time, he broadened his teachings, giving long discourses on writings from various religious traditions, mystics, bhakti poets, and philosophers around the world. In 1974, he moved to Pune and set up an ashram that offered therapies based on methods from the Human Potential Movement, attracting a growing number of Western followers. By the late 1970s, tensions with the ruling Janata Party government under Morarji Desai led to restrictions on the ashram’s growth and a back tax claim of about $5 million.

United States and the Oregon commune: 1981–1985

In 1981, the movement shifted to the United States, where Osho established a commune called Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon. The commune soon clashed with local residents and the state government, and a series of legal disputes over construction and development slowed its progress. In 1985, Osho asked authorities to investigate his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, and her close supporters for several crimes. These included a mass food-poisoning attack in 1984 meant to influence a county election, a planned assassination of U.S. attorney Charles H. Turner, an attempt to murder Osho’s personal doctor, and the bugging of his own living quarters.

Several members of the ashram, including Sheela, were later convicted. That same year, Osho was deported from the United States on immigration charges after entering an Alford plea. Following his deportation, 21 countries refused him entry.

Osho returned to Mumbai in 1986, gave public discourses for a time, and then moved back to Pune in January 1987 to revive his ashram. He died there in 1990. Today, his ashram is known as the Osho International Meditation Resort, and all related intellectual property is managed by the Osho International Foundation, formerly the Rajneesh International Foundation. Osho’s teachings have influenced Western New Age thought, and their popularity grew after his death.

Childhood and adolescence: 1931–1950

Osho was born Chandra Mohan Jain into a Jain family, the eldest of eleven children of a cloth merchant named Babulal and his wife Saraswati. From childhood, he was called Rajneesh, a nickname from Sanskrit meaning “lord of the night.” He was born at his maternal grandparents’ home in Kuchwada, a small village in the Raisen District of Madhya Pradesh. His parents, followers of the Digambar Jain monk Taran Svami, arranged for him to live with his grandparents until he was eight. Osho later said this gave him great freedom, as his grandmother imposed no restrictions or formal education.

When he was seven, his grandfather died, and he moved to Gadarwara to live with his parents. The death of his grandfather, and later the death of his childhood girlfriend Shashi from typhoid when he was 15, deeply affected him and led to a lasting preoccupation with death. In school, he was gifted and rebellious, known as a strong debater. He grew critical of traditional religion and explored methods to expand consciousness, such as breath control, yoga, meditation, fasting, the occult, and hypnosis.

According to Vasant Joshi, he read widely from an early age, and though he played sports, reading was his main interest. After showing interest in Marx and Engels, he was labeled a communist and threatened with expulsion. With friends, he built a small library of communist literature. His uncle Amritlal said he also formed a group of young people who regularly discussed communist ideology and opposed religion.

Osho later said he had been interested in communism since childhood and owned every book on the subject before 1950. He signed and dated each one. He first entered the intellectual world through communism, but finding it a “corpse,” he turned to anarchism, particularly the works of Russian anarchists Prince Kropotkin, Bakunin, and Leo Tolstoy, who advocated for no state or government. He briefly joined the socialist movement and two Indian nationalist groups, the Indian National Army and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, but could not submit to any external discipline, ideology, or system, so his membership was short-lived.

In 1951, at age 19, Rajneesh began his university years.