Osho

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain in 1931 in Kuchwada, Madhya Pradesh, and known for much of his public life as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, built one of the most internationally visible and, ultimately, most controversial spiritual movements of the twentieth century — a trajectory that ran from provocative university philosophy lectures through a thriving meditation ashram in Pune to a sprawling Oregon commune that collapsed amid criminal convictions for bioterrorism, attempted murder and immigration fraud, before Rajneesh returned to India, adopted the name Osho, and died in 1990.

A provocative philosophy professor

Rajneesh claimed to have attained enlightenment at age twenty-one, and went on to teach philosophy at Jabalpur University through the 1960s, developing a public reputation as a sharp, deliberately provocative critic of organized religion, socialism, and even revered national figures such as Mahatma Gandhi. Beginning in 1970, while based in Mumbai, he began formally initiating followers as "neo-sannyasins," building a distinctive spiritual identity around individualism, rejection of conventional social and religious dogma, and — most distinctively among Indian teachers of his era — an explicit embrace of sexual freedom as compatible with, rather than opposed to, spiritual life.

The Pune ashram: meditation, therapy and controversy

In 1974, Rajneesh relocated his growing movement to Pune, establishing an ashram that combined intensive meditation techniques — most notably his own Dynamic Meditation, designed to release suppressed emotion through structured physical catharsis before settling into stillness — with encounter-style therapy groups drawing on the Western Human Potential Movement. The ashram drew thousands of largely Western, often highly educated seekers dressed in orange, and became known simultaneously as a genuine center of alternative spiritual and therapeutic practice and as a site of serious excess: reported mental breakdowns, physical injuries and instances of sexual assault occurred within some of the more confrontational therapy sessions, and mounting friction with Indian tax authorities and local communities eventually made the ashram's continued operation there untenable.

Rajneeshpuram and escalating crimes

In 1981, the movement relocated to a 64,000-acre ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, establishing the incorporated city of Rajneeshpuram, led operationally by Rajneesh's personal secretary Ma Anand Sheela while Rajneesh himself remained largely silent during this period. What began as an ambitious attempt to build a self-sufficient spiritual community rapidly deteriorated into escalating conflict with local Oregon residents and authorities, culminating in a series of serious crimes carried out by senior members of the commune: a 1984 bioterror attack in which local restaurant salad bars were deliberately contaminated with salmonella bacteria in an attempt to influence a county election by incapacitating voters, and a subsequently uncovered plot to assassinate United States Attorney Charles Turner.

Deportation and the return to India

A federal investigation implicated Sheela and several of her closest associates as the masterminds behind these crimes; both were convicted and served prison sentences. Rajneesh, attempting to flee the United States as the scandal unfolded, was apprehended in North Carolina and charged with immigration fraud connected to sham marriages arranged to secure residency for foreign followers. Facing this evidence, he accepted deportation through an Alford plea in 1985. More than twenty countries subsequently denied him entry as he attempted to find a new base, and he eventually returned to the revived ashram in Pune, where he took a more direct, hands-on role in guiding meditation practice and formally adopted the name Osho, dropping the "Bhagwan" title, before his death from congestive heart failure in 1990.

A legacy that remains genuinely contested

Osho's teachings — an eclectic synthesis drawing on Zen, Tantra, Sufism, existentialist philosophy and his own idiosyncratic commentary on virtually every major world religious tradition — continue to be studied and practiced today through the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune and through publications and recordings that remain in wide circulation. At the same time, subsequent investigative accounts, memoirs from former commune residents, and documentary treatments including the widely watched "Wild Wild Country" have kept the Rajneeshpuram period's serious criminal history, including documented instances of child neglect and abuse within the commune, squarely part of the public record, and any complete account of Osho's legacy has to hold both the movement's genuine meditative innovations and this substantial history of documented harm together rather than treating either in isolation.