Swami Anand Arun

Swami Anand Arun, born Arun Kumar Singh in Janakpur, Nepal, has spent more than five decades as one of the most prominent disciples of Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), building the Osho Tapoban International Commune into a major forest retreat center and, in the process, becoming the figure most responsible for establishing Osho's meditation movement in Nepal.

An engineering student's first glimpse of Osho

Arun's path to spiritual teaching began not in a monastery but in an engineering classroom: on March 29, 1969, while still a university student, he encountered Osho for the first time and, by his own account, immediately recognized that his long search for a teacher had come to an end. That October, he attended his first meditation camp under Osho's guidance, and in 1974, at Osho's ashram in Pune, he received formal initiation into neo-sannyas, at which point Arun Kumar Singh became Swami Anand Arun. Within months, Osho gave him a specific charge: return to Nepal and establish the movement there.

Founding the first Osho center in Nepal

Following his guru's instruction, Arun returned home and, on December 21, 1974, opened the Asheesh Rajneesh Meditation Center in Tahachal, Kathmandu — the first Osho meditation center in Nepal and the founding institution of what would become a decades-long project of building Osho-inspired communities throughout the country. Osho Tapoban, situated beside the Nagarjun forest near Kathmandu, grew out of this early effort and, following Osho's own visit to Nepal in 1986, developed into a full international commune and forest retreat center offering courses in yoga, meditation, psychotherapy and alternative healing modalities developed within the Osho tradition.

Building a global network of over 100 centers

Over the following decades, Arun expanded his work well beyond Nepal's borders, and is today credited as the founder or key organizer behind more than one hundred Osho ashrams and meditation centers around the world. This scale of institutional building — carried out from a base in Nepal rather than from Osho's original Pune commune — reflects the broader, decentralized way Osho's movement spread globally after his death in 1990, with senior disciples such as Arun independently establishing and sustaining regional centers according to their own understanding of the teaching.

Preserving Osho's legacy through Tapoban

In a notable and, by his own account, deeply meaningful act, Arun brought a portion of Osho's ashes to Nepal at the time of Osho's death in 1990, and these remains are now housed in two Samadhis at Osho Tapoban — an arrangement whose authenticity has been disputed by the management of the original Pune ashram, but which Arun and his community treat as central to Tapoban's identity as a living site of continued connection to Osho's presence.

An author and continuing teacher into advanced age

Now in his eighties, Swami Anand Arun continues to travel internationally, teaching meditation and Osho's vision, and has authored several books, including "Mystics & Miracles," a collection recounting his experiences with various spiritual figures over the course of his long life. He has described his own motivation simply: having received what he calls his master's love and compassion, sharing that same gift with the world remains, in his words, his greatest joy — a sentiment that has sustained an unbroken half-century of teaching activity centered on a single formative encounter with Osho in 1969.