Osho, read in his own talks.

He was born Chandra Mohan Jain in 1931 in Kuchwada, a village in Madhya Pradesh. He studied philosophy and taught it, at Jabalpur University from 1958, then left the post in 1966 to lecture across India as Acharya Rajneesh, acharya meaning teacher. From 1971 he was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He dropped “Bhagwan” at the end of 1988 and was known as Osho in the last year of his life.

In 1974 he settled in Pune, where thousands of followers from the West, called sannyasins, came to his talks, meditations and therapy groups. In 1981 he moved to the United States, and his followers built a city, Rajneeshpuram, on a ranch in the high desert of central Oregon.

The commune ended in crimes. In 1984 commune members led by Ma Anand Sheela deliberately contaminated restaurant salad bars in The Dalles, Oregon, and 751 people fell ill. Sheela and others later pleaded guilty. Osho was never charged over the poisoning. He blamed Sheela publicly in 1985, and whether he knew of the plot has never been settled. That November he pleaded guilty, under a plea agreement, to two immigration charges, paid $400,000 in fines and costs, and left the country.

He returned to Pune in 1987 and died there on 19 January 1990, aged 58. Nearly all of his books, hundreds of them, are transcripts of his talks.

Watching

The practice he came back to most was witnessing: watching thoughts and feelings pass the way we watch trees or people outside. He called it the one discipline he gave.

“Witnessing is the key of my sannyas, the master key. I don't give you any other discipline, because giving you any discipline will not help.”

The Wild Geese and the Water, talk 6, 16 February 1981, Pune

Awareness, wider than concentration

Concentration narrows attention to one thing and shuts the rest out. He described meditation as the opposite movement.

“Meditation is not concentration. Meditation is simple awareness -- widening of the mind, widening of consciousness -- expansion, not narrowing.”

Come Follow To You, Vol. 3, talk 6, 16 December 1975, Pune

Zorba the Buddha

He wanted the earthly and the spiritual in one person: Zorba, the life-loving hero of Kazantzakis’s novel, and the Buddha.

“I am trying to create a great synthesis: the synthesis between Zorba the Greek and Gautam the Buddha, the synthesis between materialism and spiritualism. I am trying to create a spiritual materialism.”

The Secret of Secrets, Vol. 1, talk 10, 20 August 1978, Pune

Laughter belongs

He held that a sense of humor belongs inside a religious life, and he joked often in his talks.

“Dancing, singing, laughing -- of these three, laughter is the most simple, the most natural and the most spontaneous phenomenon. You don't want to learn, you don't need to learn - it is a natural gift.”

Come, Come, Yet Again Come, talk 10, 5 November 1980, Pune

Belief is borrowed

Belief, in his account, is handed to us by parents, priests and the culture around us. What counts is what we find out for ourselves.

“People will inquire, and when they find, they will trust. Belief is borrowed; trust is one's own experience.”

The Secret of Secrets, Vol. 1, talk 7, 17 August 1978, Pune

Love is freedom

A follower told him they were forcing themselves to give their partner freedom, because he had said to. He said they had heard him wrong.

“I have not said that if you love, then you have to give freedom. No, I have said that love is freedom. It is not a question of giving.”

Beyond Psychology, talk 25, 24 April 1986, during his world tour

Psychology studies something close to his witnessing under the name decentering: seeing a thought as an event passing through the mind. It is one of the skills that mindfulness-based therapies teach. That research doesn’t test his methods, and his talks aren’t where it came from.

His best-known method, Dynamic Meditation, introduced in 1970, is an hour in five stages: fast, chaotic breathing, letting emotion out, a mantra, “Hoo”, stillness, and dance. The research on it is thin. Two small trials found some benefit over three weeks, one of them with no comparison group, and a 2022 review rated the studies moderate to poor and said the findings need caution.

At the Pune ashram, therapists from the Western human potential movement ran encounter and other groups from the mid-1970s. Sociologists who studied them found the groups worked to forge new identities by breaking taboos, and to bind members to the community.

Psychologists from the University of Oregon studied Rajneeshpuram’s residents while the commune was running. Members scored high on self-esteem and low on social anxiety, and after the collapse most former residents showed few signs of distress on standard scales. Those are self-reports from people who chose to be there, and they say nothing about the crimes.

In the Psychology Library: Rumination · Expressive suppression · Self-concept clarity

Lines shared under his name, checked against the talks and books.

1. “If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love.”

   No source found

   Where it’s from

   Not in any of the 276 books of his talks we searched.

   What the source says

   Something close is in The Dhammapada, Vol. 3, talk 3, 14 August 1979: In fact, if you have really been impressed by the flower, you cannot pluck it.

   What changed

   The idea is near his. The popular version, which ends on love as appreciation, isn’t in any talk we could find.

2. “Be, don’t try to become.”

   Reworked

   Where it’s from

   The Book of Wisdom, talk 10, 20 February 1979.

   What the source says

   All the buddhas of all the ages have been telling you a very simple fact: Be -- don't try to become.

   What changed

   Cut from the middle of his sentence. He gives it as what every buddha has said, and doesn’t claim it as his own.

3. “Experience life in all possible ways.”

   His, as said

   Where it’s from

   The Book of Wisdom, talk 14, 24 February 1979.

   What the source says

   And experience life in all possible ways -- good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light, summer-winter.

   What changed

   His words. Shared versions drop the opposites he lists after them.

4. “Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.”

   Reworked

   Where it’s from

   The Goose is Out, talk 9, 9 March 1981.

   What the source says

   In the past it was inevitable that the artist had to live in rebellion, because creativity is the greatest rebellion in existence.

   What changed

   The second half of his sentence, made to stand alone. The first half ties it to artists.

5. “Courage is a love affair with the unknown.”

   No source found

   Where it’s from

   The title of a talk in From Misery to Enlightenment (1985), but not a sentence in the talk’s text.

   What the source says

   We found it only as a heading.

   What changed

   It may well be his. Nobody sharing it has shown where he said it.

“The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.”

The Messiah, Vol. 1, talk 9, 12 January 1987, Pune

He said it in a talk on Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. Unlike some of the lines above, this one is his, word for word.

His own website, osho.com, publishes the talks, but it wouldn’t open for our checks. We read the talks in the text of the Osho e-book library, an archive copy of 276 of his books, and matched every line on this page to it, with the series, talk number and date. Wording on osho.com can differ by a word or two. Where we find a difference, we’ll follow osho.com and change this page.

The history comes from the investigators’ report on the poisoning in JAMA, news reports from 1985 and 1990, and Hugh Urban’s history of the movement, Zorba the Buddha (2015). Anyone with a source we missed can send it to us.