Part[2]
Reception
Rajneesh is widely regarded as one of the most controversial spiritual leaders to emerge from India in the twentieth century. His advocacy for sexual, emotional, spiritual, and institutional liberation, coupled with his penchant for offending, surrounded his life with controversy. Rajneesh was infamously dubbed the “sex guru” in India and the “Rolls-Royce guru” in the United States. He openly criticized traditional nationalism, expressed disdain for politicians, and mocked leading figures of various religions, who found his arrogance insufferable.
His teachings on sex, marriage, family, and relationships contradicted traditional values, inciting anger and opposition globally. His movement was widely perceived as a cult, and Rajneesh was often seen as living in “ostentation and offensive opulence.” Meanwhile, many of his followers, having severed ties with friends and family and donating most or all of their money and possessions to the commune, often lived at a mere “subsistence level.”
Appraisal by Scholars of Religion
Academic assessments of Rajneesh’s work have been mixed and often directly contradictory. Uday Mehta criticized Rajneesh for errors in his interpretation of Zen and Mahayana Buddhism, pointing out “gross contradictions and inconsistencies in his teachings” that he believed “exploit” the “ignorance and gullibility” of his listeners. Sociologist Bob Mullan, in 1983, described Rajneesh’s teachings as a “borrowing of truths, half-truths and occasional misrepresentations from the great traditions,” labeling them as “often bland, inaccurate, spurious and extremely contradictory.” American religious studies professor Hugh B. Urban echoed these sentiments, stating that Rajneesh’s teachings were neither original nor particularly profound, concluding that much of their content was borrowed from various Eastern and Western philosophies.
On the other hand, George Chryssides found descriptions of Rajneesh’s teachings as a “potpourri” of various religious traditions unfortunate, asserting that Rajneesh was “no amateur philosopher.” Highlighting Rajneesh’s academic background, Chryssides stated, “Whether or not one accepts his teachings, he was no charlatan when it came to expounding the ideas of others.” He described Rajneesh as primarily a Buddhist teacher, promoting an independent form of “Beat Zen.” Chryssides viewed the unsystematic, contradictory, and outrageous aspects of Rajneesh’s teachings as tools to induce change in people rather than philosophical lectures aimed at intellectual understanding.
Regarding Rajneesh’s embrace of Western counter-culture and the human potential movement, Mullan acknowledged Rajneesh’s unparalleled range and imagination. He noted that many of Rajneesh’s statements were insightful and moving, sometimes even profound. Mullan perceived a “potpourri of counter-culturalist and post-counter-culturalist ideas” focusing on love and freedom, living in the moment, the importance of self, the feeling of “being okay,” the mysteriousness of life, the fun ethic, individual responsibility for one’s destiny, and the need to drop the ego, along with fear and guilt. Mehta noted that Rajneesh’s appeal to his Western disciples was based on his social experiments, which established a philosophical connection between the Eastern guru tradition and the Western growth movement. He saw this as a marketing strategy to meet the desires of his audience. Urban also viewed Rajneesh as negating a dichotomy between spiritual and material desires, reflecting the preoccupation with the body and sexuality characteristic of late capitalist consumer culture and in tune with the socio-economic conditions of his time.
British professor of religious studies Peter B. Clarke noted that most participants felt they had made progress in self-actualization as defined by American psychologist Abraham Maslow and the human potential movement. He stated that the style of therapy Rajneesh devised, with its liberal attitude towards sexuality as a sacred part of life, had proved influential among other therapy practitioners and New Age groups. Yet Clarke believed that the main motivation of seekers joining the movement was “neither therapy nor sex, but the prospect of becoming enlightened, in the classical Buddhist sense.”
In 2005, Urban observed that Rajneesh had undergone a “remarkable apotheosis” after his return to India, especially in the years since his death. Urban described Rajneesh as a powerful illustration of what F. Max Müller, over a century ago, called “that worldwide circle through which, like an electric current, Oriental thought could run to the West and Western thought to return to the East.” Clarke also stated that Rajneesh has come to be “seen as an important teacher within India itself” who is “increasingly recognized as a major spiritual teacher of the twentieth century, at the forefront of the current ‘world-accepting’ trend of spirituality based on self-development.”
Appraisal as a Charismatic Leader
Several commentators have remarked upon Rajneesh’s charisma. Comparing Rajneesh with Gurdjieff, Anthony Storr wrote that Rajneesh was “personally extremely impressive,” noting that “many of those who visited him for the first time felt that their most intimate feelings were instantly understood, that they were accepted and unequivocally welcomed rather than judged. [Rajneesh] seemed to radiate energy and to awaken hidden possibilities in those who came into contact with him.” Many sannyasins have stated that hearing Rajneesh speak, they “fell in love with him.” Susan J. Palmer noted that even critics attested to the power of his presence. James S. Gordon, a psychiatrist and researcher, recalls inexplicably finding himself laughing like a child, hugging strangers, and having tears of gratitude in his eyes after a glance by Rajneesh from within his passing Rolls-Royce. Frances FitzGerald concluded upon listening to Rajneesh in person that he was a brilliant lecturer and expressed surprise at his talent as a comedian, which had not been apparent from reading his books, as well as the hypnotic quality of his talks, which had a profound effect on his audience. Hugh Milne (Swami Shivamurti), an ex-devotee who between 1973 and 1982 worked closely with Rajneesh as leader of the Poona Ashram Guard and as his bodyguard, noted that their first meeting left him with a sense that far more than words had passed between them: “There is no invasion of privacy, no alarm, but it is as if his soul is slowly slipping inside mine, and in a split second transferring vital information.” Milne also observed another facet of Rajneesh’s charismatic ability in stating that he was “a brilliant manipulator of the unquestioning disciple.”
Hugh B. Urban said that Rajneesh appeared to fit with Max Weber’s classical image of the charismatic figure, being held to possess “an extraordinary supernatural power or ‘grace’, which was essentially irrational and affective.” Rajneesh corresponded to Weber’s pure charismatic type in rejecting all rational laws and institutions and claiming to subvert all hierarchical authority, though Urban said that the promise of absolute freedom inherent in this resulted in bureaucratic organization and institutional control within larger communes.
Some scholars have suggested that Rajneesh may have had a narcissistic personality. In his paper “The Narcissistic Guru: A Profile of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh,” Ronald O. Clarke, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Oregon State University, argued that Rajneesh exhibited all the typical features of narcissistic personality disorder, such as a grandiose sense of self-importance and uniqueness; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success; a need for constant attention and admiration; a set of characteristic responses to threats to self-esteem; disturbances in interpersonal relationships; a preoccupation with personal grooming combined with frequent resorting to prevarication or outright lying; and a lack of empathy. Drawing on Rajneesh’s reminiscences of his childhood in his book Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, he suggested that Rajneesh suffered from a fundamental lack of parental discipline due to his growing up in the care of overindulgent grandparents. Rajneesh’s self-avowed Buddha status, he concluded, was part of a delusional system associated with his narcissistic personality disorder; a condition of ego inflation rather than egolessness.
Wider Appraisal as a Thinker and Speaker
There are widely divergent assessments of Rajneesh’s qualities as a thinker and speaker. Khushwant Singh, an eminent author, historian, and former editor of the Hindustan Times, described Rajneesh as “the most original thinker that India has produced: the most erudite, the most clear-headed, and the most innovative.” Singh believed that Rajneesh was a “free-thinking agnostic” who could explain the most abstract concepts in simple language, illustrated with witty anecdotes, who mocked gods, prophets, scriptures, and religious practices, and gave a new dimension to religion. The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, a one-time devotee of Rajneesh (living at the Pune ashram from 1978 to 1980), described him as a “Wittgenstein of religions,” ranking him as one of the greatest figures of the 20th century; in his view, Rajneesh had performed a radical deconstruction of the word games played by the world’s religions.
During the early 1980s, several commentators in the popular press were dismissive of Rajneesh. The Australian critic Clive James scornfully referred to him as “Bagwash,” likening the experience of listening to one of his discourses to sitting in a laundrette and watching “your tattered underwear revolve soggily for hours while exuding grey suds. The Bagwash talks the way that he looks.” James finished by saying that Rajneesh, though a “fairly benign example of his type,” was a “rebarbative dingbat who manipulates the manipulable into manipulating one another.” Responding to an enthusiastic review of Rajneesh’s talks by Bernard Levin in The Times, Dominik Wujastyk, also writing in The Times, similarly expressed his opinion that the talk he heard while visiting the Pune ashram was of a very low standard, wearyingly repetitive, and often factually wrong, and stated that he felt disturbed by the personality cult surrounding Rajneesh.
Writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in January 1990, American author Tom Robbins stated that based on his readings of Rajneesh’s books, he was convinced Rajneesh was the 20th century’s “greatest spiritual teacher.” Robbins, while stressing that he was not a disciple, further stated that he had “read enough vicious propaganda and slanted reports to suspect that he was one of the most maligned figures in history.” Rajneesh’s commentary on the Sikh scripture known as Japuji was hailed as the best available by Giani Zail Singh, the former President of India. In 2011, author Farrukh Dhondy reported that film star Kabir Bedi was a fan of Rajneesh and viewed Rajneesh’s works as “the most sublime interpretations of Indian philosophy that he had come across.” Dhondy himself said Rajneesh was “the cleverest intellectual confidence trickster that India has produced. His output of the ‘interpretation’ of Indian texts is specifically slanted towards a generation of disillusioned Westerners who wanted (and perhaps still want) to ‘have their cake, eat it’ [and] claim at the same time that cake-eating is the highest virtue according to ancient-fused-with-scientific wisdom.”
Films about Rajneesh
1974: The first documentary film about Rajneesh was made by David M. Knipe. Program 13 of Exploring the Religions of South Asia, titled A Contemporary Guru: Rajneesh (Madison: WHA-TV, 1974).
1978: The second documentary on Rajneesh, called Bhagwan, The Movie, was made in 1978 by American filmmaker Robert Hillmann.
1979: In 1978, German filmmaker Wolfgang Dobrowolny (Sw Veet Artho) visited the Ashram in Poona and created a unique documentary about Rajneesh, his Sannyasins, and the ashram, titled Ashram in Poona: Bhagwan’s Experiment.
1981: In 1981, the BBC broadcast an episode in the documentary series The World About Us titled The God that Fled, made by British American journalist Christopher Hitchens.
1985: On November 3, 1985, CBS News’ 60 Minutes aired a segment about the Bhagwan in Oregon.
1987: In the mid-eighties, Jeremiah Films produced a film titled Fear is the Master.
1989: Another documentary, named Rajneesh: Spiritual Terrorist, was made by Australian filmmaker Cynthia Connop in the late 1980s for ABC TV/Learning Channel.
1989: A UK documentary series called Scandal produced an episode entitled, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh: The Man Who Was God.
2002: Forensic Files Season 7, Episode 8 takes a look into how forensics was used to determine the cause of the bio-attack in 1984.
2010: A Swiss documentary, titled Guru – Bhagwan, His Secretary & His Bodyguard, was released in 2010.
2012: Oregon Public Broadcasting produced the documentary titled Rajneeshpuram, which aired on November 19, 2012.
2016: Rebellious Flower, an Indian-made biographical movie of Rajneesh’s early life, based upon his recollections and those of those who knew him, was released. It was written and produced by Jagdish Bharti and directed by Krishan Hooda, with Prince Shah and Shashank Singh playing the title role.
2018: Wild Wild Country, a Netflix documentary series on Rajneesh, focuses on Rajneeshpuram and the controversies surrounding it.
