by Tim Guest
For most of my sannyasin life I saw Bhagwan only through his photos, which sannyasis put up everywhere they took residence. His face is still there, too: in our libraries, on the Internet, in the memory of the world. In his books and the books about him, there he is, staring back from every other page: implacable, amused, white-bearded; one eyebrow always slightly raised, ready to throw you back onto your question. I have discovered that if you cover up one eye, in any of his photos, he looks taut, stern, cruelly alert. If you cover up the other eye, he looks compassionate but weary; tired, like he’s been crying.
Bhagwan claimed responsibility for all risks taken by any sannyasin. ‘I take responsibility for it all,’ he said, on many occasions. My mother saw this as a necessary step for the culture; otherwise no one would have dared to do what needed to be done. Now, however, he’s not around to bear any of the consequences.
We all want a way out of pain and the fear of death. The way out Bhagwan offered was Enlightenment, but even Bhagwan died. Sannyasins believe he ‘left his body’. But those are just words. Bhagwan snuffed it. He kicked the bucket, jumped the perch, shuffled off this mortal coil. He is an ex-guru. He pulled a stiff one, popped his clogs, booked a One-Way Sleeper-Ticket on the Night Train to the Big Adios. As the French say: ‘He will have toothache no more.’
Bhagwan once said, ‘I have never had any friends’; but he also claimed death was his friend. In 1938, when Bhagwan was seven years old, his grandfather died, on a thirty-six-mile journey by bullock cart to the nearest hospital. Bhagwan watched it happen. In Glimpses of a Golden Childhood, Bhagwan relates the death of the man he loved most in the world. ‘Slowly,’ he remembers, ‘one after the other, his senses were going away.’ Out of respect for his grandmother, who was also in the cart, Bhagwan refused to cry.
‘His death freed me forever from all relationships,’ Bhagwan said. ‘His death became for me the death of all attachments. Thereafter I could not establish a bond of relationship with anyone. Whenever my relationship with anyone became intimate, that death stared at me.
‘Thereafter, with whomsoever I experienced some attachment, I felt that if not today, tomorrow that person would also die.
‘Therefore,’ he went on, ‘the other could not become important for me in the sense that it could not save me from my own self. So I had to live with my self only. If I had been interested in the other, I would have lost the opportunity to journey in toward the self.’ Bhagwan boasted of himself: ‘I am an island.’
Bhagwan denied his need for others; his claim was that this denial freed him from his lineage and from history, allowing him to attain great spiritual height. He felt his separation to be the source of his connection with the absolute. His wound was also inflicted on us. By following him, the sannyasins were brought to the heights of spirituality; but when the whole dizzy tower collapsed we were also cut off from the family and friends we needed.
Bhagwan refused to suffer. I refused to suffer. My father refused to suffer. We all refuse to suffer. Until we choose to suffer.
After watching his grandfather die in the bullock cart, Bhagwan became fascinated by death. He followed funeral processions on their way to the cremation grounds. He slept at night among the burning ghats. Whenever he heard someone was dying, he would go to watch. ‘That has been one of my hobbies from childhood,’ he said. ‘In my town I never allowed anybody to die without my being there. The moment I would hear someone was on his deathbed, I would be there. I would follow to the last pilgrimage, and I would go with every dying person, rich, poor, beggar—even a dying dog or cat—and I would sit and watch.’
Bhagwan’s childhood sweetheart was called Shashi. She followed him everywhere, and chided him for his spirituality; he had to post guards outside the temple to stop her interrupting his meditation. In 1947, nine years after the death of his grandfather, Shashi died of typhoid fever. Bhagwan later told how she had sworn to come back to Raja—Bhagwan—in her next life, and that he was to wait for her. In 1971, while he was touring the country, confronting religious leaders and running discourses and meditation camps in Hindi and in English, Bhagwan met a young English girl from Morden, in Surrey, called Christine Woolf. Bhagwan renamed her Vivek, and announced she was the reincarnation of Shashi. Vivek became his girlfriend, and stuck by his side for the decades that followed. In the Ashram Vivek was the only sannyasin who received two Darshans a day. At Rajneeshpuram, when Bhagwan didn’t feel like driving or when Sheela had banned him after his latest accident, Vivek drove his Rolls-Royces. In Bhagwan’s private apartment, Vivek threw shoes at him while he watched Indian videos. Back at the Ashram, six months before Bhagwan died, Vivek committed suicide alone in a Pune hotel room.
Bhagwan was fond of relating a story about his last incarnation. When he settled in Bombay, and first revealed details of his enlightenment twenty years before, a disciple asked him why he had not proclaimed his enlightenment when it happened. The reason, he said, was that in all his years of travelling he could very easily have been killed by the ‘stupid mob’. At the same time, he also revealed details of his last incarnation seven hundred years ago, as a great sage. He had foreseen, then, he said, the trouble mankind would face in the twentieth century. The reason he had not escaped the great chain of being and exited into Buddhahood, he said, was that he had ordered a disciple to kill him just three days before his appointed death.
Some have suggested that in 1990 he did the same again.
Depending on whom you believe, he died by slow poisoning at the hands of the American government, or his doctor, or himself. Or maybe he just died. He had been wasting away for years. In his final years, his discourses became more extreme. He claimed genetic engineering was the only solution to parenting. One afternoon in Buddha Hall he announced that Gautama, the first Buddha, had moved into his cranium and begun to speak through him. Then four days later he announced that Gautama Buddha had been too demanding. He ate only from a rice bowl; he slept only on his left side. Bhagwan had him evicted.
Bhagwan always said: ‘We have nothing to lose, and we have lost it anyway. Life is such a little thing anyway, so short. Win or lose, you lose.’
The last person to see Bhagwan alive was a wealthy disciple who had come to pay his last respects. Bhagwan beckoned him close and whispered his final words: ‘I give you my dream.’
But dreams are something you wake up from.
Postscript
In November 1985, four months after I left Medina for good to live with my father in California, Medina Rajneesh was sold. The house and the grounds were bought by the International Buddhist High School of Osaka; they in turn converted it into the ‘Shi Tennoji’ boarding school for Japanese students, which opened in early 1986. In 2001 the school was sold. At the time of this writing, the property is still empty. I went back there recently, with my girlfriend for company. I called up the number on the security company sign on the gate; the single guard strolled down the front drive and took me in. He was a local. I told him I had lived there fifteen years ago. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Were you with the Maharishi?’ He flicked through his key ring and showed us inside the buildings. The rainbow stickers were still on the windows in the Kids’ Hut. I tried to peel one off, but I still couldn’t get my thumbnail underneath. Down by the old crumbling wall next to where the tennis courts had been, I pulled back the vines. There was the symbol that sannyasin craftsmen had marked on the wall back in my first summer at Medina, a mosaic of white and black pebbles glued into the brick: two birds—one black, one white—silhouetted against the low circle of a setting sun. We walked into the Main House office where my mother had first called me from Medina. The guard had set up a den there; he’d spent a whole year in this office, drinking tea and listening to the radio. I was looking forward to seeing the green glazed tiles, which I knew had been the perfect width for running Matchbox cars along. When we arrived in the corridors, I saw that the tiles had always been brown.
When Medina closed, some of the teachers and som
e kids moved to Ko Hsuan, the continuation of Rajneesh School in Devon—the place where the boy was found hanged, and where The Times made much of the mixed dormitories for adolescents. Ko Hsuan is still there. In the summer of 1996 the school briefly made the headlines again; it was criticized by AIDS charities for the HIV tests given to every pupil at the start of each term. The school also insisted that every visitor to their annual festival carry a valid AIDS test certificate. ‘It is our job to protect our children,’ Suvendra, the headmaster, explained to The Times. ‘People at the festival will share shower facilities, toilets and cutlery, which could spread the illness.’ On their website I recognized one or two of the current teachers. I noticed, too, that history had reappeared on the curriculum. As for the Ranch, Oregon State considered the property for use as a prison, but that came to nothing. It’s now a big, hydroponics-equipped ghost town.
In the years after Medina I met up once or twice with a few of the Medina kids. It seemed to be mainly the older kids—the ones who had been teenagers, or almost teenagers, who kept in touch. They turned out to be the ones with whom I always had the least in common. From what I hear, because they were older when Medina shut down they had more trouble than I did with the transition. Soon after leaving Medina some of the older kids, in their mid and late teens, stopped going to school. Some of them, I know, looked back on Medina very positively. A smaller coterie felt it was a terrible place to grow up. Some of us embraced the sun; some retreated into the shade.
Occasionally, though, I bumped into one of the other, younger, kids, the ones I was closer to back then. Our mothers’ paths crossed, numbers were exchanged; we got in touch. I met up recently at Majid’s house with Bindu, one of the boys with whom we used to jump out of the third-floor window of the guest house. Bindu is a software engineer now; he lives in Boulder, Colorado. Sitting on Majid’s sofa, Bindu told me he remembered me being picked on a great deal at Medina.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Why’s that?’
‘Because you were young, and scrawny, and detached,’ he said.
Sannyasins wanted us to let go. They kept telling us: Let go! It’s that simple! But we were fresh to the material world. All we had ever done was let go.
The Medina kids have their demons, as I do, too. Some have had breakdowns; some have worked as hostesses; some drink. There have been heroin addictions, and one or two have died. But I guess many of us came through OK. It is true that we were not protected enough from the merry-go-round of disciplehood and the agony of surrender. That was our parents’ game; it was too hard for children. But then, if life didn’t hurt us, we wouldn’t notice it pass by.
My mother told me not long ago that Bhagwan always maintained his adult sannyasins were beyond help. They were too far gone to understand what he was saying. It would be the kids, he said, who would really get it.
She laughed. ‘When you do get it,’ she said, ‘would you let me know?’
Recently I went through the indexes of The Times, the Independent, and the Guardian looking for mentions of Bhagwan. My finger traced down the years. Sandwiched between ‘Batman’ and ‘Bombings’, I found a few. For a time in the 1990s, the ‘Around the World’ column in the Independent picked up on the Ashram’s press releases. Dr Amrito, Bhagwan’s ex-physician, was quoted as saying: ‘The only way to avoid a 3rd world war is the World War Olympics.’ Swami Devageet, Bhagwan’s ex-dentist, publicly invited Margaret Thatcher ‘to exorcise her deep sense of inferiority with some primal screaming and meditation’. In early 1993 the siege at Waco sparked recollections of Rajneeshpuram, and, since September 2001, there has been another surge in mentions of Bhagwan. Until the anthrax attacks of that month, The Dalles salmonella plot was the only biological attack ever to have taken place on American soil. Bhagwan now has a place not only in From Here to Nirvana: The Yoga Journal Guide to Spiritual India, but also in the opening paragraph of Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.
In the early 1980s the German magazine Stern published a broadly unfavourable portrait of Bhagwan and the Ashram. (The article featured a picture of Bhagwan emerging from his Rolls-Royce with Vivek and Shivamurti, his long-haired bodyguard. To Bhagwan’s amusement the caption read: BHAGWAN AND HIS TWO WIVES.) Bhagwan was pleased with the bad publicity. ‘It does not matter whether I am famous or notorious,’ he said. ‘I do not care whether people see me as Buddha or Rasputin. One thing I am certainly interested in is that everybody think something about me.’ In Germany at least, he wasn’t far off the mark. In the spring of 2000 a Berlin ad agency designed a poster for the FDP political party, campaigning for changes in educational policy. ‘If we don’t provide more teachers quickly,’ the poster said, ‘our children will find teachers themselves.’ Above the slogan were pictures of Hitler, Freddie Krueger, and Bhagwan.
At the same time as Bhagwan’s arrest, Sheela, Puja, and Shanti Bhadra, three of the biggest of the Big Mammas, were arrested in a Black Forest hotel by West German police and extradited to the USA to face charges of attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and first-degree assault. Sheela, it transpired, had formed a hit squad to carry out attacks, including the murder of District Attorney Charles Turner, Laxmi, Vivek, and an Oregonian reporter. During their trial five rusty handguns were dredged up from the bottom of the Rajneeshpuram lake (the one Majid and I had slid over in inflatable milk-sacks we stole from the Magdalena food tents). The guns had been bought in Texas with fake IDs, then smuggled back to the Ranch on Greyhound buses. Sheela’s hit squad had staked out Charles Turner’s house in Portland; they planned to ambush him in an underground garage. Granted immunity from prosecution, some of Sheela’s ex-friends and members of the inner circle stood in the dock and testified against her. (Yogini, the woman who had stroked my mother’s hair and sung Sufi songs of surrender, turned state’s evidence in return for just a two-year sentence.) The court heard that Sheela had instigated The Dalles salmonella poisonings. A team of sannyasins had been sent out with orders to smear salmonella from rubber gloves onto the salad bars of eight different restaurants. The court heard how the poisonings and murder plots were looked on lightly by some of the conspirators; after all, death was just another part of the journey. As well as the poisonings and the Oregon bombings, Sheela and her associates were accused of drugging Australian shareholders in preparation for a corporate take-over. (In the witness stand Sheela admitted she had a ‘bad habit’ of poisoning people.)
Sheela pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiracy in immigration frauds, wiretapping, and ‘tampering with consumer products’ (The Dalles salmonella poisonings), attempted murder, first- and second-degree assaults on Wasco County commissioners, and arson at the Wasco County planning office. She received two twenty-year and ten-year sentences, to run concurrently. On Tuesday, 13 December 1988, after serving a total of just two and a half years, Sheela was released from the San Diego Metropolitan Correctional Facility. She was put on a plane to West Germany the same day. Investigating the $200,000 remaining from her fine, as well as the $69,000 still outstanding as restitution to Wasco County for the arson of their planning office, the Salem Attorney General, Dave Frohnmayer—to whom Sheela had famously flipped the bird—was disappointed she escaped the country. Just a week before her release Sheela had been given a lie detector test which indicated she was not telling the truth when she claimed she was broke. Dressed in men’s trousers, a borrowed shirt and socks, and prison-issue sandals, Sheela arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, the next day. Carrying only hand luggage, she told reporters waiting for her at the airport: ‘I have no money, but I am extremely wealthy in my soul.’
From Germany she moved on to Switzerland, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. There she remains, running an old people’s home near Basel.
The Ashram is now officially the Osho Meditation Resort, although Pune taxi drivers still know the place as the Ashram. In the years after Bhagwan returned to India, the Ashram reopened; it soon grew from the original six acres to encompa
ss forty acres of Koregaon Park. Visitors wore maroon during the day and white for the evening meditations. There were waterfalls, gardens, an Olympic-size swimming pool, and a cyber-café. Not long ago I looked through the Osho Resort website. Their ‘Fitness for the Witness’ programme, in the ‘Club Meditation’ complex, included the non-competitive ‘Zennis’. The website had a pop-up ad offering ‘The Wellness Weekend Getaway Special’—a three-day package including a free white and free red robe. (The site quoted the British Airways in-flight magazine: ‘It was the sheer beauty of the place that I first fell for. Meditation was in the very air.’) The Osho logo was shown as a registered trademark. At the time of this writing, every visitor must still undergo a patented fifteen-minute AIDS test.
The website does not use the name Bhagwan: the white-bearded man-with-the-plan is now known simply as ‘Osho’. According to his online CV (‘while a student, he was All India Debating Champion and the Gold Medal winner’) the name Osho is derived from William James’s word ‘Oceanic’, which means ‘dissolving into the ocean’. (It was apparently only after he had adopted ‘Osho’ as his name that Bhagwan—‘the Blessed One’—came to find out ‘Osho’ had also traditionally been used to mean ‘The blessed One, on Whom the Sky Showers Flowers’.) There are celebrity endorsements: Tom Robbins thinks Osho is ‘the greatest spiritual teacher of the twentieth century’; Shirley MacLaine has ‘read all his books’. Elsewhere we are told a little more about Osho. He is a ‘contemporary mystic’. Apparently, despite the fact that Osho ‘left his body’ on 19 January 1990, he remains the largest-selling author in India.
