Wikipedia Deep Dive

Rajneesh movement

16 min read

The Guru, the Rolls-Royces, and America's First Bioterror Attack

In 1984, a group of people wearing orange robes walked into restaurants in a small Oregon town and quietly poisoned the salad bars with Salmonella bacteria. Seven hundred and fifty-one people got sick. It remains the largest bioterrorist attack in American history.

The perpetrators weren't foreign terrorists or domestic extremists in any conventional sense. They were followers of an Indian spiritual teacher named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and their goal was almost absurdly mundane: they wanted to win a local county election.

This is the story of the Rajneesh movement—a new religious movement that began with meditation and free love, attracted thousands of Western seekers, built a utopian city in the Oregon desert, and collapsed in a spectacular spiral of wiretapping, assassination plots, and mass poisoning. It's also the story of what happened next, which is perhaps even stranger: the movement didn't die. Today, the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune, India, attracts some two hundred thousand visitors annually. The Dalai Lama has visited.

How did a movement go from bioterrorism to spiritual tourism in a single generation? The answer tells us something uncomfortable about charisma, about the human hunger for meaning, and about our collective capacity to forget.

The Professor Who Preached Free Love

Rajneesh started his public career in 1958 as a philosophy lecturer at the University of Jabalpur in central India. Even then, he was not a typical academic.

While his colleagues taught Aristotle and Kant, Rajneesh was lecturing throughout India on meditation and free love. He denounced marriage as "social bondage"—especially for women. He criticized Mahatma Gandhi, still a near-sacred figure in newly independent India. He attacked socialism while championing capitalism, science, technology, and birth control. In a country wrestling with overpopulation and traditional religious values, he warned that religious teachings promoting poverty and subjection were holding India back.

This was provocative stuff in the India of the 1960s. University officials forced him to resign in 1966.

Rajneesh didn't seem to mind. He had found his true calling: spiritual teacher to the wealthy and searching. He adopted the title "Acharya Rajneesh"—Acharya meaning teacher, and Rajneesh being a childhood nickname derived from Sanskrit words meaning "lord of the night." By 1964, wealthy backers had established an educational trust to support him and fund meditation retreats. The organization was called Jivan Jagruti Andolan, which translates to the Life Awakening Movement.

Around this time, he acquired something essential for any successful guru: a capable business manager. Laxmi Thakarsi Kuruwa came from the upper echelons of Indian society. Her father was a key supporter of the Nationalist Congress Party with close ties to Gandhi, Nehru, and Morarji Desai. She would serve as Rajneesh's personal secretary and organizational chief for nearly fifteen years, becoming his first sannyasin under the name Ma Yoga Laxmi.

What Is a Sannyasin, Anyway?

In traditional Hinduism, a sannyasin is someone who has renounced worldly life entirely. Think of an ascetic monk wandering with a begging bowl, having given up family, possessions, and social status in pursuit of spiritual liberation. It's an ancient practice, usually undertaken late in life after one's worldly duties are complete.

Rajneesh had something very different in mind.

In 1971, he initiated his first six sannyasins, marking the birth of what he called the Neo-Sannyas International Movement. His version of sannyas wasn't about renouncing the world—it was about renouncing the ego while remaining fully engaged with life. Women were welcomed, which was revolutionary. Disciples adopted the traditional mala (a necklace of wooden beads with the guru's picture), wore ochre robes, and took new names. But they also held jobs, had relationships, and engaged with the modern world.

The movement grew rapidly. By 1972, Rajneesh had initiated 3,800 sannyasins in India alone. The rest of the world had 134 more: 56 from the United States, 16 each from Britain and Germany, 12 each from Italy and the Philippines. There was even one person in Switzerland.

But the real explosion came after 1974, when a house was purchased for Rajneesh in Poona (now spelled Pune) and he founded an ashram there. Suddenly, Western seekers began arriving in droves.

When California Came to India

The 1970s were the golden age of what psychologists call the Human Potential Movement—that constellation of encounter groups, primal scream therapy, Gestalt techniques, and various other methods aimed at unlocking human creativity and emotional authenticity. Places like the Esalen Institute in California had become pilgrimage sites for the spiritually curious.

Rajneesh did something brilliant: he merged Eastern mysticism with Western psychotherapy.

Therapists from the Human Potential Movement began coming to Poona, and they started running group therapy sessions at the ashram. Rajneesh became, as one scholar put it, "the first Eastern guru to embrace modern psychotherapy." He gave daily discourses on religious scriptures—Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, other traditions—but wove in Western philosophy, jokes, and personal anecdotes. He commented on everything from Heraclitus to Fritz Perls.

This was intoxicating for Western seekers who wanted spiritual depth but found traditional Eastern practices too austere or culturally alien. Here was a guru who spoke their language, who validated their therapeutic explorations, who told them that enlightenment didn't require giving up pleasure.

By 1979, there were approximately 100,000 sannyasins worldwide. At any given time, about 6,000 of them were in Poona—some visiting for weeks or months to attend groups and meditations, with around 2,000 living and working permanently in or around the ashram.

They became known as the "Orange People" because of the orange and red robes they wore. In India, some called them Rajneeshees. It was meant as a description, but it was already becoming an epithet.

The Movement That Everyone Hated

From the beginning, the Rajneesh movement had a talent for making enemies.

In India, Rajneesh's hostility to Hindu morality—his advocacy of free love, his criticisms of Gandhi, his attacks on traditional religious teachings—made him deeply unpopular with conservatives. Later, in the United States, his willingness to mock Christian morality would prove equally provocative.

Even the Soviet Union got in on the condemnation. The Communist government banned the movement as being contrary to "positive aspects of Indian culture and to the aims of the youth protest movement in Western countries." The Soviets considered Rajneesh a "reactionary ideologue of the monopolistic bourgeoisie of India"—essentially accusing him of being a capitalist shill promoting consumerism in traditional Hindu disguise.

This was, ironically, not entirely wrong. Rajneesh did champion capitalism. He was not interested in poverty as a spiritual practice. And his movement would soon become famous—or infamous—for its wealth.

The City in the Desert

In July 1981, the Rajneesh organization bought a 64,229-acre ranch near the tiny town of Antelope, Oregon. To put that in perspective, that's about 260 square kilometers—roughly the size of a small country. They renamed it Rancho Rajneesh, and later, Rajneeshpuram.

The plan was ambitious: they would build a utopian intentional community from scratch. Within a few years, approximately 2,000 people had taken up residence. Rajneesh himself moved there. They constructed buildings, started businesses, created their own infrastructure.

They also bought a reception hotel in Portland, which was bombed in July 1983 by a radical Islamic group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra. This group, which had connections to militants in Pakistani-held Azad Kashmir, was apparently seeking to attack "soft" targets with Indian connections in the United States. The Rajneeshees were not universally disliked, it seems—some people disliked them quite specifically.

But the more serious conflicts were local.

The Takeover That Backfired Spectacularly

The problems started almost immediately. The Rajneeshees attempted to take over the nearby town of Antelope—which had a population of about forty people—by moving enough sannyasins there to control local elections. This did not endear them to their neighbors.

Then came the attempted takeover of Wasco County itself, with plans to control the county seat of The Dalles. This is where things got dark.

In 1984, a circle of leading members of the commune implemented a bioterror attack. Their plan was to incapacitate enough voters before a local election that their candidates could win. They contaminated salad products with Salmonella typhimurium at ten restaurants in The Dalles. Seven hundred and fifty-one people were poisoned. Forty-five were hospitalized. None died, but the attack remains the largest bioterrorist incident in American history.

It didn't work. The Rajneeshees lost the election anyway.

But that wasn't all. Investigators would eventually uncover what was described as "the longest wiretapping operation ever uncovered." There was also an attempted assassination plot against U.S. Attorney Charles H. Turner.

At the center of it all was Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh's personal secretary—a woman who had replaced the politically connected Laxmi and who had become, in effect, the operational leader of the commune. She pleaded guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault.

In the last week of September 1985, after Sheela had fled the commune in disgrace, Rajneesh did something remarkable. He declared that the religion of "Rajneeshism" and the identity of "Rajneeshees" no longer existed. His disciples set fire to 5,000 copies of a book called "Rajneeshism: An Introduction to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and His Religion." Sheela's robes were added to the bonfire. It was as if he was trying to burn away the evidence of what his movement had become.

The Oregon commune was destroyed in September 1985. Rajneesh was deported from the United States as part of an Alford plea deal—a legal arrangement where a defendant doesn't admit guilt but acknowledges that prosecutors have enough evidence to likely secure a conviction. He received a ten-year suspended sentence and a $400,000 fine.

Then he tried to find somewhere else to go. Twenty-one countries denied him entry.

The Martyrdom Narrative

What happened next is perhaps the strangest part of the story.

Rajneesh eventually returned to India, to the ashram in Poona where it had all started. And there, something unexpected occurred: his movement didn't just survive—it thrived.

One scholar noted that "the most surprising feature of the Osho phenomenon lies in Rajneesh's remarkable apotheosis upon his return to India." He achieved even more success in his homeland than before the Oregon debacle. How was this possible?

His followers had constructed a martyrdom narrative. In this telling, the Ranch wasn't destroyed by criminal activity from within—it was "crushed from within by the Attorney General's office." Like the marines in Lebanon, the story went, the Ranch was "hit by hardball opposition and driven out." The crimes were reframed as persecution.

It helped that Rajneesh had publicly denounced Sheela and burned the evidence of Rajneeshism. It helped that he changed his name to Osho. And it helped that, in 1990, he died.

Dead gurus are easier to rehabilitate than living ones.

Osho International Meditation Resort

Today, the ashram in Pune has been rebranded as the Osho International Meditation Resort. It markets itself as "the Esalen of the East"—a direct reference to that famous California center for the Human Potential Movement.

The resort offers classes in a variety of spiritual techniques from a broad range of traditions. It describes itself as a spiritual oasis, a "sacred space" for discovering one's self, a place for "uniting the desires of body and mind in a beautiful environment." According to press reports, it attracts some 200,000 visitors from around the world each year.

The promotional materials do not dwell on the bioterrorism.

The organization that runs all this is called the Osho International Foundation, or OIF. It's the successor to the Neo-Sannyas International Foundation, managed by an "Inner Circle" that Rajneesh established before his death. They jointly administer his estate and operate the meditation resort.

In the early days of the internet, they even ran a global computer network called OSHONET. Today, they communicate through more conventional online channels.

The Trademark Wars

The decades after Rajneesh's death brought various disagreements about his wishes and legacy, leading to the formation of rival factions. This is typical of new religious movements after their founder's death—think of the splits among early Mormons or the ongoing disputes among various Buddhist lineages.

One central conflict concerned OIF's copyright control over Rajneesh's works. A rival group called Osho Friends International spent ten years challenging OIF's exclusive use of the title "OSHO" as a trademark. In January 2009, they won: OIF lost its exclusive trademark rights in the United States. An appeal was filed but eventually withdrawn.

The legal battles may seem mundane compared to bioterrorism, but they matter. They determine who controls the guru's image, who profits from his books and teachings, who gets to define what the movement means today.

What Did They Actually Believe?

This is harder to answer than you might expect.

A 1972 monograph outlined Rajneesh's vision: a worldwide movement rooted in the affirmation of life, playful and joyful, based on science rather than belief and dogma. It would not rely on ideology and philosophy but on practices, techniques, and methods. The goal was to offer every individual the chance to discover and choose their own proper religious path—leading people to an essential, universal religiousness.

The movement would be open to people of all religions or none. They would experiment with the inner methods of all religions in their pure, original form, not seeking to synthesize them but to provide facilities for each tradition to be revived and maintained. Lost and hidden secrets would be rediscovered. The movement would not seek to create any new religion.

This is, of course, somewhat ironic given that in 1983, the Rajneesh Foundation International published a 78-page book called "Rajneeshism: An Introduction to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and His Religion." The book claimed that Rajneeshism was not a religion but rather "a religionless religion... only a quality of love, silence, meditation and prayerfulness." The motivation for this may have been tied to a visa application seeking "religious worker" status.

When surveyed at Rajneeshpuram, over 70 percent of residents listed their religious affiliation as "none." Yet 60 percent participated in activities of worship several times a month. They followed norms of wearing similar clothes and participating in the same activities. They were allowed to come and go as they pleased, as long as they didn't hurt anybody—a rule they famously violated in 1984.

The Vision of Small Communities

Rajneesh taught that families, large cities, and nations would ultimately be replaced by small communities with a communal way of life. By 1972, small communes of disciples existed in India and Kenya, and a larger one called Anand Shila was planned as a permanent world headquarters in India.

This plan was repeatedly thwarted, which is why the movement eventually looked west—to Oregon, to that enormous ranch in the high desert.

The vision was utopian in the classic sense: a community that would model a new way of living. Communities would run their own businesses. Publishing companies would be founded. A central International University of Meditation would have branches all over the world and run meditation camps. Study groups would investigate the key texts of Tantra, Taoism, Hinduism, and other traditions.

Some of this actually happened. The publishing did occur. The meditation camps were real. But the utopian community in Oregon ended in criminal charges and deportation.

Is the Movement Dead?

In 2003, sociologist Stephen Hunt wrote that "the movement has declined since 1985, and some would argue it is now, for all intents and purposes, defunct."

That judgment seems premature, or at least incomplete. Yes, the movement is nothing like what it was in 1979, when 100,000 sannyasins wore orange and gathered in Poona. Yes, the legal battles over trademarks suggest fragmentation rather than unified growth. Yes, you're unlikely to encounter orange-robed Rajneeshees on the streets of any Western city.

But 200,000 visitors annually to the Pune resort is not nothing. There are still smaller centers of the movement in India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Osho's books remain in print. His teachings circulate online.

In 2018, Netflix released a six-part documentary called "Wild Wild Country" about the Rajneesh movement. It was widely watched and critically acclaimed, introducing the story to a new generation who had never heard of Rajneeshpuram.

The documentary's complicated portrayal—neither wholly sympathetic nor wholly condemnatory—perhaps captures something true about the movement itself. These were people seeking meaning and community. They built something extraordinary in the Oregon desert. They also poisoned hundreds of innocent people.

The Uncomfortable Questions

How should we think about a spiritual movement that committed bioterrorism?

One response is to draw a sharp line: blame the criminals, not the teaching. Sheela and her inner circle committed the crimes. Rajneesh, in this telling, was either unaware or, at worst, culpably negligent. The movement's ideals were betrayed by bad actors.

Another response is to see the crimes as somehow inherent in the structure of the movement—the inevitable result of a charismatic leader demanding total loyalty, of a closed community with its own rules, of a belief system that set followers above outsiders.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between, which is to say it's genuinely complicated.

Rajneesh taught about ego death and universal love. His organization also ran the longest wiretapping operation ever uncovered. His followers sought enlightenment. They also plotted to assassinate a federal prosecutor.

Perhaps the lesson is that movements seeking to transcend ordinary morality can end up falling far below it. Perhaps it's that charisma without accountability is dangerous. Perhaps it's simply that humans are capable of holding genuine spiritual aspirations alongside terrible actions.

Or perhaps the lesson is about forgetting. Today's visitors to the Osho International Meditation Resort likely know little about what happened in Oregon. Current leaders, as one report notes, "downplay early controversies in Oregon in an effort to appeal to a wider audience." The martyr narrative has done its work.

In one generation, a movement went from bioterrorism to being described as a "spiritual oasis" in press releases. The Dalai Lama has visited.

History doesn't repeat, but it does sometimes offer uncomfortable reminders of how quickly we can move on from even the most disturbing events—especially when there's something we want to believe in.