Osho

Overview

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain and known for much of his teaching life as Rajneesh, was a 20th-century Indian mystic and teacher whose work drew eclectically on Zen Buddhism, Tantra, Sufism, Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and Western psychology, rather than sitting within a single established lineage. He is best known for a large body of recorded public discourses and for developing active meditation techniques, most notably Dynamic Meditation, aimed at practitioners for whom traditional silent sitting proved difficult.

Early life and teaching career

Osho was born in Kuchwada, Madhya Pradesh, and taught philosophy at the University of Jabalpur before leaving academic life to teach full-time as a spiritual teacher, first under the name Acharya Rajneesh. He established an ashram in Koregaon Park, Pune, in the 1970s, which became a center for his teaching and for the active meditation techniques he developed there. He returned to Pune in the late 1980s, adopting the name Osho in his final years, and his ashram — now known as the Osho International Meditation Resort — continues to operate as a meditation center today.

Teaching and Dynamic Meditation

Osho’s teaching resists easy categorization within a single tradition: his discourses drew freely on Zen koans, Sufi stories, Tantric and Advaita philosophy, and Western psychological ideas, often in the same talk. Dynamic Meditation, his best-known contribution to meditation practice, moves a practitioner through stages of fast breathing, cathartic release, and physical movement before settling into silent stillness — a structure he taught as better suited to modern, energetically restless practitioners than extended silent sitting alone. Among his textual work, his extended commentary on the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, a Shaiva tantric text describing over a hundred meditation techniques, remains one of his most studied bodies of teaching.

A prolific body of work

Over more than two decades of public teaching, Osho’s discourses were recorded and later transcribed into several hundred published books, covering subjects from meditation technique to commentary on Indian scripture to broader questions of psychology and living — a volume of published material that makes him one of the most prolifically documented spiritual teachers of the 20th century. He died in Pune in 1990.