What do you love about India?

Beloved Osho, india, your homeland, has treated you badly and without due respect. Yet sometimes when I hear you speak, do I not detect a subtle fondness in you for india and her people? Osho, what do you love about india?

India, to me, is not only a country, but a concept... not just a land, but a way of life, a tremendously significant philosophy. So when I talk about India, it does not matter at all that they have treated me badly, that they would like me to be killed. They have made efforts -- unfortunately they failed. These are small things, and I don't take them into consideration. My consideration is for the India as a concept. It is the only part of the world which has gone deep into the interiority of man, which has discovered for the first time the ultimate in consciousness, the universality of individual beings. Science has discovered much, but no discovery of science can be compared to the discovery that India has made in the past. For ten thousand years continuously it has devoted its whole energy to finding out the meaning of…

Osho, would you be kind enough to say something about your view of India? Ayub Syed, editor, ‘Current.’

Dear Ayub Syed! I am not a nationalist. India, Pakistan, China, Japan have no meaning for me. I do not see this earth as divided into fragments. The misfortune of the earth is precisely that it is divided into fragments. And as long as it remains divided, that misfortune will continue. Science has made the earth one; if only politics would step aside, humanity’s misfortune would end. Today the earth has all the means to make human beings happy and prosperous. For the first time, the earth could fill even the gods of heaven with envy. But politics will have to die if science is to win. Science opens the doors of good fortune; politics turns those very doors into misfortune. Scientists like Albert Einstein and Lord Rutherford discovered the atomic bomb. The atom could have proved a blessing for the earth, for such energy had come into our hands…

Beloved Osho, being with you in india is much stronger than anywhere else in the world. Sitting with you in discourse feels like being in the very heart of the world. Sometimes just sitting in the hotel room, closing my eyes, I feel that your heartbeat and mine are beating in the same rhythm. Waking in the morning, listening to the sounds around -- they penetrate much deeper than in any other place. It feels like meditation is happening here naturally, and without any effort. Is your work different in india, or is there something here like a natural buddhafield?

And if you look from this angle you can see why he says again and again, "It has been said to you by the prophets of old that if somebody is violent with you, angry with you, then you have to be ready. Your answer has to be a stone for a brick, an eye for an eye. But I say unto you that if somebody hits you, slaps you on the face, give him the other side of your face too." This is absolutely un-Jewish. He has learned it from the teachings of Gautam Buddha and Mahavira. When he came to India -- and there are records still available of his visit -- Buddhism was still very alive, although Buddha was dead. Jesus came five hundred years after Gautam Buddha, but Buddha had created such a great storm that the whole country was drowned in it, was drunk with…

Osho, on seeing your ashram I had the sense of another world. How meaningful is this in our country, India?

Poverty, wretchedness, India’s problems—all can disappear; only give India a right perspective to resolve them. Our problems are of our own making; therefore removing them is easy. Today there is such technological progress in the world that India has no need to remain poor. If we are poor, perhaps it is because we want to remain so; we are poor because our ways of thinking are foolish. We have the most beautiful land, the most beautiful sky. We are not short of talent either. But we have forgotten to honor talent. So whenever a talented person is born here, he too has to leave India. We have become adept at honoring the dull-witted. We have invented such criteria that only the dull-witted can qualify. Someone gets up at five in the morning—our respect! Someone does not smoke—our respect! Someone eats only greens—our respect! Someone wears khadi—our respect! Someone performs daily…

Osho, you say you want to show india "love," yet most indians who come here, when faced with love, see it only as lust. What should be done about it?

The most important thing in the Indian mind is sex. Hence every day so many rapes happen, and no woman is safe walking on a street. How many sannyasins have written to me, particularly women sannyasins, saying, "Is it not our right to walk alone under the stars in the sky? Are we not human beings? Don't we have such a simple human right?" But in India it is impossible. Just the other day a young woman sannyasin was attacked by four Indians. Of course she screamed, and some sannyasins reached in time; otherwise they were going to rape her -- they had torn her dress apart. And this is not just one accident, it has been happening every once in a while for almost six years. The Indian mind is so sexually repressed that it cannot love, it can only lust. And once the lust is there you start…