What is the difference between a religion and a cult?

Osho, what is the difference between surrender and blind imitation?

So be careful: the freedom you allow yourself, allow the other too. You have no right to judge another as blindly credulous or as a surrendered being. Drop that concern. You cannot judge anyway—how will you enter another’s heart? How will you know? Think only about yourself. See within whether, up to now, you have lived by blind belief or by surrender. Decide only there; leave worrying about others. Otherwise, all your judgments will be wrong. Jesus said: Judge not; do not set yourself up as a judge in relation to another. To the friend who has asked: if you are asking for yourself, good. Drop worrying about others. Look within and see: whatever I have been clinging to till now—have I ever staked my life to hold it? Have I meditated for it? Have I loved for it? Or am I just clutching what culture, society, civilization handed me?…

Beloved Osho, according to my dictionary, a cult is "a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious" -- "spurious" meaning "of illegitimate birth, bastard." is it not true to say that the real spirit of religiousness can never be anything but unorthodox; and will always be inspired by a love union, rather than born out of a legalized contract?

Maneesha, I am not a man of language, not a linguist, not a man of words. My experience is of the wordless. Although I use words, I am not confined by them. To me there is only one dictionary and that is of existence, of experience. All other dictionaries are for mundane, ordinary affairs -- not for this extraordinary love affair. In the first place there is no such thing as religion. Just as there is no such thing as love, no such thing as beauty -- these are not things. There is a certain phenomenon you can describe as religiousness, but you cannot confine it to the word `religion'. Religion is a limitation; it has a boundary line, it is an imprisonment. Religiousness is open to the whole sky. It can contain the all. It has no doors, no windows, no walls. The moment the experience of religiousness is…

Osho, the story of Reverend Jim Jones and the mass suicide in Guyana has dominated the newspapers for the last few weeks. It has all the ingredients of a perfectly sensational news story. The fallout has been endless analyses and commentaries, along with a re-examination of all nontraditional religious experiments. In the classical media vocabulary these are called “cults”—which is, in a way, a built-in accusation. I am quite sure the same label could be applied to the Osho Ashram. Would you kindly explain the difference between your teaching and experiments, and cults?

So first, this is not a cult or a sect. It is freedom from all sects. And who are these people who condemn cults and sects? They themselves are sectarians—some are Christian, some Hindu, some Muslim. They condemn sects. Why? Because their own sects feel threatened. They themselves are bound by beliefs, yet they fear a rival might appear. Yes, they have one argument: they say, “We are traditional, therefore we are not a cult; we are religion. What is nontraditional is a cult; what is traditional is religion.” What a definition! Then when Jesus first gave birth to Christianity, was that religion or a cult? It was not traditional then. Then the Jews did the right thing by crucifying Jesus, for he was a cultist, creating a sect, provoking and misleading the Jews. And when Buddha gave birth to the Buddhist way, that was a cult, a sect—not religion.…

Osho, is it not possible in any way to preserve your living religion and not let it be reduced to a cult like christianity? The very idea of your religion being reduced with time to a cult is unbearable.

IT is almost impossible to preserve a religion as a religion. Up to now nobody has succeeded in doing it. But I said it is almost impossible, not absolutely, because we are fortunate in seeing all the failures of the past: all that helps a religion to become a cult can be dropped from the very beginning. We know that many people have tried before. Their efforts are also helpful. There is not an intrinsic impossibility of a religion remaining a religion. The reasons that reduce it to a cult are not very fundamental. The first thing: it is not my religion. I have nothing to do with it. In fact, when I ceased to be it came into being. This is the first thing to remember -- it will help the religion to remain a living current. Do not make it a certain kind of religion -- Christianity, Hinduism,…

We don't tolerate anybody because we are not hostile in the first place. For example, Jesus says, "Love your enemies," but that means first you have to create enemies; otherwise, how are you going to love enemies? Q: THERE ARE PEOPLE, THOUGH, IN THE WORLD, THAT WE'VE NEVER MET AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL MEET WHO JUST START OUT LIFE PURSUING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT GOALS WITH A TOTALLY DIFFERENT ATTITUDE, A DIFFERENT SET OF VALUES FROM OURSELVES. AND WHO'S TO SAY WHICH IS THE BETTER SET OF VALUES? WHEN YOU SAY, "LIVE AND LET LIVE," THAT ALSO, DOES IT NOT, MEANS TOLERANCE, AND THEREFORE, IN ORDER FOR THESE TWO IDEAS TO LIVE AND LET LIVE WITH EACH OTHER, YOU HAVE TO ADOPT THIS UGLY WORD TOLERANCE AND TOLERATE EACH OTHER? A: No.