According to Osho, a 'Christian' is a second‑hand believer using Christianity as a drug to stay spiritually asleep—an inmate of a beautiful prison of doctrines. Christ himself is not a Christian. Real religion is firsthand, direct encounter with reality, free of beliefs. Become a Christ—courageous, awake, free—not a Christian repeating rituals and borrowed ideas.
Don’t copy beliefs; wake up and meet life directly—be like Christ, not a label called ‘Christian.’
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Who is a christian?
Difficult to say because I am not a Christian, neither is Christ a Christian. One thing is certain: that Christ is not a Christian, Buddha is not a Buddhist, Krishna is not a Hindu. To be a Christian one has to avoid being a Christ. TO be a Christian means to remain asleep. You are using another drug called Christianity to remain asleep. Somebody else is using another drug called Hinduism to remain asleep, but these are all drugs. A real man, a man of courage, has the courage to face reality as it is. A real man has the courage not to be second-hand. A Christian is second-hand, Christ is first-hand don't become second-hand. Go to reality, direct, immediate -- not through any belief system -- otherwise you will never reach to reality. The belief system will hinder you, it will not allow you: it is an imprisonment. So…
(The real Christian is he or she who has the consciousness of a celebrant, Osho told Kerstin.) Being a Christian has nothing to do with Christianity. It has nothing to do with the church, a creed, a dogma; it has something to do with your own consciousness. If your consciousness becomes blissful you attain to the same state as Christ -- and that is the only way to be a Christian. Being a Christ is the only way to be a Christian. Believing in Christ won't help. Millions of people believe in Christ, millions of others believe in Buddha, and so on, and so forth; neither the Buddhists are Buddhas nor the Christians are Christs -- they are just believers. Belief is cheap; it does not transform you. Transformation needs guts. That's why Jesus says everybody has to carry their cross on their own shoulders. It is a symbolic message.
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] (Don't follow and imitate Christ, love and flower as Christ yourself, Osho told Veet Christiane.) Following is something wrong. The follower becomes an imitator. He becomes like a parrot. He starts repeating the master's words without attaining the consciousness that the master had. It is beautiful to be a lover of Christ because love is vast; you can be a lover of Christ and at the same time a lover of Buddha and a lover of Lao Tzu and a lover of Zarathustra and a lover of me. Love is so vast that it can contain all the masters. But following is very narrow. The follower of Christ cannot be a follower of Buddha, the follower of Buddha cannot be a follower of Christ.
Osho, you say christ was the last christian. Are you the last rajneeshee? Please explain.
That is the other way of declaring superiority -- perhaps far better a way, because it is so arduous. To become a messiah all that you need is a retarded mind, stupid, stubborn -- and you can declare yourself And to declare yourself the only begotten son of God, what do you need? Just no sense of shame, that's all; otherwise such stupid things.... Any intelligent person, even if he is the only begotten son of God, will try to hide the fact: if somebody hears, what are people going to think about it? Even if he knows that he is a messenger from God he will not tell anybody. He will deliver the message and escape because it looks so foolish that you are the son of a poor carpenter, uneducated, and you have been chosen to be the messenger of God. God could not find an educated, sophisticated…
[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.] (A man to be really worthy of the name man has to go through not one but two births, Osho says to Rita from Switzerland. Then he explains why.) One is the physical birth, the other is the spiritual birth. The physical happens to everybody but for the spiritual one has to work, one has to deserve it. The first is ordinary, it only gives you the material dimension, and because there is no spiritual dimension in it, it is utterly dark. Matter is darkness, spirit is light. Unless one is born again one remains in a dark night. The initiation into sannyas means the preparation for the second birth. Socrates says the master functions as a midwife, and he is absolutely right.