Demographics

Osho, India is a land whose very life-breath is religion. One proof is that even the most insignificant gurus here do not keep their number of disciples below a hundred thousand. But it is surprising that a guru as radiant as the sun, like you, has so few Indian disciples. Kindly shed some light on this.

Ramanand Agnihotri! No country has religion as its life-breath! Not India, not China, not Japan, not Iran, not Pakistan—no country. Countries cannot be religion-breathed. Countries are political units; what could they possibly have to do with being religion-breathed! Do countries have any prana—any life-breath at all? If there is no life-breath, how will there be religion-breath? Individuals are religious, not countries. Not castes, not communities, not organizations—only individuals. That is the dignity of the individual. Did it never occur to you that first there must be life-breath? At the very least, there should be life—religious or irreligious—but life. Do countries have any life-breath? These are political fictions, political tricks. Just a while back, before 1947, Pakistan was India; now it is not. What will you say? Is Pakistan now religion-breathed or not? Before 1947 it was; now? Now it is not. Bangladesh earlier was religion-breathed because it was part of…

Osho, I’ve become intoxicated, drinking again and again the wine poured in your tavern. Osho, the world burns at the sight of lovers, but even the other drinkers in your own tavern are so opposed to love—especially fifty percent of the Indians who have been with you for the last ten or twelve years. Our foreign friends feel happy seeing lovers, but the Indians not only burn with jealousy, they look at them with a criminal eye and gossip sarcastically for hours. This crowd knows only one meaning of love—“sex.” Why is that? Is there no other dimension of love, especially in the relationship betw

I would like these friends to drift away little by little. Even their questions that come to me are not worth answering—trash questions with no purpose or value. In the relationship of man and woman, the Indian mind has held only one notion: there can be only one bond—sexual. That friendship can exist between man and woman has never been part of Indian tradition. Indian tradition has never had the courage to conceive friendship between man and woman. Sex is one relationship. It is not the whole. Friendship is also possible—and it should be. A beautiful, cultured person should have enough capacity to befriend a woman or a man. Friendship means there is no question of bodily give‑and‑take; it is a connection of souls. In the West this happens: a man and a woman can have a friendship like that between two men or two women. The basis can be…

Osho, I wish you would say something about the eastern indifference to what you are doing, and the western attraction.

You can see it happen everywhere. Rabindranath Tagore got the Nobel Prize. Before he got the Nobel Prize his book was already published for years -- the book on which he got the Nobel Prize, GITANJALI -- but nobody has praised it. Once he got the Nobel Prize, the whole India was praising him, and he could see. He refused the invitation of Calcutta Corporation. They wanted to honor him. He said, "I won't come. I refuse this honor, because the book has been published for many years in the original, and you have never honored me." In fact, no note was taken of his book, and it is one of the greatest books ever written. On the contrary, people were criticizing it, criticizing it because it was not according to the old pattern of Indian poetry. It has something original, and the Indian mind cannot understand anything original; it…

Osho, why are you toiling in this country of dogmatists? The traditionalists and conservatives have neither understood you nor will they. I myself am so fed up with this country’s superstitions that I am thinking of going to live abroad somewhere. What is your command?

Where there is no pain there is no happiness; where there is no prison there is no experience of freedom. All dualities walk together. Along with darkness goes light, along with birth goes death—every duality moves side by side. Bigotry will remain in the world; even so, we must light lamps—light lamps right in the midst of bigotry. If someone sits beating his head that there is too much darkness, what use is bringing light? The very joy is that there is darkness and we must bring light. Only because there is darkness is there the joy of lighting lamps. And there has never been as much darkness as there is today. Therefore, the joy of kindling light today has also never been so great. The disciples of Buddha could not take the delight you can, because there wasn’t so much darkness then. Today the darkness is great. We must…