Followers

Why have your teachings attracted so many followers, and why are women, particularly, attracted to your teaching?

Truth has a magnetic force in it. It always attracts, particularly those who are young and fresh, particularly those who are not burdened with old rubbish and garbage and junk; who are receptive, capable of seeing, understanding. That's why so many people, without any special effort on my part to attract them, have come close to me. I started the journey alone, and then people started coming and the caravan became bigger and bigger. Now it is surrounding the whole earth. You are asking why more women are attracted. All the religions have condemned women. I am the first man who is trying to compensate for all the harm and the wounds that have been done by the past and its so-called religious people. My respect for women is equal to my respect for men. This has not been the case in the past. Gautam Buddha, a man I respect,…

Did the followers do this? It’s all the followers’ doing. The follower is very frightened, utterly frightened. Suppose you begin to love me and my words start to feel right to you—then you will immediately shut the door, because you will feel that if someone else comes and muddles all this, it will cause you pain. So you will simply close the door: enough, no more need.

That is why, after Muhammad, Muslims closed the door! In their lineage an unparalleled man had appeared in Muhammad. After Jesus, Christians closed the door. Before Jesus there had been many prophets, but after Jesus they shut it completely! This business of closing the door... After Buddha, the Buddhists closed it; now no enlightened one will be born. There is the notion of a Maitreya—that someday Buddha himself will take another incarnation as Maitreya—but even that would be Buddha taking it; it is not going to be someone else.

Osho, jesus, buddha, krishna, etc., certainly were enlightened masters. But buddhism, hinduism, christianity and whatsoever has developed from them, have not much to do with the ideas of the masters. Osho, I am sure you are an enlightened master too, but what can we do, or what at all is possible to do, to prevent oshoism?

And he persuaded Arjuna to go into war, and the reasons that he gave were that, "The soul is eternal, so don't be bothered. You can kill -- the soul is not killed, only the body, and the body is dead anyway. So there is no violence involved, because the soul is immortal and the body is mortal. You are only separating the immortal from the mortal, there is nothing wrong in it -- just separating the essential from the non-essential. Do you think you would have agreed? That's why people create Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mohammedanism -- it is easier, very easy, because then you can manage the dead Master according to your ideas. You can put your ideas in his mouth, you can ignore the ideas that go against you, you can interpret. manipulate, rationalize... you can do thousand and one things because the Master is no more there.…

When a master dies, suddenly a myth springs up around him, man makes stone or wooden idols of him, the master becomes a distant god to be worshipped and becomes unattainable to ordinary man. The thought of the master being an example of what we should and can be disappears. Why does this phenomenon happen time and time again?

Jesus must have been a very human master. It is because of his great humanity that he had to suffer, that he had to be crucified -- it is because of his great humanity. If he had lived just like a god, just like a holy saint, chanting mantras, fasting, living in a cave, the same rabbis would have worshipped him. Before Jesus they had not killed anybody else. Why Jesus? This is strange. The Jewish history has no precedent for it. What was his sin? What was his crime? His crime was that he was trying to live a very ordinary life. He wanted to show you that you can live an ordinary life and yet you can be enlightened. You can move with prostitutes and gamblers and drunkards and yet you can be absolutely holy. He wanted to show you this paradox, he wanted to become an example…