Rajneeshpuram and the Rajneesh Movement

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was born Chandra Mohan Jain in 1931 in central India. He taught philosophy at a university in Jabalpur before becoming a travelling speaker in the 1960s, known for his sharp attacks on conventional religion, politics and sexual morality. In 1974 he opened an ashram in Pune, near Bombay, which became a magnet for young Westerners seeking spiritual experience. There he lectured daily on figures from the Buddha and Lao Tzu to Jesus and the Sufis, and his ashram offered intense therapy groups drawing on Western humanistic psychology.

A note on terms: scholars often prefer “new religious movement” to the word “cult”, which is contested and often pejorative. Rajneesh’s movement, sometimes called neo-sannyas, drew freely on Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist and Western ideas. He taught that people should celebrate life fully, uniting the worldly enjoyment of “Zorba the Greek” with the inner stillness of the Buddha, and he rejected the idea that spirituality required poverty or sexual restraint.

By the late 1970s the Pune ashram faced tax disputes and hostility from Indian authorities and neighbours. In 1981 Rajneesh flew to the United States, officially for medical treatment. His secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, who managed the movement’s practical affairs, arranged the purchase in July 1981 of the Big Muddy Ranch, a vast and dry property of about 64,000 acres in central Oregon. The nearest town, Antelope, had around forty residents.

Thousands of followers came to build a new community in the desert. Within a few years the ranch had houses, a reservoir, farms, shops, restaurants, a meditation hall, an airstrip and a public transport system. In 1982 residents voted to incorporate it as the city of Rajneeshpuram, which gave it its own police force and the power to issue building permits. Summer festivals drew many thousands of visitors from around the world. The movement also bought a hotel in Portland, which was damaged by a bomb planted by an outsider in 1983, an attack that deepened the commune’s sense of being under siege.

Life at the ranch was demanding. Residents worked long days, often twelve hours or more, without wages, a regime the leadership called worship. They dressed in sunrise colours, wore a mala with Rajneesh’s portrait, and began the day with Dynamic Meditation. Rajneesh himself had entered a period of public silence in 1981 and rarely spoke to followers; his daily drive past them in one of his many Rolls-Royces became a ritual of devotion. Sheela, outspoken and combative, became the commune’s public face.

Conflict with neighbours grew quickly. Oregon’s land-use authorities and the conservation group 1000 Friends of Oregon challenged the city’s legality, and the state attorney general, David Frohnmayer, argued that a city controlled by a religious group violated the separation of church and state. Followers gained a majority in Antelope and in 1984 renamed it Rajneesh. Sheela’s public statements grew increasingly hostile, and the commune built up an armed security force.

In 1984 the commune’s leadership sought to win seats in the Wasco County elections, which would decide important land-use matters. In September they brought thousands of homeless people from cities across the United States to live at the ranch, apparently hoping they would vote. In the same month members of Sheela’s inner circle deliberately contaminated salad bars at ten restaurants in The Dalles, the county seat, with salmonella. Some 751 people fell ill, 45 of them seriously enough to be hospitalised; no one died. Public health officials at first could not prove the outbreak was deliberate. The election plan failed, and many of the homeless were later bussed away.

In September 1985 Sheela and several close associates suddenly left for Europe. Rajneesh, who had resumed speaking, accused them of crimes including the poisonings and the attempted murder of his physician, and invited investigators to the ranch. Federal and state investigations uncovered evidence of wiretapping, arson, poisonings and a plot to kill the United States Attorney, Charles Turner. In October 1985 Rajneesh was arrested at Charlotte, North Carolina, as his plane stopped to refuel. In November he entered an Alford plea, accepting conviction without admitting guilt, to two counts of immigration fraud, received a suspended ten-year sentence and a $400,000 fine, and left the country.

Sheela was arrested in West Germany and extradited. In 1986 she pleaded guilty to crimes including attempted murder, assault, arson and wiretapping, and was sentenced to twenty years; she was released for good behaviour in 1988 after about twenty-nine months and moved to Europe. Several other leaders were also convicted, some in the 1990s. Residents left the ranch, the city of Rajneeshpuram ceased to function, and its property was sold.

Rajneesh returned to Pune in 1987, took the name Osho in 1989, and died there in January 1990. The movement continues today as the Osho movement.

The legal battle over the city outlived the city itself. Courts had blocked many of Rajneeshpuram’s powers while the case was argued, and in 1987, when the commune had already dispersed, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled on the incorporation in a decision that by then had no practical effect. The wider debate it raised, about how far a religious community can govern itself as a public authority, remained a lesson for lawyers and planners. For many former residents, the end came as a shock: most had known nothing of the crimes committed by the inner circle, and they left the ranch with little money after years of unpaid work.

The Oregon ranch passed through several owners before being donated in the 1990s to Young Life, a Christian youth organisation, which runs it as a summer camp. In The Dalles, the poisoning is often described as the largest bioterror attack in American history, studied by public health experts as a warning of how difficult such attacks can be to detect.

Historians and sociologists, such as Lewis F. Carter and Hugh Urban, see Rajneeshpuram as a revealing case: an affluent, educated community that set out to build a utopia and, under a closed and fearful leadership, slid into crime. The story drew renewed attention through the documentary series Wild Wild Country in 2018, which brought the events back before a wide audience.