The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, Or Dissipate

Stausberg, Michael. "Playing the Religion Card: The Creation and Dissolution of Rajneeshism." The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, or Dissipate. By Michael Stausberg, Stuart A. Wright and Carole M. Cusack. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 135–154. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 30 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350162945.ch-008>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 30 September 2021, 23:33 UTC. Copyright © Michael Stausberg, Stuart A. Wright, Carole M. Cusack, and contributors 2020. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 8 Playing the Religion Card: The Creation and Dissolution of Rajneeshism Michael Stausberg For a religion to end there has to be a religion in the first place. In many cases labeling something a religion seems uncontroversial. This is the case, for instance, when the social formation so labeled derives from one of the historical worldviews that are commonly called religions. Several so-called religions comprise established mechanisms of internal differentiation, for example, the establishment of sects, schisms, denominations, schools, or cults (in the sense of organized forms of communal worship). In these cases of derivation, the main protagonists tend to be familiar with the former religious traditions, be it as active participants or as being part of the same cultural and social context. On the other hand, there are cases of cross-cultural and cross-religious inspiration; if somebody who has grown up in a country where Buddhism has no established social presence starts to propagate some “Buddhist” ideas and gets others to do the same, the resulting ensemble would probably still be labeled a religion because Buddhism is generally considered such a thing. This labeling by derivation can impact a phenomenon that by itself is quite remote from practices and semantics we would commonly identify as religious; for example, yoga is commonly included in the literature on contemporary religious landscapes. In many cases this is not due to what actually happens in a yoga studio, nor based on self-descriptions of what people are doing in there, but is due to the genealogical ties of the notion of yoga to India or Hinduism. We can even go so far as to label groups or audiences religious when they themselves have neither invoked the r-word, nor entertain any links to historical traditions generally called religion, as long as they can be likened to what is generally considered a religion by showing some similarities to the prototype. 136 The Demise of Religion In this chapter, we will look at a case where the religion-ascriptions have gone through various trajectories. We will encounter a person who made his career by challenging notions of religion, before he became part of a scheme where a religion was created in his name. This episode, however, ended relatively quickly, and this proclaimed end became part of a public posturing. One aspect of his activities that made him prone to religious ascriptions, in both the pre-religion and the post-religion periods, was his choice of stage names that resonated with religious traditions: Bhagwan, which could seem like an appropriate choice for an Indian guru-type; Zorba the Buddha, a hybrid of Greek life-affirmation and Buddhism; Maitreya (the Buddha of the future); and Osho, which could point more into the direction of a Zen-master (while he is said to have explained the word as deriving from “oceanic”). Enlightenment and Provocation The birth name of our protagonist, Mohan Chandra Jain (1931–1990), hints at his descent from a Jain family from the Western Indian region of Gujarat (India). He grew up with his grandparents and experienced different forms of religious attitudes in his close family. He reports that his father was a pious person, whereas his grandfather was not (Osho 2000: 47). His grandmother felt all religion to be childish (Osho 2000: 10). He grew up in a religiously diverse environment and seems to have visited places from different religious traditions such as churches, mosques, gurudwaras, and Hindu and Jain temples. At the age of twenty-one, Rajneesh (as he was called from early on) reportedly experienced a nervous breakdown, followed by an extended experience of illumination or “enlightenment.” While he refers to the guidance of a pundit, who became his “protector,” he also states that he “was working without a master,” that he “searched but could not find one”—a claim that put him beyond the realm of traditional religions, because “all the religions insist on finding a master” (Osho 2000: 63f). In retrospect he says of his realization that “there is nothing to be done. We are already divine and we are already perfect—as we are. … God never creates anybody imperfect” (Osho 2000: 66). His statement is ambiguous in terms of its relationship to religion: on the one hand, he invokes “God”—as if he had realized the divine order of Playing the Religion Card 137 things—and he qualified human nature as “divine”—which invokes a religious vocabulary rather than merely perfect. On the other hand, his statement seems to obliviate all religious paths and procedures. He considers this combination of breakdown and breakthrough that he reportedly experienced the nucleus for any potential creation of a religion: if I were to make a religion, then this would be a basic thing in it: that anybody who becomes enlightened first will have to go through a nervous breakdown, only then he will have a breakthrough. That is how all the religions are created: individuals imposing their experience on the whole of humanity, without taking into consideration the uniqueness of every individual. (Osho 2000: 71) There is the same ambivalence again: his experiences could be turned into the making of a religion, they are germane to religion, but religion is dismissed as something that endangers the expression of individuality. From 1955 he taught philosophy in a small college in Central India and in 1960 he started to go on lecture tours. Both within his college and beyond Acharya (“teacher,” often used for Hindu religious teachers) Rajneeesh, as he was then known, made his name as a provocative and controversial public figure. His iconoclastic anti-authoritarianism was spiced with a great sense of humor. He left his post at the college in 1966. That gave him more independence and he grasped the opportunity to create scandal. For some of his wealthy supporters he arranged meditation retreats and provided counseling. At a lecture series he gave in Bombay in 1968, he praised the psychological and spiritual aspects of sex. He spoke of “the sacredness of sex” (Urban 2015: 81). Apparently inspired by Freud and Reich and tantric texts he praised the coitus as a means to approaching god, and he criticized all major religions for their suppression of the liberating force of human sexuality (Urban 2015: 81f). That created his public perception as the “sex guru.” In 1969, the centenary of Mohandas Gandhi, Rajneesh challenged almost every aspect of the Mahatma’s message, including, of course, his asceticism and chastity. He held Gandhi accountable for mass poverty and deprivation. In his turn, Rajneesh embraced technology and capitalism. In 1969, he was invited to speak at the Second World Hindu Conference in Patna, where he offended the organizers by 138 The Demise of Religion criticizing religious practices as futile and priests as thriving on the misery of beggars—all the while pointing toward the Shankarachaya of Puri, one of Hinduism’s most reputed authorities who was present on the stage (Bharti 2007; Urban 2015: 34). His bold and direct approach was reported widely in the national press (Bharti 2007). An Atheist Adopting a Religious Vocabulary Rajneesh, who after 1971 called himself Bhagwan (“God” or “Blessed One”), eventually settled in an apartment in India’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, Bombay. Despite his choice of name, he considered himself an atheist. He explained that calling himself God was meant as a provocation and an invitation for his students to discover their own divine nature (Palmer 1988: 125). In 1985, in retrospect, he speaks of his intention to “hammer religion and try to clean people completely of all this nonsense” (Osho 2000: 107). Thus, in expressing his atheist stance he did not shun an aggressive vocabulary: The whole history of religion simply stinks. It is ugly, and it shows the degradation of man, his inhumanity, and all that is evil. And this is not about any one single religion, it is the same story repeated by all the religions of the world: man exploiting man in the name of God. I still feel uneasy being associated with the word religion. (Osho 2000: 106) However, he came to realize that in a culture like India, public atheist pronouncements and demeanor made people shy away from him: “Being known as an atheist, irreligious, amoral, became a problem. It was difficult to communicate with people, almost impossible to bridge any kind of relationship with people. In my communing with people, those words—atheist, irreligious, amoral—functioned like impenetrable walls” (Osho 2000: 107). If he wanted to get his message across, he had to adapt his strategy, especially since it turned out that the seekers he was targeting were often involved in religions: “They were the people who would be ready to travel with me to unknown spaces. But they were already involved in some religion, in some sect, in some philosophy; just their thinking of me as irreligious, atheistic, became a barrier. And those Playing the Religion Card 139 were the people I had to seek out” (Osho 2000: 107).

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