OSHO: Indias Greatest Bookman?

If there were a competition to decide who is the 20th century's a) most voracious reader; b) most prolific author; and c) assembler of the largest personal library, India would have a candidate. His name is Osho, a spiritual leader, who attained, before his death in 1990, a substantial following both in India and the West. India's esteem for Osho can be measured by the fact that he is one of only two authors whose entire works have been placed in the Library of India's National Parliament in New Delhi. The other is Mahatma Gandhi.

From 1958 to 1966, Osho was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. Thereafter, he devoted himself entirely to spiritual study, reading close to 100 books a week. He is said to have read 100-200.000 titles over a period of forty years, some fiction, but mostly philosophy, psychology, religion and science.

In Books I have loved (1985), a book dedicated to the memory of Alan Watts and his effort to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western thinking and spirituality, Osho cites authors as diverse as Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Book of Mirdad, Lao Tzu, Hahlil Gibran, D R Susuki, Herman Hess, Jean Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Samuel Beckett, Karl Marx, Turgenev, Herbert Marcuse and Aristotle.

In 1954, at the age of twenty-three, he spent his entire salary for a month (seventy rupees) on a copy of P D Ouspensky's Tertium Organum. He had a particular passion for 19th century Russian novelists and maintained that if he had to count only ten outstanding novels, five of them would be Russian. Osho first came to the attention of students from the West during his stay in Bombay from 1970 to 1974. Thereafter he settled in Poona, on the edge of the Deccan plateau, 120 miles from Bombay. His mansion, known as Lao Tzu House, is entirely filled with books. His private library of 100.000 volumes is said to be exceeded in the 20th century only by that of Henry Edwards Huntington, the American railway tycoon (1850-1927).

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