Re-Imagining an Ancient Greek Philosopher: The Pythagorean Musings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho)

In the last third of the twentieth century, the controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a.k.a. Osho (1931–1990), postulated the necessity of a “new”—“Pythagorean”—man, and began to fashion himself as a new Pythagoras. This chapter focuses on constitutive antecedents of this postulate in order to show how it was possible for Pythagoras of Samos, stylised in modern times as a representative of the perennial philosophy, to serve as a suitable referential model for Osho. These connections are reconstructed by examining Osho’s 1972/73 lecture series on the Vijnāna Bhairava Tantra, of which he used Paul Reps’ edition, and his commentary on the Golden Verses entitled Philosophia Perennis (1978/79), which constitutes a reception of Antoine Fabre d’Olivet’s Les vers dores de Pythagore (1813).