About this site

The Osho Books Library: Historical Background

In the years following his enlightenment, Osho started speaking in public. His first talks were at the start of the 1960s but were recorded only occasionally, so were not transcribed or published. Whatever has been transcribed in to English and published was collected together at the first Osho Commune in Pune, India in the 1970s. This included letters and correspondence.

In the late 1980s, advances in personal computing enabled individuals to scan printed books and convert them into digital format. A contact at SilverPlatter Information, Inc. provided access to the company’s software for indexing the scanned material and distributing it on CD-ROM. The software included a searchable text index; however, because it had been designed primarily for medical records rather than extensive literary content, it proved suboptimal for Osho’s works.

Scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) of the collection continued, encompassing not only commercially published titles but also unpublished manuscripts and earlier pamphlets translated from Hindi into English. To create a more effective searchable database suitable for distribution on CD-ROM and installation on Windows systems, the Folio Views software was acquired. The first version of the resulting CD-ROM was released in 1994.

This website presents the texts exactly as they appear in that original CD-ROM edition — unedited and uncensored. There is an even greater number of Hindi talks and books that have not (yet) been included in this site.

Background information on the CD-ROM was drawn from the Sannyas Wiki (Osho Books on CD-ROM). Readers seeking further details about the books and about Osho are encouraged to consult this excellent resource.

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