Osho’s Personal Library

Osho has always loved books. From his early childhood he is a voracious reader – he is the only person to have read every single book (3000) in his local library. And that while he is still  teenager.

At university he starts collecting books – he starves himself every second month to use the money his father sent him for food, to buy books.

At the University of Jabalpur also, most of the library books are signed out only in Osho’s name – the registers are still there.

‘I have been collecting books from my high school days. You will be surprised that by the time I was a matriculate I had read thousands of books and collected hundreds of books of my own – and great masterpieces. I was finished with Kahlil Gibran, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Turgenev – the best as far as writing is concerned. When I was finishing my intermediate I was finished with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bertrand Russell – all the philosophers that I could find in any library, in any bookshop, or borrow from anybody.’

Eventually Osho collects over 100,000 books, which are still in his library in Pune. It is one of the world’s largest private libraries, with approximately two kilometers of shelves. More

The books in this amazing library are not in any order. Osho has unusual rules for his library, which drive his librarian a little crazy – the books are not to be in any order, not by subject, nor title, nor author. Instead they are arranged like waves, with no two sizes next to each other and no two colours next to each other. The result is a library that seems very alive, not dead.

Pierre Evald, retired Assistant Professor at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, spent many hours studying Osho’s library. He says, ‘Of all the libraries I have observed worldwide, including China and Japan, public and academic, none comes close to the beauty and lightness of Osho’s Library.’