Testimonial letter from John Clarke
This letter is one of a remarkable series of over 2650 letters amassed in 1983 to support Osho's attempt to get permanent resident status in the US at the time of the Oregon ranch. The image is reproduced here with the kind permission of The Oregon Historical Society. Information about their collection of these letters and other supporting material -- the "Jeffrey Noles Rajneesh Collection", named for Osho's immigration lawyer Jeffrey Noles, who compiled them in 1983 and donated them to the OHS -- can be found at this page. The wiki is grateful to the OHS for making access available for these documents. For more information and links to all the letters, see Testimonial letters.
This letter is from John Clarke. It is "Exhibit A-1728" in the Noles collection.
The text version below has been created by optical character recognition (OCR), from the images supplied by OHS. It has not been checked for errors but this process usually results in over 99% correct transcription. Most apparent "errors" are correct transcriptions of typos already in the original. The image on the right in the text box links to a pdf file of the original letter, it has one page.
 South Wales To whom it may concern, I am a sub editor employed by the South Wales Echo newspaper and a B.A. (Hons) graduate of the University of Lancaster. It was while studying religion at Lancaster in 1978 that I first came across the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Lancaster has the largest Religious Studies department of any university in the United Kingdom and is generally considered as the leading department in Europe for the study of comparative religion. Several members of staff are visiting lecturers to universities in the United States of America, including Professor Ninian Smart who is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost experts in the world today on religion as author of The Religious Experience of Mankind. Books by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh are recommended reading for certain courses, especially Buddhism, and numerous of his works are available at the university library. I frequently read Rajneesh during my studies at Lancaster and found them invaluable in improving my understanding of both Buddhism and Hinduism. In my opinion, Rajneesh has the rare ability of clearly explaining the more abstruse concepts, of Indian religions to students in the West. During my three years at Lancaster, Rajneesh’s work aroused a growing interest and respect among both students and members of staff. A fellow undergraduate devoted the greater part of her studies to completing a major thesis on Rajneeshism. When I graduated in July, 1981, the department were planning to include the teachings of Rajneesh in a course on new religions. Yours sincerely, |
(Please note: We assume that the above letter is still copyrighted, but we regard its historical interest to constitute a Fair Use exception for publication in this wiki.)
