Testimonial letter from Seung Sahn
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 Zen Master Seung Sahn and Lincoln Rhodes. It is "Exhibit A-45" 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.
 THE PROVIDENCE ZEN CENTER To Whom It May Concern, This letter is concerning the stay of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the United States as a religious teacher. There are two kinds of teaching, one involves speech and the other involves action or silence. An eminent teacher one time said that "Silence is better than Holy." Today our world has too much speech, so it is a very complicated world. So, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh by keeping silence is teaching us how to return to this "primary point" in order to find our human nature and true World Peace. Therefore we feel very strongly that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is a religious teacher who should be allowed to stay in this country. Sincerely, [notary statement] |
(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.)
