Testimonial letter from G. Dharmasiri

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 G. Dharmasiri. It is "Exhibit A-2709" in the Noles collection.

The original letter was handwritten. The image below links to a pdf file of the original letter. It has one page.

This is an unusual letter in two ways. First, there is no reason to suppose that the date is incorrect, so it preceded the request for testimonials by almost a year and a half. It was included nevertheless because it addresses the the issue raised by the INS of whether Osho/Bhagwan is a genuine religious teacher, and it was unsolicited. Its other feature is in ending the collection but also bringing us back to the beginning in a serendipitous way: The writer is a professor at both Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges in Pennsylvania, and the writer of the first letter is also a professor at Haverford. So a kind of full circle, perhaps intended by the collectors, perhaps not. It has not been transcribed yet.

(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.)