COLUMN ONE : Feud Flares Over ‘Club Meditation’ : Guru Osho Rajneesh sparks controversy even in death. A fight has emerged over control of his empire, including a giant commune in India that caters to both vacationers and pilgrims.

PUNE, India —  Twilight is falling. More than 3,000 barefoot, mostly Western and 30-something followers of Osho Rajneesh have padded into a lofty tent christened “Buddha Hall” to again hear the master’s words.

The guru’s white armchair, complete with a cushion to ease his chronic back pain, is reverently borne in and placed on a marble platform. A screen lowers to the amplified twang of a sitar. The projector lights up and purrs.

Ten feet high, there reappears the wispy-bearded countenance of the iconoclast who once called himself the Baghwan (God), shocked much of the world by owning no fewer than 93 Rolls-Royces and lashed out at organized religion. (Christianity, he said, is “the deadliest poison.”)

“The worshiper is the worshiped, you don’t have to worship anyone else,” Rajneesh proclaims from the screen, his bulging, guppy-like eyes shaded by aviator sunglasses. “Existence is irrational. The moment you ask why, you have missed the point.”

Sitting on the marble floor in their pristine white robes, the disciples reflect silently on the evening’s sermon. As the session ends and their playfully smiling teacher vanishes, they rise and joyously and deafeningly shout “Osho!”

The outrageously provocative, Zen-inspired thinker--born Mohan Chandra Rajneesh and dubbed the “sex guru” by a scandalized press--seems to be enjoying the last laugh in death.

Nine years ago, with the commune his followers founded in Oregon convulsed by a power struggle, he was arrested on immigration fraud charges in the United States and expelled.

On Jan. 19, 1990, at age 58, the man known to his latter-day followers as Osho died here of massive coronary thrombosis, or “left the body,” as disciples say.

Strewn with petals, Osho’s corpse was carried to a riverside pyre from the religious teaching center, or ashram, that he founded 20 years ago in this inland city southeast of Bombay and incinerated that very evening.

But thanks to magnetic tape, inspired marketing and the spiritual hunger and curiosity of thousands of Westerners, the guru lives on--though another power struggle may be on, this time for mastery of his legacy.

Still, the ashram, Osho Commune International, has become, in its own words, “the biggest spiritual health club in the world,” doubling in size in three years and attracting more pilgrims and enlightenment- and sun-starved holiday makers than ever.

“This is a unique place, a buddhafield,” proclaims a notice at the gate, where guards, Osho’s hirsute brother among them, verify that visitors have passed a mandatory AIDS test and bought a daily pass that costs about 66 cents.

Once inside the fenced-in oasis of 31 acres, the paying guest can meditate, take a class in Zen archery or get a massage at a “Multiversity”--or just play a set of what is jocularly called “Zennis.”

Many who seek succor in Rajneesh’s eclectic blend of Asian mysticism and Western pop psychology and materialism find contentment and enrichment--and confirmation that Osho was much more than a spiritual con artist.

For the last 3 1/2 years, ruddy-faced Burt Eggan, 62, a former Manhattan Beach stockbroker and restaurateur, has lived in a one-bedroom servant’s house in Pune.

A dropout from the high-pressure world of finance, Eggan is one of the scores who perform volunteer work at the ashram, checking off visitor’s meal cards, selling them towels and booking tennis courts.

“I was a fairly neurotic alcoholic suburban businessman,” said the man now known as Swami Anand Burt, clad in the ankle-length maroon robe of an Osho disciple. “Beneath the exterior, I was desperate.”

He read one of Rajneesh’s books and left his wife and two children to follow his guru.

Summarizing the thoughts of a man whose transcribed teachings fill an entire commune bookstore and have sold a purported 15 million volumes worldwide is not easy. Perhaps the kernel is Osho’s notion that the perfect human being combines the earthy zest of Zorba the Greek and the transcendental spirituality of Buddha.

“A Buddha that cannot dance is not much of a Buddha,” he once sniffed.

Osho called himself a guru for the rich, for people who already have a fast car but are seeking inner wealth. He held that poverty was a consequence of humanity’s idiocy. He spoke of Hitler and Gandhi as being violent men.

He told tasteless jokes about Nancy Reagan in his sermons and said meditation and sex were both valid techniques to penetrate the inner self.

He counseled followers to wear latex gloves during foreplay and appears to have been obsessed about the risk of AIDS.

Osho, the eldest son of a central Indian cloth merchant, enraged many at home and in the West because there had never been anyone who more brashly proclaimed his belief in both the divine and the crassly material.

“Osho was a man who was dead set against priests and politicians, against religion,” Swami Krishna Aroop, a New Delhi merchant who has been a follower for 13 years, explained in his sari shop as he sipped milky coffee one afternoon. “Osho wanted to create new men.”

And therein, perhaps, lies the joke that the passing of time in turn has played on the guru.

Aroop and some other disaffected Indian followers of Osho say that the buddhafield in Pune is actually becoming a battlefield as Osho’s successors, home-grown and foreign, vie for mastery of his legacy.

The ashram, Aroop said sadly, “has been taken over by new priests and politicians.”

He and some other longstanding Indian disciples of Osho point a finger at a coterie of Westerners who they claim have money, and not metaphysics, on their minds.

“Their sole concern is to become bigger and bigger, and more powerful,” charged Swami Suraj Prakash Manchanda, a Bombay trucking company owner who once hosted Osho for five months in his home. For speaking out, Manchanda said, he has been banned from the ashram.

The real genius behind the commune’s transformation into “Club Meditation,” as it calls itself, appears to be an elusive Canadian real estate investor, Michael William O’Byrne, 45, now known as Swami Jayesh.

Jayesh--the affable, polite and smooth-mannered son of a provincial judge from Edmonton, Canada--was raised in a large Roman Catholic family.

Jayesh lived in a Palm Springs condo around a decade ago, locals recalled.

“He came down here, he had some money, he played a little polo. He was a very, very nice man,” said Susan Stovall, director of polo at the El Dorado Polo Club in Indio. “He was a gentleman, always a gentleman, very kind to his horses and the people who worked for him (grooms).”

O’Byrne swung a mallet for a year to a year and a half, Stovall said, then “rode off into the sunset with the Baghwan.”

The lanky, curly-haired Canadian became head of financial services for the Rajneesh Investment Corp. in the Oregon commune days, and was with the guru when he was arrested in Charlotte, N.C., when it seemed that he might be trying to flee the United States in a private jet for Bermuda.

Rajneesh pleaded guilty to two counts of a federal grand jury indictment in Portland, Ore., including charges that he had arranged sham marriages so his foreign followers could settle at the commune.

The remaining 33 counts were dropped. He was given a 10-year suspended prison sentence, fined $400,000 and ordered to leave the United States.

On his death bed, claiming that he had been covertly fed thalium, a common ingredient in rat poison, and exposed to radiation during his 17 days in jail in the United States, Rajneesh looked into Jayesh’s eyes and said, “I leave you my dream,” it was later announced.

Commune officials flatly denied The Times’ request to speak to Jayesh.

By all accounts, he keeps an extraordinarily low profile.

The seeds of the dispute that divides some of Osho’s most senior followers arise from the decision the ailing Osho made in April, 1989, to appoint a 21-member Inner Council to deal with “mundane matters” of running the commune after he had gone.

Jayesh was named chairman. The vice chairman’s job went to Swami Prem Amrito, or Dr. George Meredith, 49, a handsome fellow of the British Royal College of Physicians who was Osho’s personal doctor. He lived with 5,000 other devotees in the Oregon commune and was the one who placed the urn containing Osho’s ashes in his tomb.

The dissatisfied Indians paint a picture of intrigue on the Inner Council that has led to 11 of its original members leaving or being forced out.

For Aroop, the sari merchant, the last straw came when the leadership, citing exclusive knowledge of “Osho guidance,” or the guru’s final wishes, ruled that meditation camps organized by him and other Osho followers across India could not exceed three days.

“When did Osho ever say that, I ask you?” Aroop asked gently. “What they are truthfully concerned about is that, if people meditate in Delhi, they will no longer come to Pune. They have turned the man who was against all churches into a church, with its commandments and rules!”

The church also has a hot tub now. Under Inner Council guidance, the ashram has been transformed, and boasts a lagoon-shaped pool, volleyball court, studio for painting and pottery, a tatami-equipped gym for martial arts, a Multiversity that includes an Institute for Love and Consciousness, four vegetarian eating areas, a sauna and the “zennis courts.”

For many of Osho’s faithful, it is the most perfect place on Earth they know.

“You basically have to choose: It’s the world or this,” said Mike Mogul, 50.

Once a writer of the suggestive questions asked by women on “The Dating Game,” Mogul has become the black-robed Swami Krishna Prem, instructor of meditation and “zennis.”

Osho taught that asking “why” about things was absurd, and commune leaders acknowledge that its finances and organization may seem that way to outsiders.

“The commune is kind of self-organizing. Sannyasins (Osho’s followers, literally “those who have renounced the world”) are not people who like being told what to do,” Amrito answered when asked who, precisely, is in charge.

“None of us gets a salary,” he said. “Basically every single bit of money that comes in here is spent on here, on his work.”

Amrito contended that nobody really knows how much money flows into the buddhafield, where everything from large $1 photos of Osho to meal tickets and videos of the guru’s teachings are on sale.

“No one here is going to sit down and give you an annual report,” he said.

One Indian journalist who has looked into commune affairs estimates from 2,000 to 8,000 robed disciples visit daily, and that they spend at least $40,000 a day--meaning an annual take of no less than $7.3 million. But he emphasizes that is only an informed guess.

It is no easier to learn where royalties from impressive worldwide publishing operations end up.

The commune says 236 books are in production and 79 in translation. Last year alone, Rebel Publishing House of Cologne, Germany, Osho’s major English-language publisher, distributed an estimated 250,000 volumes.

More books and tapes are in the pipeline. Osho videotaped 1,700 hours of lectures and question-and-answer sessions and audiotaped 3,500 hours. That’s enough to show a tape every night for three years.

Visiting sannyasins stay for the most part in rental apartments or, like Swami Anand Burt, in servant’s quarters on the grounds of wealthy Indians’ homes.

Clad in the wine-colored robes that make up their day wear, they buzz to the commune on scooters or motorized rickshaws, infuriating neighbors with the noise and the peddlers they draw.

The Pune ashram was once notorious for orgies so energetic they left some sannyasins with broken bones.

These days, new arrivals are told that if they want to demonstrate their affection, they should wait until they are inside commune walls and away from the shocked eyes of India’s prudes.

Sannyasins there unabashedly kiss and nuzzle one another, but no more than at any holiday resort.

For the cost of the daily pass, sannyasins can attend several public meditation sessions, including the dusk conclave when they change attire and become the Osho White Robe Brotherhood.

Multiversity Chancellor Swami Satya Vedant, who says he supervised courses taken by an average of 50,000 visitors a year, is one Indian who expresses bliss at the workings of Osho Commune International.

“It’s a complete fallacy that foreigners are in charge,” said Vedant, who once taught Indian culture and religion at UC Berkeley. “The Inner Circle is 25% Indian. That’s the largest national group.”

But another Indian sannyasin who has performed his own investigation said he has seen the forms filed by the religious trusts that constitute the commune’s owners of record, and that the purported trustees are Indian office clerks or other low-level commune employees.

That maneuver, the disciple said, would allow circumvention of laws that restrict non-Indians’ right to own property.

Ironically, the naming of the multi-member Inner Council was meant to prevent a repeat of the power struggle that had rocked Rajneeshpuram.

There, the guru’s steel-fisted former chief of staff, Ma Sheela, took control after Rajneesh took a vow of silence. She later fled with her staff, and Rajneesh accused her of trying to poison Amrito and Oregon government officials.

Outraged by the decisions of the Inner Council, Swami Chaitanya Bharati, one of Osho’s most trusted disciples, has now organized his own dissident meditation camps.

Other Indians charge Osho’s foreign heirs are racist to the point of excluding dark-skinned sannyasin from publicity photographs and tourist brochures.

But those who believe in the commune say it is perhaps the only spot on the planet where people from so many countries come together in friendship and fellowship in search of the higher truth revealed by Osho. Everything else, they say, is unimportant.

“If you come to this place and look at it logically, you won’t understand anything,” explained Prem Leela, a South African who directs the Multiversity’s Meditation Academy.

Times staff writer Tom Gorman in Riverside contributed to this report.