The Rajneesh movement formed around the Indian spiritual teacher Rajneesh, later known as Osho, who taught an eclectic synthesis of Eastern mysticism, meditation (including his distinctive "dynamic" active meditations), Western psychotherapy, and a critique of conventional social and religious constraints, especially around sexuality. His followers, called sannyasins (and later the Osho movement), were known for their orange-red clothing and their intense devotion.
In the early 1980s the movement established a large commune, Rajneeshpuram, on a ranch in rural Oregon, which grew rapidly and came into escalating conflict with neighbors and local and state authorities over land use, political control of the surrounding area, and immigration. This conflict produced a genuinely extraordinary criminal episode, established in the US courts: in 1984 leading figures in the commune's management, in an effort to influence a local election, carried out the deliberate contamination of restaurant salad bars with salmonella in the town of The Dalles, sickening more than 700 people, the largest bioterrorism attack in US history to that point. Several senior figures, including Rajneesh's chief lieutenant, were convicted; Rajneesh himself was deported, and the commune collapsed. He returned to India, where he died in 1990, and his teachings continue to circulate widely under the name Osho, largely detached from the Oregon episode.