One of Osho’s best intellectual “leaps”! Here is how he describes it
You need to be reminded about Buddha’s life:
Up to his twenty-ninth year, he was a pure Zorba. He had the best young girls available in his kingdom, by the dozen. His whole palace was full of music and dance. He had the best food, best clothes, beautiful palaces to live in, great gardens. He lived more deeply than poor Zorba the Greek.
Zorba had only one Bubulina — an old, faded woman, a prostitute who had lost all her customers. She had false teeth, false hair — and Zorba was her customer only because he could not afford to pay. You call him Zorba? — and you forget completely the twenty-nine years of Buddha’s life which were far richer. Day in, day out, he was simply living in luxury, surrounded by everything that he could imagine. He was living in a dreamland. It was this experience that turned him into a Buddha.
… .. . It has not been analyzed this way. Nobody bothers about the first part of his life — which is the very base.
Siddhārtha Gautama (Buddha’s birth name) became fed up. He tasted every joy of the outside; now he wanted something more, something deeper, which was not available in the outside world. For the deeper you have to jump in. At the age of twenty-nine he left the palace in the night in search of the inner. It is Zorba going in search of the Buddha.
Zorba the Greek never became a Buddha for the simple reason that his Zorbahood is incomplete. He is a beautiful man, full of zest, but a poor man. He wants to live life in its intensity, but he has no opportunity to live it. He dances, he sings, but he does not know the higher nuances of music. He does not know the dance where the dancer disappears.
The Zorba in Buddha knew the highest and the deepest parts of the outside world. Knowing it all, now he was ready to go on an inner search. The world is good, but not good enough; something more is needed. It gives momentary glimpses; the Buddha wants something eternal. And all these joys will be finished by death. He wants to know something which cannot be finished by death.
If I have to write Gautama Buddha’s life, I will start it from Zorba. And when he is completely acquainted with the outer and whatever the outside can give, and still finds the meaning missing, he goes in search — because that is the only direction that he has not looked in. He never looks back — there is no reason to look back, he has lived it all! And he is not just a religious seeker who has not known the outer at all. He is a Zorba — he goes towards the inner with the same zest, with the same strength, the same power. And, obviously, he finds in his innermost being the contentment, the fulfillment, the meaning, the benediction that he has been seeking.
It is possible you can be a Zorba and stop there. It is possible you may not be a Zorba and start looking for the Buddha — you will not find him. Only Zorba can find the Buddha; otherwise, you don’t have the strength: you have not lived in the outside world, you have avoided it. You are an escapist.
To me, to be a Zorba is the beginning of the journey, and to become a Buddha is reaching the goal. And it can happen in the same individual — it can only happen in the same individual. That’s why I am insisting continuously: don’t create any split in your life, don’t condemn anything of the body. Live it — not unwillingly — live it totally, intensely. That very living will make you capable of another search.
That’s why I don’t say my sannyasins have to be ascetics, that my sannyasins have to leave their wives, their husbands, their children. All that nonsense has been taught for centuries, and how many people — out of millions of monks and nuns — how many people have blossomed? Not even a single one. I want you to live life undivided. And first comes the body, first comes your outer world.
The moment the child is born he opens his eyes, and the first thing he sees is the whole panorama of existence around him. He sees everything except himself — that is for more experienced people. That is for those who have seen everything of the outside, lived it, and are freed from it.
Freedom from the outside does not come by escaping. Freedom from the outside comes by living it totally, and then there is nowhere to go. Only one dimension remains, and it is natural that you would like to search in that remaining dimension. And there is your Buddha, your enlightenment.
You are saying, “Is it possible that Zorba and Buddha can meet?” That is the only possibility. Without Zorba there is no Buddha. Zorba, of course, is not a full stop. He is the preparation for the Buddha. He is the roots; Buddha is the flowering.
From Bondage to Freedom
Chapter – 40 Without Zorba there is no Buddha
Now the question comes: Who is going to be the next Buddha: Prince Charles´s younger son or the founders of Google?
Zorba to Buddha…
Is the journey almost like from Osho Commune to Osho Resort or is like Turiya´s group to Meera´s audience.
Life has changed, contexts have changed. To be true, the piece looks like a catalogue of a company which is no more in the trading.
It is just my perception, truth can be otherwise too.
Shantam, try reading and meditating (have you heard this word yet, btw?) on Samarpan’s post, just a few minutes before yours. In so many of your bitter complaints about ‘the regime’ is an implicit blaming of others, of ‘circumstances’ for your personal situation, for whatever you judge as ‘wrong’ in your life – a sense of being a ‘victim’, with all the misplaced self-righteousness that helpless standpoint carries with it.
That undercurrent is probably a large part of why you consistently fail to ‘win friends and influence people’ here at SN. Who wants to pay attention to such “a whiner and whinger” (as the Aussies would call you)?
(You do realise you’re wasting your time and energy here, don’t you?).
Satyadeva, you think I want to influence people and win friends here at SN.
You must be kidding.
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SD, when Shantam is in this mode, which he is almost all the time, he reminds me of the mosquito disturbing the meditators. I thank Existence for not making us meet in our childhood!
As Lokesh has pointed out here, before SD:
Shantam is not really addressing the bloggers here or using SN in the way most of us do.
He is using it as a platform for the wider world and his wider agenda. These posts may appear here, but though I have never checked I am more or less sure they are linked or copied elsewhere, and wherever his campaign to reoccupy the Pune Resort attracts credence or controversy.
Including, one imagines, his almost 2,000 “friends” on Facebook!
“Shantam is not really addressing the bloggers here or using SN in the way most of us do.”
Does it mean everybody needs to walk in the straight line? There is no place for non-conformist in the scheme of things?
Maybe you guys write for each other. I write for the invisible readers too.
What I think Parmartha’s getting at, Shantam, is that you so often simply choose to ignore others’ posts concerning you or what you’ve written. And that you are focused on just one thing, one issue, apparently determined to use SN as a means of spreading your one-pointed propaganda.
But yes, you’re right about one thing though: those readers you think you’re writing for are certainly “invisible”! I recall none who have ever responded to you, let alone expressed any agreement.
You’re consumed by sheer delusion, Shantam, and its concomitant self-importance.
Gosh, your a creative English gentleman, SD.
Who would have thought it possible to call someone a twat in so many polite English phrases?
How it can be sheer delusion?
I am not calling myself Avatara.
Sheer delusion and self-importance is when some Indians do spread the propaganda of being embodiment of God.
Your delusion takes various forms, Shantam, this one being that you’re ‘really’ addressing an “invisible” audience who are hanging on every word you write (yet, most mysteriously, never expressing a word of support!).
You’re either too stupid to realise this and/or tricky enough to try to deflect the issue on to an irrelevance.
Plus being an attention-seeker, with too much time on your hands….
“Invisible readers”. They don’t exist? Spirits? Those chaps with bandaged heads, sunglasses and bowler hats?
The significance of this post seems to me to be Osho’s insight into Buddha’s life.
Many of us have lived lives which courted both meditation and Zorba at the same time, and thought it somehow complementary. Here it seems that Osho is saying that meditation cannot be taken seriously until one has exhausted every avenue of pleasure and enjoyment, of ‘having fun’, and “really” living life, as one group leader once told me.
Hence becoming tired with that, one then moves in the only direction left – going within! At some inner level, I am not sure of this, though it may well have applied to Gautama.
Zorba the Buddha was one of Osho’s greatest concepts. Reading the above it all makes logical sense. Observing Osho’s life one could come to the conclusion that he was Buddha the Zorba, because he was more Buddha-like in the beginning and more Zorba-like towards the end.
In the beginning he lived quite humbly and in the end he lived in palaces, surrounded by hundreds of dancing girls and he liked driving fancy chariots.
What to make of it? I like the Zorba the Buddha idea. but I do not see it as the end-all of spiritual concepts, just one of many. When the shoe fits…as the saying goes.
Zorba the Buddha is a great concept and the general insight that meditation and being holy is no excuse for not getting down and dirty with the reality of life holds.
Yet isn`t it all a bit last century? I mean, Osho says: “He (Buddha) had all the best girls by the dozen.”
A bit sexist, isn`t it? So did Jimmy Savile!
What Osho is implying when he says that Buddha had everything he wanted is that women are all lumped in with clothes, palaces, gardens and servants…
Just stuff that has to be transcended.
Isn`t that just the same old power-warped patriarchal shite rearing its ugly head again?
Doesn`t it just normalise the warped man/woman relations/power structures that ‘religion’ has worked so successfully at creating?
Possibly a good point, Frank. But substituting ‘all the sex he could wish for’ for “all the best girls by the dozen”, ie ‘sex’ for “women”, would tidy that up, wouldn’t it?
As that – rather than genuinely ‘real’ relationship as a pre-requisite for love – is what such indulgence was, is and always will be about – for men anyway. Didn’t you partake of such in, er, ‘your day’?
SD,
Point taken.
I was just trying to find some angle of disagreement with the whole Zorba the Buddha thing, for the sake of mental agility, but it’s very hard as it is an absolute cracker.
It is said that creativity is the marriage of two previously unrelated things and Osho certainly hit it when he came up with Zorba the Buddha.
Savile the Buddha doesn`t really cut the biscuit.
.
Back to the drawing board….
Yes, Frank, it is. The women – and don’t forget the children (maybe because they come out from the women) – always suffered in this world. It doesn’t matter if the women are in ‘important’ jobs or making chappatis and looking after the siblings at home. They always have to suck a cock. The world is full of Jimmy Saviles, it is how the system works…
Jimmy Savile the Buddha? Nahhh! Zorba sounds much better!
Cheers.
Tan, that’s pretty good English from a Doll-who-might…orally speaking.
Yeah, but on the other hand, the mothers often made/make the children to fill er a ‘ hole’, so to speak, in their own lives, which never gets a look-in in the oppressed women thing. After all, if they manage to do the birth plus making themselves a role of all-knowing-seeing etc. , together with the male partner, then there doesn’t leave a lot of room for non-fascist relationships amongst the ‘family’ offspring/beloved my family stuff…
Unless, of course, you have a 21st century ‘family’ that’s funky, switched on, responsible, supportive, indulgent and egalitarian and ‘open’.
Speaking as a single parent myself, who had no other support in the toddler years of being that parent, years ago, I know that also transparency and non-fascist parenting was not a common denominator amongst the lard-ass class that pushes prams in Lidl or Waitrose:
“Shane, put that tin back, I told you NOW!”
And even worse amongst the privilegiati media entrepreneur types of the Devon beaches with their plummy tones of self-satisfied family bourgeois life and rocket and caprese salads for four: “Jacob, stop trying to put on Emily’s sweater, say sorry, Jacob, and don’t forget to eat all the honey-glazed ham sandwiches from grandma.” (They’re so demanding at that age, chortle, guffaw).
Frankly, the kids at Ko Hsuan did pretty well in having the place to themselves, and that’s despite most of the teachers there having huge deficiency syndromes themselves, even before my time there!
The kids, along those Zorba Buddha lines did pretty good, considering, and friends maintain strong links with them down the years. They became in turn intelligent, voracious for life, child-bearing parents of their own these days, but with a whole generational shift that allowed them to be cool and interesting and supportively available to their own kids.
Sure, many of them hark back to the halcyon days of their commune lives, being as the world now intrudes, but wasn’t that great of us and Osho to do some real Zorbary Buddhing for the next generations?
I know of the anti comments in some ex-Osho kids’ commune individuals, and have posted links myself for that here, but that wasn’t my experience.
It was crazy collective joy and absurd creativity. Even if you did have to evacuate the house three times in the week at night cos some guys couldn’t stop taking the piss with the fire-alarms.
Love it.
Prem Martyn, you were working at Ko Hsuan school. I have heard just like the concept of Zorba the Buddha, school too had far-out concept.
What happened after few years? Why every concept of Osho and his disciples fall flat after the initial phase of trials? Every time we can not blame one Sheela and one Ronald Reagan.
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Thanks, Prem Martin, for the sharing of your experience with children in UK. The oppression in UK is a different kind, like 10 year-old girls with anorexia or other mental problem due to not having big knockers or a big butt, demented plastic surgeries, etc…Very sad indeed!
Zorba the Buddha is a baby step, maybe somebody else will come along and show us a bigger step and so on…
And for your records, the dolly here does not!
Very much appreciate your post. Cheers!
Tan,
We men, as the weaker sex, are basically terrified of Budditas and Buddhanas and Buddhelas the Vajazzlers…
No wonder guys make such a song and dance about sitting alone in silence…Yeah, right, amazing things to do with sitting on a cushion…notttttt…
http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/we-spoke-to-the-woman-who-lifts-weights-with-her-vagina–lJ1ADPIfpe
All these macho dudes thinking it’s spiritual to loaf around on a cushion all day! Bet they still had to get women to come and plump up the cushions when they`d finished!
Btw, Marty, you`re sounding like a radical feminist.
Me too.
You have to be these days to get a shag!
“Vaginal Kung Fu” course – how cool is that? This lady must be enlightened!
Well, at least, we can see that lifting heavy things with the sexual organs is not only for those stinking, ugly and disgusting ‘yogis’ who give spectacles in that country where all the religions were born…
What is the country’s name? I’ve forgotten, sorry!
China?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js_3bIni52I
(If I had mastered that one I could have got on a lot better with the wife).
India?
This one isn`t even funny (look away now):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7ROOJ74kgI
USA?
Religionless religion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyv_MHxqRX0
Yes, it’s a beautiful sentiment, this marriage of Zorba and Buddha. The idea that by living life in ‘a total way’ on the outside, we also discover the meaningless and emptiness of the outer world, and go in.
I guess Osho recognised that we were all repressed, guilty and anxious, and saw that the only way through it was through ‘experience’ of all kinds.
Has it worked? If we look around, many are still stuck in the search for more pleasure. Have we done what Osho truly asked of us? Or is the problem that, unlike Buddha, the rest of us have never had 29 years of full exposure to pleasure? The Buddha’s situation was pretty unique.
Either way, the principle that Osho gave us, of living without repressing our feelings and of breaking down the almost Victorian mores of our society hold good for me.
His idea of living through experience of as many kinds as possible, and exhausting them, remains valid. Experience bored me fairly quickly, whether that was because I was too troubled to truly enjoy as others did, I don’t know. Was it because I was inherently dissatisfied within or because ‘out there’ never gave me the pleasure I was seeking? Again I don’t know.
Looking out today, I see much confusion. We are a pleasure-seeking society, obsessed with sex, determined to rid ourselves of guilt and shame and duty to others.
We are largely incapable of loving each other because we are more selfish than ever. Why? Is it because we haven’t yet indulged and fulfilled ourselves of all our desires, and so we should continue on our current path?
Such a path seems to take us to the verge of total destruction, which I guess is where I see us going. This seems to me to be the wider ‘global’ position.
I wonder, too, if the reason why we haven’t exhausted our desire for pleasure may be because we haven’t really followed our desires to the limit. We are still a lot more repressed than we’d like to believe. How honest are we about our darkest, most intimate feelings and desires? Do we share the vulnerability and real fears about who we are? Are we honest with our fellow man and woman? If we were, might we see through our desires more quickly and with a real result?
I have attempted to be as honest and true about my feelings with others. Not privately and secretively but as publicly and intimately as possible. It’s been terrifying at times. I’ve been ridiculed and attacked and felt very alone and isolated. Luckily, I’ve also been blessed with a few, very few, friends and lovers who had the same longing, to be free of the mind.
I’ve enjoyed exploring with this forum, because it’s given me a wonderful opportunity to write publicly, to sort out some ideas, to express myself and to be heard. Here too, there have been moments when I’ve been afraid to reveal myself and it’s been a great learning experience.
So thanks, all of you guys. The ‘experience’ has been rewarding.
I reckon you have to have ‘SELFISH’ in big red letters on your entry card for this world, or else you will not be allowed in.
Nice one, Lokesh. How do you get an exit card from this world?
My feeling is, Simond, soon you will be in the league of spiritual inspirational and motivational speakers or writers, like late Barry Long or Eckhart Tolle.
And I am also very sure one of your speeches will start with, “Humanity is passing through a period of deep crisis.”
The Very Reverend Derek “Simple” Simond-Nimmo, a selfless preacher from the Church of Latter-Day Barry Longers, was called to give a sermon at a St. Sannyasnews mental institution for the spiritually challenged, the congregation of which was infamous for its sinful, unrepentant and godless ways, which had already taken humanity to the very verge of extinction.
As the strains of the final verse of ‘Haway in a Manger’ died down, the erstwhile Rev. meditatively made his way up to the pulpit. In time-honoured fashion, he started his sermon:
“Let us just take a moment of reflection to ponder why we are all here…”
At that moment a voice from the back pew shouted out:
“Because we are not all there!”
No, Shantam, it’s in fact YOU who’s passing through a period of deep crisis – but instead of seeing the obvious you imagine it’s all because of that ‘wretched regime’ 6000 miles away. Convenient escape (from your self) act, eh?
But there again, what else to expect from someone who thinks BL and ET are merely “spiritual inspirational speakers or writers”?!
Late BL and ET are merely “spiritual inspirational speakers or writers”?!
Yes – have they created some institution? Miss MM, who is being called Avatara, is not even that.
Ok, to be fair, I also feel to say that to call Osho as Master of the Masters is too extravagant. The way policies are being formed in his name, soon he can be also called, An Impressive Orator!
Apart from your obvious blind ignorance of any of the three people you mention here, Shantam, you badly mislead yourself if you think a spiritual teacher’s worth is defined by whether he or she creates “an institution” (clearly a pseudonym for a ‘religion’, in your terms).
For a start, any “institution”, by the way of things, is bound to degenerate, sooner or later, it has a sort of inbuilt ‘entropy factor’ (or whatever is the correct term, I’m sure there is one), not to mention the usual array of potentially destructive forces operating in any such ‘political’ set-up: power-seeking, jealousy, interpersonal antagonism, distance from the people it’s meant to be serving – all of which eventually make the corruption of its original purpose more or less inevitable.
Plus, of course, in a would-be ‘religion’, the emergence and divisive influence of various ‘priests’, with their differing ‘interpretations’ of the original master.
I mean, just look at any of the so-called ‘great’ religions and even you, Shantam, will surely get the idea…
Teachers, masters work in different ways and are not to be judged by what their ‘followers’ make of them after they’ve gone. Your perspective, Shantam, indicates (yet again) that you still don’t see the ‘spiritual wood’ for the ‘religio-political trees’: you joined a ‘movement’, that you thought was set to be a new religion, but as soon as its outer form changed, you became like a fish out of water – an angry little fish at that, full of blame, wanting things your way, a middle-aged child in an ongoing tantrum, having seemingly gained absolutely nothing of much internal worth from all those years.
As such, of course, you’re just the type to want to create and belong to an ‘institution’, where outer forms and observances are more important than any genuine inner search. Sincere – oh, yes, but of course! – but fundamentally too mediocre to ever grasp what the master was about.
Such is the fate of institutionalised religions, in the hands of people like you. God save the world – and specifically, Osho’s people, present and future – from any more such foolish nonsense perpetrated by such fools as you.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/27/oliver-burkeman-mediocrity
Exit cards!…This way, please…I give special price…Surrender to me!
How is the outer meaningless if it provides so many opportunities to become mature?
Arpana, your link on the Caravanserai prompted my reply to that news article. You’ll ROFL if I could (won’t) tell you how much I know of some people who are or have been highly involved in some commissioning articles in national newspapers. I might be saying too much already as the internet is full of re-tweets. Ooopsss!!
This is what I wrote, off the cuff:
Hey, tell your features editor that the ride with Rajneesh /Osho was better than all the dahlings/ media/ ambitious/ mortgaged/nuclear family codswallop of social conformism. Why?Because we gave a sh*t about the amount of interpersonal joy we created – let alone being in the presence of Osho, who,you with your academic and government-approved university- trained analysis will never, ever, ever get, however successful you become.
It’s great to fall over edges of cliffs if you know how. Osho showed the way up from everyone else going down. Osho didn’t care? That’s not what I got from him or it, but I did get that experiencing is everything – and then some. Try getting that permission in your humdrum daily metro life.
“It’s great to fall over edges of cliffs if you know how.”
Great line.
Ne , Arpanamou , ne !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6K7OC-IKnA
He is enlightened, she is enlightened.
And one asks, then?
Tickets, please!
He is enlightened, she is enlightened.
And one asks, then?
Can there be better answer than “Tickets, please”?!
No ticket, no ask then!
Ticketless travel is also a good way to go.
Sadhus in India used to get dispensation in the old days. Does that still hold or do the old rascals get busted these days?
Friends,
The most beautiful responses to this thread, I found in the Net ´vid´-documentaries on the variety of ZORBA flashmob spontaneous dancing all over the globe, like also in Birmingham 2012, in Chania 2013/14, Rethymnon (Crete), in Vienna and so on, happenings in the midst of city life, inviting citizens to spontaneously join the dance, old and young, kids and so-called grown-ups; it worked for me like a kind of remedy to digest some of the lines being written here.
(On top of it I also found the ‘vid´ of Anthony Quinn dancing the Zorba with Mikis Theodorakis here in Munich (summer 1995), when those two old wonderful guys met here for the ´ZORBA´).
By that I´d like to say neither the ´Zorba´ nor the ´Buddha´ qualities of life in the body and celebrating Existence with awareness in expression and the joy to share that with other human beings can be talked about:
It has to be lived, moment to moment.
Moments when these two qualities were meeting, I recall in the Sangha, when the ripples of laughter following a joke or our short gibberish meditations have then been followed by Nivedano´s drumbeats, and then – Melting into Silence.
´Zorba the Buddha´ is all about celebration and about celebrating to Be alive in a body, no special ´marriage´ is needed, because we ARE IT.
The Tibetans say it is very precious to be incarnated in a body.
Quite easy to forget this preciousness and what that means.
Love,
Madhu
“The Tibetans say it is very precious to be incarnated in a body.
Quite easy to forget this preciousness and what that means.!”
Yes.
Nothing quite like a positive attitude.
https://s.yimg.com/cd/resizer/2.0/FIT_TO_WIDTH-w500/3693b4ab18f565b94c163398241d4d09506dd6bc.png
LLAP: Live long and prosper.