Hugh B. Urban - Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement

My concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautam the Buddha: the new man will be Zorba the Buddha. He will be sensuous and physical, in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible, and still a great consciousness.... He will be Christ and Epicurus together.

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Zorba the Buddha

Max Webers famous metaphor in The Protestant Ethic of religion striding into the marketplace of worldly affairs and slamming the monastery door behind it becomes further transformed in modern society with religion placed very much in the consumer marketplace alongside other meaning complexes.

Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism

Most Americans today probably remember Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho) as that Indian guru who became hugely controversial during the 1980s, when he created an enormous utopian commune in central Oregon, collected a fleet of ninety-three Rolls-Royces, and taught a radically sex-friendly form of spirituality before being arrested and deported in 1985. Personally, I first remember hearing about Rajneesh while watching an episode of the ABC news program Minutes in 1985, which played a clip of the notorious Guru of the Rich. I sell contentment. I sell enlightenment, he said in the now infamous segment, which made him the medias poster child of the

The story of Rajneeshs rise to celebrity and dramatic fall into infamy in the United States is indeed a remarkable tale to tell. Despite its brief existence, the Oregon commune was one of the largest and most successful religious experiments in American history, covering more than 64,000 acres and housing over 2,500 residents, even as some $130 million flowed through its gates.

However, the real story of the Rajneesh movement extends both well before and well after the brief yet spectacular episode of the Oregon ranch in the 1980s. Arguably the first truly global guru of the twentieth century, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh began teaching in India during the 1960s and 1970s, as new waves of global tourists, spiritual seekers, and eventually capitalist investors began to pour into a rapidly changing South Asian landscape. His early community in Pune was one of the first attempts to combine Indian meditation techniques with Western psychology, becoming a major hub of global spiritual experimentation during the 1970s. And ironically, Rajneesh became even more popular after the scandalous collapse of the Oregon community and his arrest and deportation from the United States. Returning to India and assuming the title Osho, he established a new and explicitly global religious community in Pune, now known as the Osho International Foundation. Offering a vast array of spiritual practices drawn from East and West in a luxurious setting, the new Osho resort has become a global tourist hub that attracts a vast international audience of spiritual seekers.

As such, Osho-Rajneesh and the movement he inspired represent something far more interesting that just another curious anecdote from Reagans America of the 1980s. Rather, they offer profound insights into the larger processes of globalization and the transnational flow of people, ideas, tourism, and capital in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not only was this arguably the first truly transnational religious movement of the modern era, tracing a complex global circuit from India to America and back to India again, but this was also perhaps the first to explicitly unite spirituality and capitalism, wedding the ideal of otherworldly transcendence to the unapologetic pursuit of material wealth. While this ideal ended in a spectacular collapse in Oregon during the 1980s, it has been reborn and now circulates worldwide in the new Osho movement of the twenty-first century.