Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement by Hugh B. Urban (review)

Hugh Urban has made a significant mark in the study of religion with scholarship noteworthy for penetrating insights, erudition, and lucidity. This book is no exception. Showing great command of theoretical materials, especially recent analyses of late twentieth-century capitalism, and carefully detailing the rise, fall, and apotheosis of one of the seminal figures in the global guru movement in the 1960s, Urban's study of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh reads like a novel but is utterly fascinating and finally persuasive.

Rajneesh (later known as Osho or Osho-Rajneesh) was an iconoclast of the first order in India in the late 1950s and 1960s. He critiqued and even ridiculed traditional Hindu beliefs and practices, particularly the practice of renunciation and any religious philosophy that tended to dichotomize body and spirit, the physical and the spiritual. Derided as the "sex guru" by the Indian media and the traditional religious establishment, Rajneesh not only flouted the conventional sexual ethos but also rejected the widespread socialist policies favored by Nehru after independence. Instead, he argued for and, in his movement, promoted a dynamic and liberal capitalism that would later be the hallmarks of the administrations of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. Rajneesh's permissive attitudes toward sex are perhaps more widely known than his economic or business models, but an unrestrained and free liberalism seems characteristic of both. Urban's argument is that the Osho/Rajneesh movement was no mere reflection of the 1970s or 1980s but a profound embodiment and even epitome of them and, indeed, even a driver of neoliberal capitalism in its late twentieth-century form. Drawing upon various economic theorists, Urban argues that this broadly global and unrestrained capitalism has been marked by increasing commodification of multiple aspects of human culture, including religion (11).

This commodification can best be seen in the impact of Rajneesh's "neo-Tantric" view of sex and sexuality and in the corporate model of the Osho International Foundation, the business and legal empire whose jewel is the rebranded ashram in Pune now known as the Osho International Meditation Resort. Scanning the self-help and/or sexuality section in any large bookstore will likely reveal numerous books explaining or promoting "Tantric sex" and "Tantric orgasm" and a host of practices, purportedly based on Tantra, that the authors insist will magnify sexual ecstasy. But Tantra, emerging in various threads of Hinduism (and Buddhism) from the sixth century CE, was decidedly esoteric, charged with a robust and at times impenetrable symbolism and characterized by an approach to sex far removed from these sensationalizations. In one school of Tantra, itself vastly more complex and heterogeneous than popular accounts allow, sex was a highly ritualized practice; sexual pleasure, conventionally understood, was hardly the goal. Instead, control was the immediate objective, and this typically meant control of ejaculation, which was understood to intensify spiritual prowess and even bring about liberation. Typical of the androcentrism that is characteristic of many Indian texts and traditions, "left-handed" Tantric practice focused on the male participant's sexual activity and control and not necessarily on the "tantric orgasm for women," as one contemporary teacher has promoted.

Perhaps more than any other guru, Rajneesh was responsible for this reappropriation and reinterpretation of Tantra. While purists may recoil from such innovation and adaptation, it is not unusual for religions to constantly engage in subtle or dramatic processes of change due to circumstances internal or external to the traditions. In this case, Rajneesh, clearly a free-thinker and countercultural figure, seized upon the wave of globalization to export his mix of "spiritual materialism" to the United States, where, following the tectonic cultural and political shifts in the 1960s and 1970s, he found a receptive audience.

At least for a time. Urban's chapter on Rajneesh's commune, Rajneeshpuram, in Oregon in the early 1980s is a fascinating...