In ‘Zorba the Greek,’ novelist Nikos Kazantzakis introduces a middle-aged guide who celebrates life. He eats, drinks, sings, dances, loves and laughs while he lives passionately, totally. Enjoying all his senses, he enjoys every moment of his life, which for him is a game.

In Gautama the Buddha, the world meets a prince who abandons his luxurious life: his palaces, his pleasures, his princess, and even his little son to search for his true self in the forest. He starves, he denies himself until he becomes still, calm, still, peaceful, silent and serene.

Can Zorba be combined with Buddha? No! One cannot imagine a Buddha who celebrates life, dances, sings and laughs or a Zorba who sits serious, silent, without smiling, and yet this is the very combination of two opposite poles that Osho presents to us as the only alternative to our current market madness. The two opposites can never meet until Osho declares that they not only must but must if modern man is to survive.

Osho says: “Zorba is the roots in the earth, and Buddha is the desire to fly towards ultimate freedom, to reach space, which has no limits. I would like you to be Zorba the Greek and Gautama the Buddha together, simultaneously. Less than that will not do. I want Zorba and Buddha to meet. Zorba is just hollow. His dance has no eternal meaning, it is a momentary pleasure. He will soon tire of it. Unless you have inexhaustible sources, available to you from the cosmos itself… unless you become existential, you cannot become whole. This is my contribution to humanity: THE WHOLE PERSON.”

Zorba the Buddha is something totally new in the world. There have been Zorbas, there have been Buddhas, but they have always remained opposite each other. Zorba represents materialism, Zorba represents the West. Buddha represents spirituality, Buddha represents the East.

The English poet, Rudyard Kipling, has been quoted endlessly as saying that the West is the West and the East is the East, and that the two will never meet. Osho challenges him to see that in Zorba the Buddha the two have met. Zorba is not separate from Buddha. The West is not separate from the East. In fact, any materialism that does not have spiritual values ​​is going to be very mundane, profane, ugly. It will not have open sky flights to the stars. It will not bloom or release its fragrance; it will be just a rock. Osho’s unique contribution is that the world needs to be one and only one type of man: Zorba the Buddha.