According to Osho, a true Buddha and an authentic Zorba meet in present-moment spontaneity. He sees Zorba in everyone and lives as a breeze—unplanned, here-now—so today is enough. When awareness drops into this unpremeditated aliveness, enlightenment and earthy celebration are not two paths but one lived reality.
Being truly enlightened and joyfully human is the same when you live like a carefree breeze—fully here today, without clinging to plans.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
What is your relationship with zorba, as invented by kazantzakis, and what does zorba have in common with you? I know that he didn't have any wealth....
Gautam Buddha was a Zorba up to the age of twenty-nine. Six years of deep meditation transformed the man. He became enlightened. So when I have called the new man Zorba the Buddha, I have reasons to call it so. Every man is born as a Zorba. Your religions don't allow you to live the Zorba, so you don't get bored with it. They don't allow you to live it so totally that you get finished with it. Your religions are preventing you from becoming buddhas. The word `buddha' means the enlightened one, the awakened one. Your religions are keeping you asleep. They are certainly functioning as opium. My effort is to make you first totally Zorbas, utterly Zorbas, intensely Zorbas, so that you can transcend Zorba and enter into another phase of your consciousness -- the awakening. Zorba is the foundation of the temple. Buddha is the temple itself.…
Beloved master, is the meeting of zorba and the buddha really possible? If it is so, then why have other religious leaders never thought about it?
The first thing to be understood: I am not a religious leader. A religious leader cannot think, cannot see the way I can -- for the simple reason that he has immense investment in religion; I have none. Religions are necessarily splitting man, creating a duality in the human mind; that is their way of exploiting you. If you are whole, you are beyond their control. If you are cut in fragments, all your strength is destroyed, all your power, your dignity abolished. Then you can be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan. If you are left just the way you are born -- natural, without any interference from the so-called religious leaders, you will be a man of freedom, independence, integrity. You cannot be enslaved. And all your old religions are doing nothing but enslaving you. To enslave you, they have to create a conflict within you so you…
The zorba is not going to lose anything. Without buddha, zorba is just a mundane existence. Without zorba, the buddha has no roots -- only flowers. But how long can flowers live without roots? Roots are ugly; that's why they remain hiding underneath the ground -- but they are the source of life and juice. Those beautiful flowers cannot exist without those ugly roots underneath the ground; those roots are continuously nourishing them, giving their life to the flowers. And this miracle is happening everywhere. But we are so blind that we cannot see. When you see a roseflower, you don't see that in that roseflower is hidden the whole philosophy of life -- the leaves are not red, nor are the thorns red nor are the roots red. Yet out of this green foliage comes a beautiful red rose.
Question: The second question: WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ZORBA AND ZEN? The whole past of humanity has tried to keep them separate, and this has been an unfortunate experiment. The Zorba has remained incomplete, just superficial. And Zen has remained incomplete; it has only the inner world, and the outer is missing. My Manifesto of Zen is that Zorba and Zen are not antagonistic to each other. The Zorba can melt into Zen, and only then will both be complete. The man who has lived outside has lived very superficially, and the man who does not know anything about the inner, knows nothing about the existential, about the eternal. And on the other hand, the man who knows something of the inner starts thinking that the outer is illusory. Nothing is illusory. The outer and the inner are part of one existence.
Question: BELOVED MASTER, HOW IS YOUR REBEL CONCERNED WITH "ZORBA THE BUDDHA"? Zorba is a fictitious character, a man who believed in the pleasures of the body, in the pleasures of the senses. He enjoyed life to the fullest, without bothering about what is going to happen to him in the next life, whether he will enter into heaven or be thrown into hell. He was a poor servant; his boss was very rich, but very serious, long faced -- very British. One full-moon night... I have not been able to forget what he said to his boss. Zorba was in his cabin. He went outside, with his guitar -- he was going to dance on the beach -- and he invited the boss. He said, "Boss, only one thing is wrong with you -- you think too much. Just come on!