According to Osho, Zorba and Zen are two halves of one whole—the outer celebration and the inner silence. They must melt into each other: Zorba learns meditation; Zen enters the marketplace. When inner and outer unite, life becomes complete, guiltless, and joyous; you relish the world and your inner freedom simultaneously, living in ease, love, and sharing.
Like two wings, enjoying the world (Zorba) and being peaceful inside (Zen) should work together so you can live happy and whole.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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.
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…
She said, "You are behaving like a simpleton. If the sun is here, I cannot be here; if I am here, the sun cannot be here. We cannot stand each other. You will have to hear our story separately and then decide." God said, "That is not my way. You both have to be present here so I can be certain that nobody is lying." The woman said, "Then it is better I take my complaint back." Since then, the woman has not appeared again. Once in a while the sun comes to inquire, "What happened to the woman -- because I want to clear it up, it has become a worry on my head that somebody is being hurt by me, perhaps unknowingly." God said, "You need not be worried. The problem is such that it cannot be solved.
Beloved Osho, when I came to greece to see you, everything reflected more and more of the zorba. Now, being here in india, everything around you is reflecting more of the buddha. Osho, does this depend on being in greece or india?
In Harapur, seven thousand years ago, they had bathrooms attached to their bedrooms, they had bathtubs, and they had a very special arrangement for circulation of water in the city. The hot and cold water in your bathroom is not a new thing; it was available in Harapur, in Mohenjo daro. They had swimming pools. It must have been a very highly cultured society. At the time of Gautam Buddha, just twenty-five centuries ago, even then the West was not very evolved. And you can see it. We did not crucify Gautam Buddha, and the West crucified Jesus Christ five hundred years after Gautam Buddha. And what Jesus was saying was nothing compared to Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha was saying that there is no God; still, nobody thought of crucifying him. Jesus Christ was not saying anything against Judaism; on the contrary, he was simply saying that he was their…