Zorba the Buddha

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…

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!

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.…

I want East and West to disappear into each other. I want Zorba and buddha to disappear into each other. Only then will we have a whole man, and the whole man is the need of the day. It is because of this that I am going to be condemned from both sides. The religious people will condemn me as a materialist; and the materialists, the communists are condemning me for diverting peoples' minds towards meditation. That means the young generation is being diverted away from the revolution, that I am serving in some way the interests of capitalism. I am the greatest danger to them, because I am attracting so many young people. If they had not come to me, they would be communists. But now the situation has come to such a point that red no longer represents the communists, it represents me.