Chapter 13. Sannyas Nation

Life of Osho

Chapter 13. Sannyas Nation

78, 79, 80 – those were the years Koregaon Park was peaking. Thousands of people poured through the ashram. I don’t know when, historically speaking, anything comparable last existed, a small town in more or less open revolt. “These are my people” Osho said when he saw a video of Woodstock – and in many ways that’s what Poona was like, a Woodstock which never stopped. “I am the original Hippie”28 he added; and the basic strategy he advocated was, in fact, very much a Hippie affair.

“The mystic is a drop-out,” he said. “One has to drop out. The real revolutionary is not fighting anybody. He simply sees the absurdity of things, and drops out. He says, I am not going to be a part of it. This way or that, neither for nor against. It is so stupid that I cannot even be against it.”

That’s pure Hippie philosophy. You have no right to try and change anyone else; your only responsibility is to change yourself, and then act according to your own lights. If you try to change the system in any direct manner you will simply get sucked into it. That’s what happens to revolutionaries… in the end they don’t change the system, the system changes them. Look at a century of revolutions. None of them has done more than up-date the same basic rip-off.

“The real fight is not a fight at all. Very courageous people are needed to become drop-outs. If many, many people become drop-outs the world will change. There is no other way. “I am all for drop-outs.”

Again, the tactics drawn from this were very similar to those of the first Hippies. From the mid 60s on, from the beginnings of Haight-Ashbury in the States, from the first squats and demos in Central Amsterdam, the basic idea had been that you (a) refused to work, and (b) became part of a loose-knit community of other drop-outs. There you tried to set up an alternative life-style, for the only authentic way you could change society was by a group showing how you could do so here and now. You ran up a flag other rebels could rally round. You made your stand.

Such communities were identifiable with particular urban areas, as a sort of huge amplification of traditional artistic Bohemia. They reflected the central political idea of the 60s, that technology had reached a point where people could have more and more leisure, and that they could use this leisure in any way they saw fit. They could be creative in a way they hadn’t been since they were children. They could play. That’s what technology was for – not for producing more and more trashy commodities which nobody wanted in the first place, but for creating freedom so that you could do what you chose to do…If you want to put Poona in its historic context then this is where it belongs, as part of a whole series of Utopian ghettoes: alongside the Haight and the Lower East Side of New York, alongside Kristiana and Tangier and Notting Hill, alongside the Latin Quarter of May 68.

The difference was that Poona worked. Perhaps because it was the only place which managed to evolve an independent economy. For the therapy groups which had started out so humbly were, by the end of the decade, making money hand over fist. Acting with a bravura little short of piracy Osho had sailed off with the entire avantgarde psychotherapy scene of the early 70s. For psychotherapists, like everyone else working full-time in the ashram, were doing it just for board and lodging; all the money that was made was ploughed straight back in; there was no way Esalen, or any other growth centre of the time, could hope to compete. Even including the airfare to Bombay, the groups in Poona came out cheaper than anywhere else.

What’s more, they were working in a far wilder and more radical perspective.

“The days of Tantra are coming. Sooner or later Tantra is going to explode for the first time on the masses, because for the first time the time is ripe – ripe to take sex naturally. It is possible that explosion may come from the West, because Freud, Jung, Reich, they have prepared the background. They don’t know anything about Tantra, but they have made the basic ground for Tantra to evolve.”

For, so Osho argued, the history of psychology could be divided into three great stages. The first, the psychology of Freud and the psychoanalysts who came after him, revolved around sexual and emotional trauma. This psychology was based on the study of individual neurosis and the attempt to cure it; but while this was enormously valuable as such, it was crippling as an overall approach. The only exception, the only figure Osho talked of with any real warmth, was Reich (“a modern Tantra master,” he said; rare praise indeed) and to all intents and purposes both Reich and his work had been destroyed by the US government.

This psychology predicated on pathology had produced, if only as a backlash, a second and more highly evolved psychology: the Human Potential movement of Maslow, Fromm and Janov, which had appeared in the late 60s and early 70s. The real breakthrough their work had made was to focus on the nature of health. What is happiness? What is love? What is creativity? What, deep down, do human beings really want? What ultimately is possible for them? But at the same time, while the Human Potential movement was an enormous step forward from psychoanalysis it still could not go very deeply into these issues without questioning the perimeters of human identity – which is to say, basically, people’s identification with their own minds. And this would lead it straight into meditation.

Exploration of religious experience would constitute the third great step in the development of psychology as a science. Finally psychiatry would turn into what Osho called “The Psychology of the Buddhas.” What exactly is meant by the term ‘enlightenment’? How does an enlightened person perceive the world? Can this be triggered experimentally? For the evolution of the superman was, Osho said, the only serious work of psychology; and this was what all the therapy groups in Poona were moving a person towards. They interlocked in what he began to call a ‘Buddhafield’ – a total environment designed to accelerate an individual’s development towards enlightenment. They would take a person through the basic exploration of their sexual and emotional trauma, which was the forte of Western psychology, on through the more playful, risk-taking approaches of early 70s therapy, and only then into the religious dimensions of life which the meditation retreats were designed to open up.

For Osho insisted that a person had to pass through the whole gamut of experience;- and this was the context in which he introduced one of his best known ideas, that of Zorba the Buddha. Zorba the Buddha was the Tantrika – the meeting point, the integration, of the most earthly and the most spiritual. Zorba the Buddha was the being who said yes to everything, who accepted moment by moment existence unconditionally, and in that very acceptance transformed it.

He refused to betray God for the world, or the world for God…The Buddhafield was the laboratory in which this work could be undertaken. Was any of this an accurate reflection of what Tantra had been historically? Or was it just a way of holding things together – of streamlining a complex philosophy, of providing an overall concept which the Hippies had never managed to evolve? You could see, for instance, that the orange robes did something like that. They gave sannyas a style, they fused it. They didn’t appear to have a great deal to do with the Indian sadhu, the religious mendicant with which they were traditionally associated. They functioned as a way of bonding, of cementing group identity. They produced a burst of colour on the street which communicated far more effectively than any words…

At the time that’s how I thought he was using the term Tantra – for its shock value, as a sort of stylish, slightly sinister packaging… Since I started writing this account however, and read up a bit on Tantra, it has begun to seem that Osho was far more accurate than I had supposed. In fact Tantrism was, and it is almost unique in this, a revolutionary religion.

In his recent History of the Tantric Religion the Indian scholar N. N. Bhattacharyya argues that while both Hinduism and Buddhism were, by and large, religions of the ruling classes, Tantra was not. Tantra was a religion of the oppressed masses. Bhattacharyya proceeds to list the occupations of the first Tantric gurus of which there is any record, and they are fishermen, dhobis, woodcutters, blacksmiths, tailors. They were not even just working-class – many were actually sudras, or untouchables.

What’s more, Tantra was not just against the caste system – nor even, for that matter, just against the patriarchy. Tantra was explicitly feminist. Frequently it was women and not men who initiated in meditation; there were, it appears, whole lineages of women gurus; all of this weirdly mirroring Poona, where the ashram came to be run more and more by women; but there are numerous other parallels. Sannyasins’ emphasis on various kinds of bodywork for instance, far from being the me-generation self-indulgence the media were to portray, was typically Tantric. Bhattacharyya chronicles Tantrikas preoccupation with alternative medicine, with experiment with arcane drugs and chemicals, with alchemy.

You could argue such parallels in detail. Philip Rawson in his Art of Tantra, describes the celebrated cakrapuja rite “At this ceremony” he writes “drugs derived from hemp were sometimes taken as a sweet, as drink or smoked. Then the five powerful but usually forbidden enjoyments (fish, cooked hog-flesh, wine, cereals and intercourse) were ritually taken by a circle of couples as a kind of Eucharist presided over by the guru. In Cakrapuja the participants forget all distinctions of caste and custom.”32 Seen through the distorting glass of history, this is a group of people struggling with their conditioning, with their taboos – and experimenting with the energy freed by breaking them. To all intents and purposes this is a medieval Encounter group…

Tantra, far from being an obscure off-beat cult, seems to have been something closer to a popular Resistance movement, continuing underground for century after century. In terms of the geographical area it covered its influence appears to have extended far beyond the Indian subcontinent and interpenetrated, or been identical with, much of early Taoism; while its roots in history seem to have been almost impossibly ancient. They stretch back way before Hinduism, before the Aryan invasion of India, and what we call Tantra could conceivably be the largest remaining fragment of a purely celebratory religion which antedated the advent of patriarchy.

Well, if the archaic core of Tantra was festivity, I think you’d have to say that Osho was almost painstakingly orthodox. Poona was like a huge party he threw – a decade-long party, and one to which everyone was invited…Again there’s the tie-up with the revolutionary Left. One of the main political arguments of the late 60s was that poverty hadn’t been eliminated, it had merely changed its nature. It had become psychological. A society had been created which ruled out much traditional suffering, the cold, the hunger, the disease; - it was just that it had ruled out the rest of life with it.

Basically everyone today was isolated, bored and depressed. There had to be a ‘revolution of everyday life’…And that was precisely what sannyas offered: it was colour, it was sex, it was adventure. The vitality hit you the moment you got off the train in Poona. “The accounts of those who took sannyas and those who did not often differ quite sharply in certain respects” observes Frances Fitzgerald with distaste “but they are consistent in describing a madhouse-carnival atmosphere.”

Some day, when radical political feeling again starts to spread throughout society, Osho’s Poona will be seen as a model of a quite different type of political action: one based on Eros. The revolutionary party really was a party there, and the pull it exercised was phenomenal.

How many people took sannyas during those years? The figure of a quarter of a million sannyasins worldwide was bandied about a lot at the time; and of these there were perhaps ten thousand in Poona at any one time… A couple of thousand crammed into the ashram (by now there were huts built all over the gardens, or on the flat roofs of the main ashram buildings) perhaps another seven or eight thousand scattered through the cantonment. Koregaon Park itself was packed. Every house, every room, every bit of boarded-up servants’ quarters people could get their hands on was rented out. With nowhere else to go sannyasins started to stay in the fields at the back of the Park. At first they just slept there overnight, then they started to camp. You could buy panels of woven bamboo for next to nothing, and lash them together to form a simple hut. Rapidly this bit of the Park turned into a sort of bamboo Glastonbury. Like a summer festival it was an architectural dream-scape, with huts and towers and stockades jostling one another. People made tea on old brass pump-stoves, and sat around talking. Orange washing was hung out to dry. There were lots of kids. There was a huge old well there, under some trees, where you could swim in the afternoons.

People were coming and going the whole time. Up and down from the beaches of Goa, which were only an overnight bus ride away, down through the mountains; or back to the West, to Europe, to Australia, to the States… There was an international network crossing borders backwards and forwards with ever-increasing flexibility, setting up more and more bases in Western cities as it did so. One of Osho’s big things at darshan, when anyone was leaving Poona to go back to the West, was to get them to start a centre wherever they came from. He would just give them a name for it, otherwise they were given carte blanche to do anything they cared in his name, the meditations, groups, individual sessions, whatever. When Osho delegated authority he delegated it unconditionally; and I would say that it was through the proliferation of these small grassroots centres and communes that the movement spread so fast in the early days.

By the end of the decade Koregaon Park was something approaching a small independent kingdom. The police gave up on it, and as long as you stayed in the Park you didn’t need a visa or even a passport. Supposedly there were various members of the Italian Red Brigades in hiding there.

Certainly there was a booming underworld. If you wanted to stay in Poona and didn’t want to work in the ashram (to work your way up the hierarchy, more and more) then really drug smuggling was your only alternative. The profits were enormous, and Poona played a key role in the fast escalating drug economy of the late 70s. The internationalism of sannyas, people knowing one another all over the world yet frequently not even knowing one another’s real names, made it a perfect set-up. Poona was a masked ball. You could buy a passport for a hundred dollars or so in the Park, and they are surprisingly easy to tamper with. I remember there were these French junkies who used to specialise in forging passports: they did it with ordinary biros, using a magnifying glass to form apparently printed letters and numbers by building up a mass of tiny dots…There were camp-followers and lunatics of every description in the warm Indian night...