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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 seri-
ous work of psychology; and this was what all the therapy
groups in Poona were moving a person towards. They inter-
locked in what he began to call a  Buddhafield  a total envi-
ronment 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
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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 some-
thing 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 tradi-
tionally 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 sinis-
ter 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
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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 sys-
tem  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
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of caste and custom. 32 Seen through the distorting glass of
history, this is a group of people struggling with their condi-
tioning, 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 move-
ment, continuing underground for century after century. In
terms of the geographical area it covered its influence
appears to have extended far beyond the Indian subconti-
nent 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 frag-
ment 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 ortho-
dox. 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 polit-
ical 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;-
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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 atmos-
phere. 33 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 per-
haps 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
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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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]