ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT INSIDE.COM (5/15/01)
Nearly two decades after he captivated the world with escapades of gonzo spirituality as the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — he with the fleet of 93 Rolls-Royces and a controversial 64,000-acre commune in Oregon — the guru today known as Osho has been reincarnated as a mind-body-spirit book phenom.
Indeed, 11 years after his death from heart disease at age 58, the artist formerly known as Zorba the Buddha is pumping out more books than Vishnu has avatars. His latest, Love, Freedom and Aloneness, is due out this summer, following the paperback release this month of the Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic. Some 80 titles are in print in Italy, 2 of them bestsellers last year. Osho’s a bestselling author in India, with 200 titles in print there, and about 45 titles are on sale in Germany, including picks for Heyne, Econ-Ullstein-List and Bertelsmann.
And don’t forget China, where in 1996 alone 16 Osho titles sold a total of 600,000 copies, with Bertelsmann’s book club getting 100,000 copies of Meditation out the door before the Chinese government declared the deceased advocate of ”religionless religion” an enemy of the People’s Republic.
”In a certain sense he’s a dead author, but boy, that doesn’t keep him from writing new books,” says Michael Denneny, senior editor at St. Martin’s Press, which has published Osho in the U.S. since 1995. ”Osho’s basically having a comeback.”
The guru-provocateur is edging back into the literary footlights largely through the work of Osho International, whose three-year-old, New York-based offices manage the author’s rights. The group has signed more publishing contracts in the first quarter of this year than in all of 2000, according to Klaus Steeg, Osho International president. Plus, the door’s opening wider for Osho’s mischievously iconoclastic wisdom. ”St. Martin’s is getting more courageous,” Steeg says. ”They’re willing to look at much more provocative material now.”
Astonishingly, returns on Osho’s books are only 4 percent — a ”fairly good indication we could get a lot more books out there,” Denneny says. St. Martin’s began publishing Osho with the Osho Zen Tarot, which has now sold 150,000 copies in the U.S. and is published in some 18 countries. Due out this fall is The Art of Tea, containing a book of Osho’s meditations on the Zen tea ceremony, two Japanese tea cups and a bamboo mat. Also in the pipeline is India My Love, which will be St. Martin’s first full-color, illustrated Osho work. The idea is to keep moving from the new-age ghetto into the mainstream, a shift that’s been aided, incidentally, by none other than Tom Robbins — an outspoken supporter who once called Osho’s fleet of Rolls-Royces ”the funniest joke ever played on our pathological consumerism” and deemed Osho ”the greatest spiritual teacher of the 20th century.”
Osho, whose name comes from a Japanese word for master (but was also intended to riff on the philosopher William James’s use of word ”oceanic”) telegraphs his tomes from the next dimension via a strikingly efficient system. Under the editorial direction of Sarito Neiman, Osho International editors plunder vast archives of recorded talks — drawn from some 15,000 hours of original audio recordings, now transcribed in a searchable electronic database — and package up thematically related material. Though searching for discourses on ”courage,” for example, is a snap, putting the compilations together can be tricky. ”In the early days the tendency was to make an anthology that was almost anti-Osho, because the texts boxed in the original flow of his talks,” says Neiman. ”The challenge is to create the feeling of how he unfolds a subject, so that reading the book gives a flavor of listening to a complete talk.”
The challenges of publishing Osho certainly don’t end there.
As the infamous Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, he presided over what became known as the Oregon town of Rajneeshpuram for four years in the early 1980s. Free love and flowing cash were widely perceived to be the principal commandments — at least by the surrounding rural community — until reports surfaced that the Rajneeshee security force had bought 47 assault rifles and hatched a plot to take over Wasco County. Other activities — including the poisoning of county officials — were generally ascribed to Osho’s personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, who later pleaded guilty to charges of attempted murder, arson, electronic eavesdropping and conspiracy, among other crimes. Osho was eventually kicked out of the country on charges of immigration fraud — moving to India permanently in 1986 — but only after the National Guard was mobilized and he was forced to take a six-day trip around the nation in a prisoner transport plane.
This wasn’t the kind of book tour publishers had in mind. Numerous houses dropped Osho ”like a hot potato,” says Steeg, who still marvels as he reads notes they sent him at the time, along with voided contracts. In Germany, Goldman published Osho’s childhood autobiography just as the Oregon debacle blew up. ”They pulled the book and pulped it,” Steeg says. ”Osho was really crucified in public.”
But as publishers look to consolidate their spiritual lists — ditching the whole guru-of-the-month trend — they’re seeking long-selling backlists. A decade under the bridge doesn’t hurt matters, either, Neiman adds: ”Once the messenger is gone, people have a little more space to look at the message.”
And they seem to like what they’re seeing, according to Denneny, who says he reluctantly took on Osho from a previous editor, but soon grew fond of the guru. ”He’s essentially a philosopher, and his central preoccupation is meditation,” Denneny explains, tagging Osho as a sort of Deepak Chopra minus the Ayurvedic medicine. And when talk turns to publicity, those Rolls-Royces are priceless. ”Absolutely everybody of a certain age knows who Osho was,” Denneny says.
And so, too, will a whole new generation, now that about 200 titles will be released as e-books, mostly in Microsoft Reader format and sold through Barnesandnoble.com. Early May also saw the launch of the Osho Audiobook Club, which offers MP3 digital audio downloads of 154 titles, each lasting some 90 minutes and costing $3.50 a pop for subscribers (see www.osho.com). Meanwhile, access to a full-text, searchable, online database of 227 Osho titles is now available for subscription fees ranging from $6.95 for a one-day pass to $49.95 for a year.
Still, Osho can get a cool reception in the U.S. ”It pretty much vanished,” says Steven Finlay of East West Books in Manhattan, referring to the guru’s publishing program. ”Sales are not what they used to be when he was alive. He used to have 30, 40, or 50 books out. Now it’s down to just a few.” And according to Sydney Hannan, a buyer at Stacey’s Bookstore in San Francisco, ”They don’t blow out. We have quite a few titles and they seem to sell steadily, but not in large amounts.”
Maybe he’s still ahead of his time. The Italian publisher Mondadori, which publishes many Osho titles, refuses to print titles it thinks will boggle readers. ”We gave them The Zen Manifesto,” Steeg recalls, ”and they said come back in 30 years. Maybe then people will understand this.”
