Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement

Hugh Urban's Zorba the Buddha: Sex, Spirituality, and Capitalism in the Global Osho Movement, published by the University of California Press in 2015, is the standard scholarly account of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later Osho, and the movement built around him, tracing its history in India, at Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, and after Rajneesh's death. Urban is an established scholar of new religious movements. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed university press study drawing on the movement's own extensive archive alongside outside sources. Its limit is that it is one scholar's synthesis of a movement whose own internal accounts of the same events sometimes differ, so a claim resting on a contested episode should be checked against the movement's own materials as well.