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Cologne Buddhafield Report

The center of the Cologne Buddhafield is the Osho UTA Institute. Osho UTA Institute runs a flowering bookshop, has three big group rooms, several session rooms next to a reception area, office premises and recreational areas, as a Zen court yard, a roof garden with a pond and sitting facilities for about thirty people. This year additional session rooms, toilets and changing facilities had to be built because of the increasing rush and expansion.

The institute has been booming in the last years. Quite often even more than a hundred people are participating in two or three different groups or trainings during weekends, where people (sannaysins and non-sannaysins) are coming from far away for groups and sessions. Hari Prasad Chaurasia comes here every year with hundreds of listeners thronging the place to listen to his stunning flute. Once he mentioned how much he appreciates the silence in UTA's Buddha hall. This was, when at the end of his concert the auditorium was so taken away, that for minutes on end, there was no applause, until he got up and silently left the hall.

Many Sannyasins live and work around the Osho UTA Institute. Spatially attached to the institute is the central meeting place, OshoÕs Place Bar & Restaurant. ItÕs not only and Osho place; itÕs even called that. Group participants melt with "outside" business people, which give sometimes a funny but well accepted picture, when primal groupies, their teddy bears under the arm, mix with normal guests. People even feel attracted by this atmosphere. The outside appreciation shows in local newspapers and guides who recommend OshoÕs Place as a restaurant with excellent vegetarian food, good service and reasonable prices. Part of the flair is the international scene as Sannyasins visiting or working in OshoÕs place come from all over the world. A Dutch or a Brazilian waitress behind the bar might serve you. World famous Ragu for example, was born and grew up near OshoÕs birth place and met him already as an University professor, works in the kitchen whose chef is an American. Italians also cook here. Sannyasins from Japan, Iran, Canada, France, Sweden and nearly all other places in the world visit here and meet old friends as a surprise. Lately anadditional eating room for thirty people had to be created in the UTA premises due to lack of enough space for regular customers because group participants had flooded over Osho's Place. Osho's Place is booming as well as the BSE crisis hit Germany and vegetarianism became en vogue.

Osho's Place somehow functions as a floodgate to Sannyas. If sometimes a non-sannyasin gets a job here, it takes not more than a couple of months until he or she gets initiated in Sannyas Even visitors use it to sniff the taste, at times come closer and end up with a mala around their neck. But it's all easy and contingent.


Besides Osho UTA Institute and OshoÕs Place, Osho Verlag is part of an organized unity of the Cologne Buddhafield Enterprises. Osho Verlag is publishing OshoÕs books in German and the Osho Times, German edition, which is doing really well. "Verlag" has more than 500 Osho titles in German on stock. Lately, more and more additional books and music from Sannyasins and last but not the least a complete master archive of OshoÕs discourses on audio and video. Audio and videotapes of OshoÕs discourses are purchased by customers from all walks of life and from all over the globe.

These three enterprises are owned (though economically independent) by the Osho Lotus Commune association, which was formed by the operators of the businesses to inspire and coordinate the Buddhafield activities.


All together there are some eighty Sannyasins including a dozen or so permanent therapists working in these central Buddhafield businesses. Next to them, all of the "big-shot" Sannyas therapists like Avikal, Krishnananda, Prabha, Meera, Premartha & Swarup, Vedanta, Rafia, Thuria, Vasumati, Sudha, Leela etc. pass by on a regular basis, holding groups and sessions.

Together with a nearly unnumbered lot of other businesses and activities run by Sannyasins like a disco, law offices, bio-food shop, esoteric book shop, another vegetarian restaurant, doctorÕs clinics, practitioners of alternative medicine, graphic design offices, Feng Shui, Cranio-sacral, Kinesiology, Astrology, Psychotherapy and management institutes, an Osho Galleria for malas and jewellery, window cleaner companies, construction companies, real estate agents and so on, live together and have created the unique fair of the Cologne Buddhafield.

As all Osho centers around the world have their unique flavour, the Cologne Buddhafield has developed into its own structure. Sannyasins work in their jobs and live independently according to their wishes, needs or preferences as singles, some in family structures the rest in couples or some other share a flat or a house. Some in the city, some in thecountryside. But Osho's place and the institute are central to every activity like communication, sharing, gossip, and rumour; in short – the center of meeting, a communion rather.

Constant change is an essential characteristic of the Cologne Buddhafield. When you visit, you can be sure that many things must have changes since you came last; a cellar space has changed into session rooms, session rooms into office spaces or vice-versa. The reception has moved from here to there one business has moved to another place, the free space has transformed into a group room. May be next year another floor will be erected on the building, another business established or internal structures rearranged. Come here during the festival that is organized on a big boat floating on the river Rhine under the Motto, "Yes to the River." It's all a constant flow and as long as the Cologne Buddhafield goes with the flow, it will be alive as it is.

Auf wiedersehen

Republished from from Oshoworldonline