BRITISH MYSTICAL EXPATRIATES OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

It was through novelist Aldous Huxley that Alan Watts became aware of a group he went on to call the "British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California." It included Huxley, Gerald Heard, Felix Greene, and Christopher Isherwood, all of whom were associated more of less with Swami Prabhavananda and the Vedanta Society of Southern California, and with Gerald Heard's ashram at Trabuco Canyon (Trabuco College)in the Santa Ana mountains below Los Angeles.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was one of the 20th Century's foremost novelists whose works included most notably Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1928), and Point Counter Point (1928). His Brave New World (1932) and Eyeless in Gaza (1936) became classics. His essay "The Perennial Philosophy" (1946) evidenced his growing interest in mysticism. In 1947 he moved to Southern California where he lived most of the rest of his life. It was here that he became associated, through Gerald Heard, with Swami Prabhavananda who initiated him into the Ramakrishna Mission in Hollywood, home of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Among his later works were The Devils of Loudon (1952), The Doors of Perception (1954) written following his experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, and Island (1962).

Gerald Heard (1889-1971) was a historian, science writer, educator, and philosopher. He wrote many articles and over 35 books. He was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans including Clare Boothe Luce and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. His work was a forerunner of, and influence on, the consciousness development movement that spread in the Western world in the 1960s. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, Huxley's wife Maria, and their son Matthew Huxley, to give some lectures at Duke University. He turned down the offer of a post at Duke, settling in California. In 1942 he founded Trabuco College (in Trabuco Canyon south of Los Angeles) as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued. However, the Trabuco College project was somewhat short lived and in 1949 the campus was donated by Heard to Swami Prabhavananda and the Vedanta Society of Southern California. Heard was the first among a group of literati friends to discover Swami Prabhavananda and Vedanta. Heard became an initiate of Vedanta. Like the outlook of his friend Aldous Huxley, the essence of Heard’s mature outlook was that a human being can effectively pursue intentional evolution of consciousness. He maintained a regular discipline of meditation, along the lines of yoga, for many years. In the 1950s, Heard tried LSD and felt that, used properly, it had strong potential to "enlarge Man's mind" by allowing a person to see beyond his or her ego. Heard had a radio program on the BBC when he was a young man which may have inspired Alan Watts, twenty years later, to do the same on KPFA in San Francisco.

Felix Greene (1909—1985) was a British-American journalist and a cousin of both the well-known British author Graham Greene and of novelist/playwright Christopher Isherwood. At one point he had an executive job with the Friends Service Committee (Quakers) in Philadelphia. Later he joined Gerald Heard in California where he was hands-on in the preparation of Heard's Trabuco College. He is best known for chronicling several Communist countries in the 1960s and 1970s. He first visited China for the BBC in 1957. He later produced documentary films, including One Man's China, Tibet, Cuba va!, Vietnam! Vietnam! and Inside North Viet Nam. These films give a rosy and one-sided view of the communist society. He may be seen as a Fellow Traveler so-called, a person sympathetic to a particular philosophy but not a card-carrying member of a representative institution. He was one of the first Western reporters to visit North Vietnam when he traveled there for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1960's. He lived in the San Francisco area for twenty years, before dying in Mexico of cancer.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was an English-born novelist and playwright who settled in the U.S. in 1939. His best-known novels are Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), set in the decaying Germany of the 1930's, later adapted by others into plays and films (I Am a Camera, and Cabaret). He collaborated with poet W. H. Auden on three plays, the best-known being The Ascent of F-6 (1936). Greatly influenced by Aldous Huxley, Isherwood turned to Eastern religions. Much of his subsequent writing was devoted to popularizing aspects of Vedanta. He wrote a biography of Ramakrishna entitled Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1959) and with Swami Prabhavananda translated the Bhagavad-Gita and other Hindu scriptures. In 1969 he published Essentials of Vedanta, and in 1979, My Guru and His Disciple. Vedanta and the West was the official publication of the Vedanta Society of Southern California for which Isherwood was managing editor from 1943 until 1945. Together with Huxley and Heard, he was on the Editorial Advisory Board from 1951 until 1962. Many of the essays in this publication are found in the book Vedanta for the Western World (1960) edited by Isherwood.

Alan Watts did not consider himself one of the British Mystical Expatriates of Southern California most likely, despite similarities he had with them. To start with, he was younger than the others, which is to say, in 1955, when his career as a freelance writer and speaker was taking root, he was a mere 40 years old, while Huxley was 61, Heard 66, Greene 46, and Isherwood 51. On the other hand, he, like the others, was a transplant from England, setting up shop, like Greene, in the San Francisco area, and he had like interests. And he certainly knew the rest of them, some of them, like Huxley, quite well. He was not, however, associated with the Vedanta Society, even though he had had discussions with Swami Prabhavananda on many occasions. Indeed there were ideas in Vedanta that he quite liked.

ALAN WATTS

When speaking about Zen Buddhism and its introduction to the West, the first name that comes to mind is, of course, D. T. Suzuki. The second name, however, is Alan Watts. Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker. He wrote more than 25 books and numerous articles on a wide range of subjects, mostly in the areas of philosophy, religion, and psychology.

Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent, England in the year 1915, living at 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tire Company, his mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up playing at brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies.

By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training) in his early years. During holidays in his teen years, Francis Croshaw, a wealthy epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and the exotic little-known aspects of European culture, took Watts on a trip through France. It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s. He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge which had been established by Theosophists, and was now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization’s secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Watts went on to attend King's School next door to Canterbury Cathedral. Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically, and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as presumptuous and capricious.

Hence, when he graduated from secondary school, Watts was thrust into the world of employment, working in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović. (Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.) Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom.

London afforded him a considerable number of other opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors (e.g., Nicholas Roerich, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan) and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey. In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D.T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, he absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia. In 1936, Watts' first book was published, The Spirit of Zen, which he later acknowledged to be mainly digested from the writings of Suzuki.

In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America. He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. A few years later, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master (or "roshi"), Sokei-an Sasaki, and this Japanese gentleman served as a sort of model and mentor to Alan, though Watts chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki. He did, however, take Zen training.

Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher didn't suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a professional outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He entered an Anglican (Episcopalian) school (Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, in Evanston, Illinois), where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and Church history. He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopalian priest (beginning in 1945, aged 30), until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled. It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry by 1950. He spent the New Year getting to know Joseph Campbell, Campbell's wife Jean Erdman, and John Cage.

In the spring of 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Here he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa, Frederick Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors. Hasegawa, in particular, served as a teacher to Watts in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature.

Watts also studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa as well as with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the Academy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, with its origins in China, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics," cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid 1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area. These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death. The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles, and at the Electronic University archive founded by his son, Mark Watts (alanwatts.org). (This writer has collected 134 of the Watts audio tapes over the years, along with the six Watts "talks" that Mark Watts videotaped in 1973, near the end of his dad's life. There is a good early set of videotapes called "4x4" which consists of four tapes, 110 minutes each, produced by KQET in San Francisco, which are of Watts, in his middle years, discussing Taoism and Buddhism.)

In 1957 when 42, Watts published one of his best known books, The Way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published). Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.

Around this time, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. In relation to modern psychology, Watts's instincts were closer to Jung's or Abraham Maslow's than to those of Freud.

When he returned to the United States, he began to dabble in psychedelic drug experiences, initially with mescaline given to him by Dr. Oscar Janiger. He tried LSD several times with various research teams led by Drs. Keith Ditman, Sterling Bunnell, and Michael Agron. He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down. Watts’ books of the 60s reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He would later comment about psychedelic drug use, "When you get the message, hang up the phone."

For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology (Psychotherapy East and West is a good example), finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe proposed by 20th-century physicists. He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Watts's explorations and teaching brought him into contact with many noted intellectuals, artists, and American teachers in the human potential movement. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support. He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his 'Light[s] along the Way' in the opening appreciation of Cosmic Trigger.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, he did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University. He also lectured to many college and university students. His lectures and books gave Watts far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia of the 1950s-1970s, but Watts was often seen as an outsider in academia. When questioned sharply by students during his talk at U.C. Santa Cruz in 1970, Watts responded that he was not an academic philosopher, but rather "a philosophical entertainer."

He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.

In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science; in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Lila), hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourself as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.


Wikipedia contributors. "Alan Watts." 11 Mar. 2010. Web. 12 Mar. 2010.

DAISETZ TEITARO SUZUKI

This writer has an audio cassette of one of D. T. Suzuki's lectures given when the professor was ninety years old. In this lecture, Suzuki is as alert mentally as a person half his age, not that he shouldn't be but not everyone is, and it is easy to see how he had such a profound influence not only on religion around the world but in the spheres of philosophy and psychology as well. The following is a summary of his life from the American National Biography.

D. T. Suzuki (18 October 1870 to 12 July 1966), the foremost exponent of Zen Buddhism in the West, was born Teitarō Suzuki, the son of Ryojun Suzuki, a physician, and his wife, Masu (full name unknown), in what is now the city of Kanazawa in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. He was the youngest of five children. Suzuki's grandfather and great-grandfather were also physicians. The deaths of Suzuki's father, shortly after Suzuki's sixth birthday, and an older brother, the following year, influenced Suzuki's gravitation toward religious and philosophical study. As a teenager he sought out both Zen monks and Christian missionaries and engaged them in philosophical discussions. Suzuki's high school mathematics teacher, who had a strong interest in Zen and had studied with Kōsen Imagita, one of the great Zen masters of the time, intensified the youth's curiosity about Zen through discussion and distribution of literature on the subject.

After leaving high school because of family financial difficulties, Suzuki continued to pursue his interest in Zen while working as a teacher of English. In 1891, the year after his mother's death, one of Suzuki's brothers, who was working as a lawyer, sent him to Tokyo, where he enrolled in classes at what is now Waseda University and also at Tokyo Imperial University. But soon after arriving in Tokyo Suzuki began commuting to nearby Kamakura, the site of Engakuji, an important Zen temple, to study with Kōsen Imagita. Kōsen died in early 1892, and Suzuki continued his studies at the temple--eventually taking up residence there--with Kōsen's successor, Sōen Shaku. In 1893 Suzuki translated into English the address Sōen was to give at the World Parliament of Religions. (Sōseki Natsume, one of Japan's greatest modern novelists, checked Suzuki's translation.)

Held in Chicago that year as part of the World's Columbian Exposition, the World Parliament of Religions was a milestone in the introduction of Buddhism to the United States. At the conference, Sōen met Paul Carus, an author and editor with a strong interest in Eastern religions. Carus was editor of Open Court, a journal focusing on ethical and religious issues, and was instrumental in the founding of an eclectic philosophical publishing company of the same name. Sōen spent the week following the conference visiting Carus at his home in LaSalle, Illinois. As a result of this visit, Carus wrote The Gospel of Buddha, which Suzuki translated into Japanese at Engakuji while continuing to study Zen as a lay-disciple.

During his four years at Engakuji, Suzuki struggled fruitlessly with the kōan he had been given by Sōen--until it was resolved that in 1897 he would travel to the United States to assist Carus with his translation of the Taoist classic Tao te ching. The winter before his departure, Suzuki finally achieved enlightenment and became able to answer the monk's questions about the kōan. At this time Sōen gave him the name Daisetsu, meaning "Great Simplicity." Suzuki is known as Suzuki Daisetsu in Japan; Daisetsu is often spelled Daisetz in English.

After assisting Carus with the Tao translation, Suzuki remained at Open Court, studying Chinese and Sanskrit and working on a variety of projects, including translations of important early Buddhist texts. In 1905 he served as Sōen's interpreter during the latter's tour of the United States. His increasingly strong belief that westerners needed a lot of assistance in their attempts to understand Buddhism led Suzuki to publish his first original book in English, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, in 1907.

In 1908 Suzuki left LaSalle, traveling to New York and in Europe before his return to Japan in April of the following year. In Paris he spent time at the Bibliothèque Nationale copying, photographing, and studying ancient Chinese manuscript copies of sutras, and in London he translated Emanuel Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell into Japanese for the Swedenborg Society. (In 1912 the society would invite him back to London to translate several other works by Swedenborg.)

On his return to Japan in 1909, Suzuki became a lecturer at Gakushūin University and Tokyo Imperial University. The following year he was appointed professor at Gakushūin. Suzuki married Beatrice Lane, a Radcliffe graduate and Theosophist, in Japan in 1911. The Suzukis lived at Engakuji until the death of Sōen in 1919. They then moved to Kyoto, where Suzuki became a lecturer, and later a professor, at Ōtani University. In 1921 the couple began publishing The Eastern Buddhist, an English-language quarterly largely intended for westerners. The first series of his Essays in Zen Buddhism, published in London in 1927, and the succeeding two series, published in 1933 and 1934, firmly established Suzuki's reputation in England; some of the essays first appeared in The Eastern Buddhist. In April 1936, Suzuki was invited to London to speak at the World Congress of Faiths. His encounter there with the twenty-year-old Alan Watts resulted in the publication, later the same year, of Watts's first book, The Spirit of Zen.

After the death in 1939 of his wife, who was his close collaborator throughout their marriage, Suzuki went into seclusion in Kamakura, remaining there for the duration of World War II. He emerged in 1949 to travel to Honolulu to attend the Second East-West Philosopher's Conference and taught at the University of Hawaii the following year. After spending the next year in California, he moved to New York in 1951, where he began teaching a series of seminars on Zen at Columbia University. Among his students at that time were the psychoanalysts Erich Fromm and Karen Horney and the composer John Cage. Cage, who attended Suzuki's seminars for two years in lieu of the psychoanalysis recommended by his friends, was profoundly influenced by them. Although Horney died shortly after a Suzuki-led tour of Zen monasteries in Japan in 1952, her final writings bear evidence of her association with him. Fromm in 1957 organized a groundbreaking workshop on Zen and psychoanalysis at his home in Cuernavaca, Mexico, at which Suzuki was the featured speaker. The long list of other Western intellectuals and artists on whom Suzuki is known to have had an influence includes Carl Jung, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and potter Bernard Leach.

In 1953 Mihoko Okamura, a second-generation Japanese American student in his class at Columbia, became Suzuki's personal secretary and editor. At this time Suzuki took up residence at the home of Okamura, her parents, and her sister on West Ninety-fourth Street in Manhattan. Okamura remained his secretary, and he continued to live with her family--when not traveling--for the rest of his life.

After his retirement from Columbia in June 1957 and the subsequent summer in Cuernavaca, Suzuki traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lectured and helped found the Cambridge Buddhist Society. Until his death in Tokyo at age ninety-five, Suzuki continued to travel widely, lecturing, attending conferences, and receiving a variety of honors.

In addition to playing a key role in the popularization of Buddhism in the Western world, Suzuki, who never formally graduated from any of the schools he attended, also made significant contributions to Buddhist scholarship, particularly to modern understanding of the Gandavyūha and Lankāvatāra sutras. In addition, his work resulted in a reawakening of interest in Buddhism in Japan after a period during which the study of Shinto had dominated Japanese religious scholarship.

Suzuki's collected complete works in Japanese occupy thirty-two volumes. The more than thirty titles he published in English include An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (first published in 1934) and Zen and Japanese Culture (1959).

Suzuki's last words were "Don't worry. Thank you! Thank you!"

BEGINNER'S MIND

Zen masters say that they have nothing to teach. This is half true. The problem is that what they have to teach is not teachable, not in so many words. Their task is the short-circuiting, in effect, of a person's analytical mind. If successful it will land the person where he was at the start of it all, at what is called beginner's mind, the state of one's mind when he is born.

The Ch'an school of Buddhism in China goes by the name of Zen in Japan, for this is how "ch'an" is pronounced in Japan. Three branches of Zen were established in Japan in the 12th, 13th, and 17th centuries. The two sects that are now most active are derived from the two most durable Chinese sects: the Rinzai, so named from the Japanese pronunciation of Lin-Chi, one of the Chinese sects, and the Soto, from the Chinese Ts'ao-tung, the other Chinese sect. The former favors the koan method where there is an enigma or puzzle that forces the student's mind outside its normal processes in order to gain instant insight. The Soto school prefers the zazen approach, or sitting in meditation on a regular, formulated basis under the direction of competent authority in order to attain gradual awakening. In both instances the aim is beginner's mind. When it occurs it is called satori. Rinzai's most vigorous advocate is the world-famous professor Dr. D.T. Suzuki whose description of his own satori is found in the entry in this blog THE MYSTIC. Alan Watts liked to recount Suzuki's informal description of his satori: "It is like everyday experience, only about two inches off the ground."

In beginner's mind a person sees the unitary character of reality. "I" and "not-I" are one. Deliberative reason will not succeed here. One cannot THINK oneself into this realization. This is to say, there are two ways of dealing with the world. One is to distinguish, describe, analyze, and, in pursuit of practical ends, manipulate its objects from the outside. This is to deal in concepts and acts that are disjunctive and misleading. The other is to contemplate the world, Nature, much as Taoists do, from the position of one who is indistinguishably at one with it.

This feeling of oneness is the mystical component of Zen, but it is different from the oneness in, for instance, Vedanta, which speaks of the oneness of Brahman and Atman. Dr. Suzuki points out that there is always what may be called a sense of the Beyond to Zen's oneness. The experience is indeed our own, he says, but we feel it to be rooted elsewhere. However, a SENSE of the Beyond is all that can be said about it. "To call this the Beyond, the Absolute, or God, or a Person is to go further than the experience itself and to plunge into a theology or metaphysics," which is not what Zen is about.