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 in the fields, 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 growing up, 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 age 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 considered 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, such as 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.  Also in 1936, Watts' first book was published, The Spirit of Zen, which he later acknowledged was 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, following their divorce, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki, who 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 teaching did not 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 went on to publish under the title Behold the Spirit.  The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for formal religious outlooks, which he saw as dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing, no matter where they may be, in Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as, ironically, an Episcopalian priest.  This began in 1945 when he was 30 years old, until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled.  It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry in 1950.  In the new year he met mythologist Joseph Campbell, Campbell's wife Jean Erdman, a dancer and choreographer of modern dance, and John Cage, a composer, music theorist, and a leading figure of the post-war avant-guarde.

In the spring of 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco.  There he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa, Frederick Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors.  Hasegawa, an abstract calligrapher, was a major influence on Watts, in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature.

Watts also studied written Chinese with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the Academy.  While Watts was noted for his interest in Zen Buddhism, with its origins in China, but his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta as well, along with 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).

In 1957, 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, gleaned 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 to life.  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.  His book Psychotherapy East and West is a good example, finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe as 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 “Lights along the Way” in Wilson’s book Cosmic Trigger.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, Watts did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University.  He also lectured to many college and university students generally.  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 in Beyond Theology and in The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview drawing on Vedanta, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science.  He maintained that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek from itself by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is.  The upshot was that we are all this cosmic self in disguise.  In this view, Watts asserted that our conception of ourselves as egos in a bag of skin is a myth, and that separate "things" so-called, are merely processes of the whole.  Everything is one thing.