Alan Wilson Watts who died on this day in 1973 was a theologian and philosopher, whose work helped introduce Western audiences to popularized notions of Zen and Asian philosophy. He was a giant in the middle 20th century, but his essays and books on Zen are still relevant to the current generation.
He was born on 6 January 1915, in Chislehurst, Kent, England to Christian parents. His father, Laurence Wilson Watts, was an employee of Michelin Tyre Company while his mother, Emily Mary Watts (née Buchan), was a homemaker who also taught missionary children in China. He developed an interest in Buddhism while he was still a student at King’s School, Canterbury which was next door to Canterbury Cathedral. As the only child of his parents, Alan grew up playing alone by the brook, learning to identify wildflowers and butterflies. Another factor that had an immense influence on his upbringing was his mother’s family, which was religiously inclined.Watts also later wrote of a mystical dream he experienced while ill with a fever as a child.
Subsequently, at 14 he declared himself a Buddhist and joined the Buddhist Lodge in London, where he met many scholars and spiritual masters, who helped him to shape his ideas. He was a prolific writer and began writing at the age of fourteen. Many of his early works were published in the journal of the Lodge.
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.
When he left secondary school, Watts worked 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. By his own reckoning, and also by that of his biographer Monica Furlong, Watts was primarily an autodidact. His involvement with the Buddhist Lodge in London afforded Watts a considerable number of opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors (e.g. the artist, scholar, and mystic Nicholas Roerich, 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, Watts absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.
By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training of the Muscular Christianity sort) from early years. Of this religious training, he remarked “Throughout my schooling my religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin…”
Watts spent several holidays in France in his teen years, accompanied by Francis Croshaw, a wealthy Epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and exotic little-known aspects of European culture. 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’s fascination with the Zen (or Ch’an) tradition—beginning during the 1930s—developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East. “Work”, “life”, and “art” were not demoted due to a spiritual focus. In his writing, he referred to it as “the great Ch’an (or Zen) synthesis of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism after 700 CE in China.”
In 1936, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. He had already read his works; the meeting fascinated him to a great extent. Two decades later, in The Way of Zen he disparaged The Spirit of Zen as a “popularisation of Suzuki’s earlier works, and besides being very unscholarly it is in many respects out of date and misleading.”
He moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher did not suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a vocational outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Episcopal (Anglican) school 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: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion.
In 1945, on receiving his master’s degree from the seminary, he became an Episcopal priest and joined the Northwestern University at Chicago as its chaplain. He was very popular among the students, who joined him in a spirited discussion on Christian as well as Eastern philosophy.
During his stay at Chicago, Watts wrote three books on Christian mysticism. However, he found it very hard to reconcile his Buddhist beliefs with Christian doctrines.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, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Moreover, he got entangled in an extramarital relationship. So he left Chicago and in early 1951, shifted to San Francisco.
Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, “from a literary point of view — the best book I have ever written.” He also explored human consciousness, in the essay “The New Alchemy” (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
Alan Watts was profoundly influenced by the East Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism, and by Taoist thought, which is reflected in Zen poetry and the arts of China and Japan. After leaving the Church, he never became a member of another organized religion, and although he wrote and spoke extensively about Zen Buddhism, he was criticized by American Buddhist practitioners for not sitting regularly in zazen. Alan Watts responded simply by saying, “A cat sits until it is done sitting, and then gets up, stretches, and walks away.”
Sometime now, he also started experimenting with psychedelic drugs and its effect on mystical insight. He began by taking mescaline.Later he worked with marijuana and wrote about their effects in his forthcoming books. Next in 1958, he worked with several other researchers on LSD, earned him an enthusiastic following, ranging from beatniks and bohemians to psychoanalysts, theologians, and intellectuals. He added advice on diet, dress, sex, yoga, Taoism, and the Vedanta to the core of his Zen Buddhist spiritualism. This Is It (1960) and Psychotherapy East and West (1961) were very popular in the United States, as were his syndicated radio and television programs and many campus lectures. Watts associated with such proponents of beat as Jack Kerouac, who portrayed Watts in the character of Arthur Whane in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958) and as Alex Aums in Desolation Angels. Among his large circle of friends are such luminaries as the writer/philosopher Aldous Huxley, poet Kenneth Rexroth, composer John Cage, and philosopher Joseph Campbell. Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Richard Alpert ("Ram Dass"), and Timothy Leary and lent support to their experiments in consciousness expansion. In the spirit of the liberated counterculture era he helped shape, Watts had experimented with LSD to attain spiritual insight as early as 1958, before Leary and Alpert used the new hallucinogen at Harvard. He defended LSD as a useful tool, a "sacrament" for Westerners in their search for knowledge, but he cautioned those seeking enlightenment to use the drug prudently. Nevertheless, Watts also enjoyed luxury, tobacco, alcohol, fine food, travel, and sexual affairs. When criticized because he eschewed the asceticism usually associated with Zen Buddhism, Watts called himself an "unrepentant sensualist. "
Watts LP This Is It is about the first hippy LSD jam sessions ever recorded. The record was a huge sources of of inspiration for the 60's scene. The LSD seemed to transform from a rather stiff British intellectual into a more looser free spirited beatnik, someone who could laugh wildly attend parties of abandonment , play bongos, dance wildly and produce long nonsense rhymes for himself and others amusement.
Also in 1962 he organized the Society for Comparative Philosophy, which published the Alan Watts Journal. His interest in bridging East and West and in finding some common ground between Christianity and Buddhism continued during the turmoil of the hippie and New Left years. But his deceptively lighthearted example led one critic to suggest that Watts's epitaph might be taken from the second chapter of Ecclesiastes: "I thought of beguiling my senses with wine, though my mind was concerned with wisdom. "
His friendship with poet Gary Snyder https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/05/happy-birthday-gary-snyder-poet.html nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support. He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2012/03/robert-anton-wilson-180132-110107-maybe.htmlwho credited Watts with being one of his “Lights along the Way” in the opening appreciation of Cosmic Trigger. Werner Erhard attended workshops given by Alan Watts and said of him, “He pointed me toward what I now call the distinction between Self and Mind. After my encounter with Alan, the context in which I was working shifted.”,
From early 1960s, he went to Japan several times. Also from 1962 to 1964, he had a fellowship at Harvard University and in 1968, became a scholar at San Jose State University. In fact, by the late 1960s, he had become a counterculture celebrity with many followers as well as critics.
Soon he began travelling widely to speak at universities and growth centers across the US and Europe and by early 1970s, he became the most important interpreter of Eastern thoughts in the Western world.
In regards to his ethical outlook, Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one’s deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens. He wrote out of an appreciation of a racially and culturally diverse social landscape.
Watts led some tours for Westerners to the Buddhist temples of Japan. He also studied some movements from the trWatts was a prophet of the idea that we can seek our spiritual fulfilment outside of traditional religious commitments and communities. He preached the ‘wisdom of insecurity’ — not clinging to any particular religion. He was a nomad-prophet for our uprooted age. He preached the wisdom of the body, the spirituality of sex, the validity of psychedelics as a spiritual technique, the superiority of Asian wisdom to Christianity, and the possibility of escaping history by focusing on ‘the Eternal Now’aditional Chinese martial art taijiquan, with an Asian colleague, Al Chung-liang Huang.
Watts’ books frequently include discussions reflecting his keen interest in patterns that occur in nature and which are repeated in various ways and at a wide range of scales – including the patterns to be discerned in the history of civilizations.
Watts was a prophet of the idea that we can seek our spiritual fulfilment outside of traditional religious commitments and communities. He preached the ‘wisdom of insecurity’ — not clinging to any particular religion. He was a nomad-prophet for our uprooted age. He preached the wisdom of the body, the spirituality of sex, the validity of psychedelics as a spiritual technique, the superiority of Asian wisdom to Christianity, and the possibility of escaping history by focusing on ‘the Eternal Now’
But his main message, which he repeated over and over throughout his career, was that there is no separate self, that there is just IT, the Tao, the Brahman, and you are inescapably part of it, so relax and let go, rather than trying to pull yourself up by your spiritual boot-straps. Over-strenuous spiritual practice will actually just reinforce your ego. You are already perfect, already enlightened, you don’t need to do or change anything. There is no ‘you’, just IT.
Watts married three times and had seven children (five daughters and two sons). In 1936, he met Eleanor Everett at the Buddhist Lodge and got married in April 1938. Their eldest daughter Joan was born in November 1938 and the younger daughter Anne in 1942.
Towards the end of 1940s, Watts became entangled with an extramarital affair with Jean Burden; as a result Eleanor had their marriage annulled. Although he never married Jean, she remained in his thought till the end. He also kept in touch with his mother-in-law Ruth Fuller Everett.
In 1950, Watts married Dorothy DeWitt. They had five children; Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane. The marriage ended when in early 1960s Watts met Mary Jane Yates King while on a lecture tour to New York. The divorce was granted in 1964 and Watts and King got married in the same year.
Despite his innate wisdom he failed as a husband, and drove his third wife to the bottle with his philandering — he would pick up a different college girl after most talks (‘I don’t like to sleep alone’). In fairness to him the women of his life knew what he was about, so I wont pass moral judgement.By his own admission he failed as a father to his seven children: ‘By all the standards of this society I have been a terrible father’, although some of his children still remember him fondly as a kind man, who initiated each of his children into LSD on their 18th birthday. He was vain and boastful, ‘immoderately infatuated with the sound of my own voice," although he didn’t try and hide his failings, and hey who at end of the day is perfect. Lfe is about mistakes, but i also about learning from them, Watts perhaps in his mystical ' Life as a Play ' talk learn from his mistakes or know something was wrong.
Until the middle of 1960s Watts lived with King on a houseboat docked in Sausalito until crowds of visiting disciples and admirers made that impossible. They retreated to an isolated cabin in Mill Valley, near San Francisco, called Druid Heights, located on the southwest flank of Mount Tamalpais. At the same time, he continued with his lecture trips.
But by the end of his life he was having to do several talks a week to make enough money to pay his alimony and child support. And he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day to be able to do that. He died, exhausted, at 58. Snyder remembers:
he had to keep working, and as you keep working, you know, you got to play these roles, and you also keep drinking ’cause there’s always these parties and so forth, so that doesn’t help you slow it down. So he just wore himself out. It was out of his control, that was my feeling. The dynamics of his life had gotten beyond his control, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
One of his lovers, the therapist June Singer, visited him in hospital when he was admitted with delirium tremens. Why didn’t he stop drinking, she asked. ‘That’s how I am,’ he said to her sadly. ‘I can’t change.’
Ultimately, Watts seems to have worked incredibly hard at his career, at his public profile, at the endless talks he gave on campuses, on radio and on TV. In other words, on the external self. And he worked very little on the inner man , psychotherapy bored him, while he felt too much meditation ‘is apt to turn one into a stone Buddha’.
For Zen writers like for Shakespeare, life is but a dream, and if you are not living in the present you are living a fantasy. Watt taught, above all else, that everything is transitory. Yes he died of alcoholism after having been a heavy drinker all his life, but he never expressed guilt or remorse because of his addiction, and he never missed one of his lectures or deadlines for his written works.
So his life to me could hardly be called a tragedy. It sounds incredibly interesting, and often incredibly fun. He was energetic, friendly, charismatic, full of ideas, alcoholic, egotistical, lonely and definitely not an authority on 'how to live'. Why, was he so unsuccessful at putting his own teachings into practice? Did he struggle but not succeed? I suspect he was never serious in the first place but a relatively easy-going personality who wished to be content as a popular success but obviously his inner demons required sedating through the use of alcohol.
The question that cannot be answered is why after a lifetime involved in Buddhist studying and proselytising was Watts not a genuine practitioner. I suspect there are two reasons. While I do not believe in the efficacy of the various Buddhist meditation techniques there is no doubt that they are difficult to practice and require long term committment and effort and Watts was able to live very well on his intelligence, charm and style. This required no such effort. Secondly he had, after all, met all the recognised Buddhist and other "masters", rinpoches, swamis, gurus, etc and he had probably already decided that if enlightenment existed at all there was nobody who had attained it. And the consequence of his egoistical drive to self-promote was the flowering of Asian wisdom in western culture.
On all accounts he sounds like a likeable and friendly man, without the tendency to greed, malice or domination that one sees in some spiritual teachers. And his books genuinely helped thousands of people, giving them a holistic vision that consoles them in dark times. Does it matter that he had such a messy life himself?
His body was cremated and half of the ashes were buried near his library at Druid Heights while the other half at the Green Gulch Monastery.
Watts remains one of the most respected and quotable writers on Zen Buddhism in the English-speaking world. Across a multitude of books, speeches and recorded lectures, he championed experiences and conscious living over the accumulation of things and is still referenced by many in the fields of politics, religion, philosophy and the arts.Today, new generations are finding his writings and lectures online, while faithful followers worldwide continue to be enlightened by his teachings.
Watts’ eldest daughters, Joan Watts and Anne Watts, own and manage most of the copyrights to his books. His son, Mark Watts, serves as curator of his father’s audio, video and film and has published content of some of his spoken lectures in print format. You can watch his talks on YouTube for hours, I've enjoyed them immensely.
There are thousands of books, essays, numerous You tube videos one can view and other materials that have stemmed from his work and all of them are impressed with affection, as if the people who read or heard him had somehow established a liaison with the author. Alan Watts was a fascinating enigmatic characters, not flawless in anyway, but an individual who helped establish a bridge to the beautiful world of Zen who was also responsible for sparking the passion of innumerable seekers of wisdom and spiritual delights with his ability to make Eastern spirituality understandable. Who was always adamant about making a path for oneself, saying: “the menu is not the meal”
Here's a video from one of my favourite short Watt's lectures animated by the creators of
South Park and here is a link to his official website https://alanwatts.org/
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