Alan Watts

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Wilson Watts was born on the 6th of January 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent, into a middle-class household at Rowan Tree Cottage, 3 Holbrook Lane, where his father worked as a representative for the London office of the Michelin tyre company. He died on the 16th of November 1973 in Druid Heights, California, at age 58. In the decades between, he became one of the most unlikely bridges ever built between Eastern philosophy and the Western mind.

  He wrote more than 25 books. His radio broadcasts ran weekly for nearly a decade. After his death, his lectures kept broadcasting on public radio in California and New York, and then the internet carried his voice to audiences he never imagined. Van Morrison wrote a song about him. A Spike Jonze film included an AI modelled on him. His words open a season finale of Loki.

  How does a child from Kent, who never finished a university degree, become the person who introduced an entire counterculture to Zen? And what does it mean that a man who called himself a "philosophical entertainer" was also called a great bodhisattva by one of the most respected Zen masters in America? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A Child Facing East

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  Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries, given to his mother by missionaries returning from China, hung in the Watts home during Alan's childhood. He later wrote that he was "aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float." That quality of floating never left his imagination.

  His mother Emily's father had been a missionary, which meant the family had unusual connections to a world far beyond Chislehurst. Watts was an only child who learned the names of wild flowers and butterflies in the countryside around their modest home. Storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East filled his reading hours.

  At boarding school, his religious instruction struck him as "grim and maudlin", in his own words. He attended The King's School Canterbury, where a schoolmate was Patrick Leigh Fermor, later one of Britain's most celebrated travel writers. The regimented "Muscular Christian" training he received there seems to have produced the opposite of its intended effect: Watts grew steadily more drawn to the Buddhism he found in libraries than to the Anglicanism he found in chapel.

  In his teen years he spent several holidays in France with Francis Croshaw, a wealthy man with an Epicurean temperament and deep interests in Buddhism and obscure corners of European culture. Faced with a genuine choice between the two traditions, Watts chose Buddhism. By age 16, in 1931, he had become secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge, then run by the barrister and QC Christmas Humphreys, who later became a judge at the Old Bailey.

• 3. Self-Made Scholar

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  Watts won a scholarship to The King's School Canterbury, described as the oldest boarding school in the country, on academic merit. He was frequently at the top of his classes. Yet when he sat a crucial examination essay for a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, he styled it in a way that was read as "presumptuous and capricious", by his own account. The scholarship went elsewhere.

  He worked in a printing house and then a bank after leaving King's, spending his spare time at the Buddhist Lodge and studying under a figure he called a "rascal guru": Dimitrije Mitrinović, who drew on Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the psychoanalytical traditions of Freud, Jung, and Adler. Watts read widely across philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry, and Eastern thought.

  Both Watts himself and his biographer Monica Furlong considered him primarily an autodidact. The Lodge gave him access to people he could not have met through any university door. Through Humphreys, he made contact with the artist and mystic Nicholas Roerich, the philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and theosophists including Alice Bailey.

  In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met D. T. Suzuki, the scholar who had done more than anyone to bring Zen to Western readers. Suzuki was presenting a paper at the congress. Watts published his first book, The Spirit of Zen, that same year, at 21. He later dismissed it, in The Way of Zen, as a "popularisation of Suzuki's earlier works" that was "very unscholarly" and "in many respects out of date and misleading."

• 4. Priest, Then Something Else

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  Watts married Eleanor Everett in April 1938, after meeting her two years earlier when her mother Ruth Fuller Everett brought her to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge. Ruth Fuller later married the Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki, who became a kind of model and mentor to Watts, though Watts chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with him.

  In 1938 the couple moved to the United States. Watts became an American citizen in 1943. He left formal Zen training in New York because the teacher's method did not suit him. Seeking a vocational outlet for his philosophical inclinations, he enrolled at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Episcopal school in Evanston, Illinois, and studied Christian scriptures, theology, and church history. He was ordained as an Episcopalian priest on Ascension Day 1945, which he justified by saying it was the only occupation in which he could "begin to fit".

  His 1947 book Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, which tried to reconcile mystical Christianity with his Buddhist commitments, earned him a master's degree in theology. But his personal life frayed the arrangement. Eleanor sued for annulment on the grounds that Watts had "contracted a monogamous marriage under false pretenses". Watts replied to his bishop's inquiry with a letter of resignation as a priest in August 1950.

  His 1953 book Myth and Ritual in Christianity applied his knowledge of Asian religion to medieval Roman Catholic mythology and mysticism. He lamented that the meaning he found in those old forms had been lost as modern Christian practice developed. By early 1951 he had already moved to California to join the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco.

• 5. California and the Airwaves

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  At the American Academy of Asian Studies, Watts taught from 1951 to 1957 alongside Saburo Hasegawa, Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, and the lama Tada Tokan, as well as visiting experts. Hasegawa, who lived from 1906 to 1957, taught Watts about Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature. Watts also studied written Chinese and practised Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa and with Hodo Tobase. He became proficient in Classical Chinese.

  One of his students at the academy was Eugene Rose, who later became a noted Eastern Orthodox Christian hieromonk and controversial theologian within the Orthodox Church in America under ROCOR.

  In 1953, while still on the faculty, Watts began a weekly radio program at KPFA, a listener-sponsored Pacifica station in Berkeley. Like other volunteer programmers there, he was not paid. The broadcasts continued until 1962, by which time he had attracted what was described as a "legion of regular listeners". In 1957, aged 42, he published The Way of Zen, which drew on general semantics from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and on Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics. The book sold well and became a modern classic. It introduced the Beat Generation and the emerging counterculture to ideas that had been largely confined to academic specialists.

  In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and the German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Durckheim. Back in the United States, he recorded two seasons of a television series for KQED public television in San Francisco, titled Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, in 1959-1960.

• 6. Psychedelics and Philosophy

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  Oscar Janiger gave Watts his first mescaline. Watts then tried LSD several times in 1958, with research teams led by Keith S. Ditman, Sterling Bunnell Jr., and Michael Agron. He also tried cannabis, concluding it was a useful psychoactive that gave the impression of time slowing down.

  His books from 1958 onward, including Nature, Man and Woman and the essay The New Alchemy, began to reflect these experiments. The Joyous Cosmology, published in 1962, explored human consciousness and psychedelics directly. But Watts resisted the idea that the drugs were an end in themselves. He later said: "If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen."

  Watts held a fellowship at Harvard University from 1962 to 1964, and was a Scholar at San Jose State University in 1968. He was Professor of Comparative Philosophy at the American Academy of Asian Studies. Though never affiliated for long with any single institution, his lectures and books shaped the American intelligentsia of the 1950s through 1970s. When questioned sharply by students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1970, he described himself, as he had since the early 1960s, as not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer".

  In the 1960s, he grew absorbed by the way identifiable patterns in nature tend to repeat at every scale, from the smallest to the most immense. His worldview, set out especially in Beyond Theology and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, held that the whole universe consists of a cosmic Self playing hide-and-seek, hiding from itself by becoming every living and non-living thing and forgetting what it really is.

• 7. Defenders, Critics, and Legacy

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  Philip Kapleau and D. T. Suzuki both criticized Watts for allegedly misinterpreting Zen Buddhist concepts, especially regarding zazen. Roshi Kapleau claimed Watts dismissed zazen on the basis of only half a koan. Robert Baker Aitken reported that Suzuki told him: "I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story." In his talks, Watts defined zazen practice by saying a cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away.

  Yet Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, defended him fiercely. When a student disparaged Watts by saying they used to think he was profound until they found the real thing, Suzuki responded with sudden intensity: "You completely miss the point about Alan Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great bodhisattva."

  His friendship with the poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the emerging environmental movement. Robert Anton Wilson credited Watts as one of his "Lights along the Way" in the opening of his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. Werner Erhard, who attended Watts's workshops, said: "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."

  Jean Burden, who had a four-year love affair with Watts and whom he credited as an "important influence", said he was "a very difficult man to be in love with. He was a rogue. He drank too much. Women were catnip to him." She still called him "one of the most fascinating men I have ever met." Watts himself, in his autobiography In My Own Way, described himself as "a sedentary and contemplative character, an intellectual, a Brahmin, a mystic and also somewhat of a disreputable epicurean who has three wives, seven children and five grandchildren".

• 8. The Final Chapter

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  Druid Heights, the community near Mill Valley, California, founded by the writer Elsa Gidlow, was where Watts spent his last years. He sometimes ate with his neighbors there, who lived in what has been described as "shared bohemian poverty". He dedicated The Joyous Cosmology to the people of that neighborhood and his autobiography to Gidlow herself, whom he called "sister".

  In October 1973, Watts returned from a European lecture tour to his cabin in Druid Heights. Friends and relatives had been concerned about his alcoholism for some time. On the 16th of November 1973, at age 58, he died in the Mandala House in Druid Heights. His body was discovered at 6:00 a.m. and cremated on a wood pyre on Muir Beach at 8:30 a.m. by Buddhist monks, before any authorities could attend the scene. Half his ashes were buried near his library at Druid Heights; the other half were placed at the Green Gulch Monastery.

  He had been under treatment for a heart condition. His son Mark Watts later investigated and found that his father had planned his death meticulously. Mary Jane Watts wrote that Watts had told her: "The secret of life is knowing when to stop." His father, Laurence Wilson Watts, died in 1974, just one year after his son.

  A personal account of Watts's final years is given by Al Chung-liang Huang in Watts's posthumous book Tao: The Watercourse Way, which Watts had described as presenting himself in his mature work as "Zennist" in spirit. The film Alan Watts: Conversation with Myself, produced by KQED for National Educational Television and shown across the country on PBS channels in 1975, was filmed at Druid Heights in 1971 and captures the man in his own landscape, two years before it became his last.