Alan Watts by South Park creators
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British-born
philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of
Eastern philosophy for a
Western audience. Born in
Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began
Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an
Episcopal priest then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to
California, where he joined the faculty of the
American Academy of Asian Studies.
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 also explored human consciousness, in the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book
The Joyous Cosmology (1962).
Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in
Sausalito and a cabin on
Mount Tamalpais.
His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and many of his
recorded talks and lectures are available on the Internet. According to
the critic
Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."
In 1936, Watts's first book was published,
The Spirit of Zen. In
The Way of Zen[12] 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Suzuki's earlier works, and besides being very unscholarly it is in many respects out of date and misleading."
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
Watts, though he chose not to enter into a formal Zen training
relationship with Sasaki. During these years, according to his later
writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his
wife.
Watts's fascination with the Zen (or Chan) 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 A.D. 700 in China."
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 professional 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.
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,
Islam,
Hinduism, or
Buddhism.
All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopal
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 and Campbell's wife,
Jean Erdman; as well as
John Cage the notable composer.
In early 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,
Frederic 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. Besides teaching, Watts served
for several years as the Academy's administrator. One notable student of
his was
Eugene Rose, who later went on to become a noted
hieromonk and theologian in the
Eastern Orthodox Church in America.
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, 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).
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.
In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist
Carl Jung and the German psychotherapist
Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.
[14]
Upon returning to the United States, Watts recorded two seasons of a television series (1959–1960) for
KQED public television in San Francisco, "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life."
In the 1960s, Watts began to experiment with
psychedelics, 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's books of the '60s
reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He
later said about psychedelic drug use, "If you get the message, hang up
the phone."
[16]
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 him far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia
of the 1950s–1970s, but he was often seen as an outsider in academia.
When questioned sharply by students during his talk at University of
California Santa Cruz in 1970, Watts responded that he was not an
academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer".
Watts has been criticized by Buddhists such as
Philip Kapleau and
D. T. Suzuki for allegedly misinterpreting several key Zen Buddhist concepts. In particular, he drew criticism from those who believe that
zazen
can only be achieved by a strict and specific means of sitting, as
opposed to a cultivated state of mind available at any moment in any
situation. Typical of these is Kapleau's claim that Watts dismissed
zazen on the basis of only half a
koan.
[17] In regard to the aforementioned koan,
Robert Baker Aitken reports that Suzuki told him, "I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story."
[18]
In his talks, Watts addressed the issue of defining zazen practice when
he said, "A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up,
stretches, and walks away."
He also had his supporters in the Zen community, including
Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. As
David Chadwick recounted in his biography of Suzuki,
Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki,
when a student of Suzuki's disparaged Watts by saying "we used to think
he was profound until we found the real thing", Suzuki "fumed with a
sudden intensity", saying, "You completely miss the point about Alan
Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great
bodhisattva."
Watts sometimes alluded to a group of neighbors in
Druid Heights (near
Mill Valley,
California) who had endeavored to combine architecture, gardening, and
carpentry skills to make a beautiful and comfortable life for
themselves. These neighbors accomplished this by relying on their own
talents and using their own hands, as they lived in what has been called
"shared bohemian poverty".
[20] Druid Heights was founded by the writer
Elsa Gidlow,
[21] and Watts dedicated his book
The Joyous Cosmology to the people of this neighborhood.
[22]
Regarding his intentions, Watts attempted to lessen the
alienation
that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the
modern Westerner, and (like his fellow British expatriate and friend,
Aldous Huxley)
to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of
alienation from the natural world. He felt such teaching could improve
the world, at least to a degree. He also articulated the possibilities
for greater incorporation of
aesthetics
(for example: better architecture, more art, more fine cuisine) in
American life. In his autobiography he wrote, "… cultural renewal comes
about when highly differentiated cultures mix".
[23]
In his last novel
Island (1962), Aldous Huxley mentions the religious practice of
maithuna as being something like what
Roman Catholics call "
coitus reservatus". A few years before, Alan Watts had discussed the theme in his own book
Nature, Man and Woman.
There, he discusses the possibility of the practice being known to
early Christians and of it being kept secretly by the Church.
In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of
Chán
(Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects,
builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks
who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages.
In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book,
Tao: The Watercourse Way.
Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom,
architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all
of great interest to him.
Though known for his Zen teachings, he was equally if not more
influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke
extensively about the nature of the divine Reality Man that Man misses,
how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means
of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted
in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the
Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. These are
discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part
captured in the 'Out of Your Mind' series.
On the personal level, Watts sought to resolve his feelings of
alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American
society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in
"Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The
Philosophy of Nature".
In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity
for international peace, for tolerance and understanding among
disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing
ecological predicament; as one instance, in the early 1960s he wrote:
"Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising
mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are
beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown
away?"
[24] These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for
NET
filmed at his mountain retreat in 1971 in which he noted that the
single track of conscious attention was wholly inadequate for
interactions with a multi-tracked world.
He disliked much in the conventional idea of "progress". He hoped for
change, but he preferred amiable, semi-isolated rural social enclaves,
and also believed in tolerance for social misfits and
eccentric artists. Watts decried the
suburbanization of the countryside and the way of life that went with it.
In one campus lecture tour, which Watts titled "The End to the
Put-Down of Man", Watts presented positive images for both nature and
humanity, spoke in favor of the various stages of
human development (including the
teenage years), reproached excessive
cynicism and rivalry, and extolled intelligent creativity, good
architecture and food.
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.
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.
Watts led some tours for Westerners to the Buddhist temples of Japan. He also studied some movements from the traditional
Chinese martial art
T'ai chi ch'uan, with an Asian colleague,
Al Chung-liang Huang.
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,
panentheism, 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
ourselves as an "
ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.
Watts's 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
