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Alan Watts

British and American writer and lecturer (1915–1973)

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Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley, California. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the Beat Generation and the emerging counterculture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first best-selling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that psychotherapy could become the West's way of liberation if it discarded dualism. He considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be his best work. He also explored human consciousness and psychedelics in works such as The New Alchemy (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

After his death, his lectures remained popular with regular broadcasts on public radio, especially in California and New York, and found new audiences with the rise of the internet.

Early years

Watts was born to middle-class parents in Chislehurst, Kent on 6 January 1915, living at Rowan Tree Cottage, 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. Watts's father, Laurence Wilson Watts, was a representative for the London office of the Michelin tyre company. His mother, Emily Mary Watts (née Buchan), was a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With little money, they chose to live in the countryside, and Watts, an only child, learned the names of wild flowers and butterflies. Probably because of the influence of his mother's religious family, Watts became interested in spirituality. Watts was interested in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East. He attended The King's School Canterbury where he was a contemporary and friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Watts later wrote of a mystical dream he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from China. The few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float ..."

Buddhism

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 Christian" 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. 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 was then run by the barrister and QC Christmas Humphreys (who later became a judge at the Old Bailey). Watts became the organization's secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Education

Watts won a scholarship to The King's School, Canterbury, the oldest boarding school in the country. 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 Trinity College, Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that he said was read as "presumptuous and capricious".

When he left King's, 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", Dimitrije Mitrinović, who was influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the 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 gave Watts opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted spiritual authors, e.g. the artist, scholar, and mystic Nicholas Roerich, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey.

In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met the scholar of Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, who was presenting a paper. Beyond attending discussions, Watts studied the available scholarly literature, learning the fundamental concepts and terminology of Indian and East Asian philosophy.

Influences and first publication

Watts's fascination with the Zen (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 (emerging as Zen in Japan) synthesis of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism after AD 700 in China." Watts published his first book, The Spirit of Zen, in 1936. 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."

Watts married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. Ruth Fuller later married the Zen master (or "roshi"), Sokei-an Sasaki, who 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. In 1938 they left England to live in the United States. Watts became a United States citizen in 1943.

Christian priest and afterwards

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 ordained an Episcopalian priest on Ascension Day 1945, which he justified by writing it was the only occupation in which he could "begin to fit". He struggled to find Christian authority for his Buddhist beliefs, resulting in his 1947 book Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion which resulted in him being awarded a master's degree in theology.

Watts believed that marriage did not fit his non-monogamous nature. As this became increasingly manifest, his wife Eleanor sued for annulment on grounds that Watts "contracted a monogamous marriage under false pretenses". Watts responded to his Bishop's "letter of inquiry" about the matter with a letter of resignation as a priest in August 1950.

Watts later published Myth & Ritual in Christianity (1953), an eisegesis of Christian traditions that made use of his knowledge of Asian philosophy and religion to provide insight into medieval Roman Catholic mythology, mysticism, and ritual, which he lamented had provided meaning that had been lost in the development of modern Christian practices.

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 from 1951 to 1957 alongside Saburo Hasegawa (1906–1957), Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tada Tōkan (1890–1967), and various visiting experts and professors. Hasegawa taught Watts about Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature. During this time he met the poet Jean Burden, with whom he had a four-year love affair.

Watts credited Burden as an "important influence" in his life and gave her a dedicatory cryptograph in his book Nature, Man and Woman, mentioned in his autobiography (p. 297). Besides teaching, Watts was for several years the academy's administrator. One student of his was Eugene Rose, who later went on to become a noted Eastern Orthodox Christian hieromonk and controversial theologian within the Orthodox Church in America under the jurisdiction of ROCOR. Rose's own disciple, a fellow monastic priest published under the name Hieromonk Damascene, produced a book entitled Christ the Eternal Tao, in which the author draws parallels between the concept of the Tao in Chinese religion and the concept of the Logos in classical Greek philosophy and Eastern Christian theology.

Watts also studied written Chinese and practised Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa as well as with Hodo Tobase, who taught at the academy. Watts became proficient in Classical Chinese. While he 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.

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