Background

Alan Wilson Watts was born in Chislehurst, England, the son of Laurence Wilson Watts, a haberdasher, and Emily Mary Buchan. Raised in the county of Kent, he became interested in the Far East at age twelve and developed a lifelong fascination with Asian art, literature, religion, and philosophy.

Education

Watts graduated from the venerable King's School in Canterbury in 1932 but failed to win an expected scholarship to Oxford.

Career

Instead of going on to higher education, he worked in his father's London office raising funds for hospitals while continuing his course of self-education guided by Oriental scholars Christmas Humphreys and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. He soon joined the World Congress of Faiths, serving on its executive board from 1937 to 1939. At age twenty Watts wrote The Spirit of Zen (1936), which explained the form of Mahayana Buddhism known as Zen to the Western public. This remarkable achievement was followed by The Legacy of Asia and Western man (1937). In these years Watts also acted as editor of The Middle Way in London (1934 - 1938) and coeditor of the Wisdom of the East book series (1937 - 1941). Watts continued to study Asian art and Zen Buddhism. In these years he wrote The Meaning of Happiness (1940) and several magazine articles. In 1943, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Strongly influenced by his wife and her mother, who were also students of Zen, Watts sought a stable career. Despite his lack of a university degree and his unorthodox Anglicanism, he entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. , in 1941 and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1944. He served as a popular and colorful chaplain at Northwestern University in Evanston (1944 - 1950), receiving his Master of Sacred Theology degree from that institution in 1948. In 1950 Watts moved to New York City for a period of writing and introspection. A year later he moved to California to teach philosophy and psychology at the independent American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco (1951 - 1957), serving as dean from 1953 to 1957. In the 1950's, Watts lectured widely at American colleges and universities, publishing The Supreme Identity (1950), The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), The Way of Zen (1957), and other works popularizing Zen and spiritualism to a diverse audience. By the 1950's, Watts was the leading Western exponent of Zen Buddhism, especially for the "beat generation" in New York and California. His concept of inner peace and release from what he termed the "chronic uneasy conscience of Hebrew-Christian cultures" 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 and his wife lived on a houseboat docked in Sausalito until crowds of visiting disciples and admirers made that impossible. They retreated to an isolated house in Mill Valley, near San Francisco, in 1969. While he was still in San Francisco, Watts associated with such proponents of beat as Jack Kerouac, who mocked Watts in the character of Arthur Whane in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958). He also befriended 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. " 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. " Alan Watts died at his home in Mill Valley.

Achievements

• He is best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. By 1965, he was considered a hero and was widely regarded as a modern mystic by the youthful counterculture in California. He was in great demand as a guru who could show Americans how to apply the wisdom of the East to the quest for freedom of the spirit. Watts's twenty-two books, numerous articles, and countless lectures did much to interest Westerners in Asian culture, in ways both superficial and serious, and, incidentally, to prepare them for multiculturalism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion

    (Just as groundbreaking today as it was when it first appe...)

  • This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

    (Six revolutionary essays exploring the relationship betwe...)

  • Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal

    (Over the course of nineteen essays, Alan Watts ruminates ...)

  • In My Own Way, An Autobiography

    (Autobiog by a man who did much to open the paths to Easte...)

  • The Wisdom of Insecurity

    (Pages are clean and binding is tight.)

  • The Way of Zen

    (spiritual)

  • Nature, Man and Woman

Politics

Watts 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.

Views

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, pantheism or 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 and 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, " or "skin-encapsulated ego" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely aspects or features of the whole.

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.

Connections

On April 3, 1938, Watts married Eleanor Everett, a socially prominent Chicago heiress. They moved to New York City in 1938. The couple had two children. In 1950, Watts left the priesthood, the church, and his family after a love affair scandal. His first marriage was soon annulled, and he married Dorothy Marie DeWitt on June 29, 1950; the couple had five children. Watts and his second wife were divorced in 1963, and on December 4 he married Mary Jane Yates. They had no children.

Father:

Laurence Wilson Watts

A haberdasher

Mother:

Emily Mary Buchan

Spouse:

Mary Jane Yates

Spouse:

Eleanor Everett

Spouse:

Dorothy Marie DeWitt

References

• Original Dwelling Place: Zen Buddhist Essays
• Elsa I Come With My Songs the Autobiography of Elsa Gidlow
• The Portable Beat Reader (Viking portable library) by Ann ed. Charter (1998-08-27)
• The Three Pillars of Zen, 25th Anniversary Updated and Revised Edition
• Zen Pioneer: The Life and Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki
• Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts (Skylight Lives)