Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled “philosophical entertainer” who helped bring Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy to a Western audience. Born on 6 January 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent, he grew up as an only child in the English countryside, where he learned the names of wild flowers and butterflies. He later moved to the United States in 1938 and became a United States citizen in 1943. By the time of his death on 16 November 1973, his voice had become closely associated with the search for spiritual language outside conventional Western forms.

Watts first found a wide public while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA radio in Berkeley, California. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy. His best-known book, The Way of Zen, appeared in 1957 and became one of the first best-selling books on Buddhism, introducing Zen ideas to the Beat Generation and the emerging counterculture. He considered Nature, Man and Woman, published in 1958, to be his best work. In Psychotherapy East and West in 1961, he argued that psychotherapy could become the West’s way of liberation if it discarded dualism. He also wrote about human consciousness and psychedelics in The New Alchemy and The Joyous Cosmology.

The sources of Watts’s thought reached back into childhood. His mother’s family had a religious background, and her father had been a missionary. As a boy, Watts was drawn to storybook fables, romantic tales of the mysterious Far East, and the Chinese and Japanese art that missionaries returning from China had given to his mother. He later wrote that he was fascinated by the clarity, transparency, and spaciousness of that art. His boarding-school religious training, which he described as grim and maudlin, pushed him in another direction. In his teens, while spending holidays in France with Francis Croshaw, he felt forced to choose between Anglican Christianity and the Buddhism he had found in libraries. He chose Buddhism and became secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge at 16.

Watts was largely self-taught, by his own reckoning and by that of his biographer Monica Furlong. He read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry, and Eastern wisdom. Through the Buddhist Lodge and Christmas Humphreys, he came into contact with spiritual authors and thinkers, including Nicholas Roerich, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Alice Bailey. In 1936, at 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met D. T. Suzuki, a scholar of Zen Buddhism. That same year he published his first book, The Spirit of Zen, though he later described it as unscholarly, out of date, and misleading in some respects.

Watts’s life did not fit a single tradition. In New York, he chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sokei-an Sasaki, though Sasaki served as a model and mentor. He later entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, studying Christian scriptures, theology, and church history, and was ordained an Episcopalian priest on Ascension Day 1945. What continued through these changes was his wish to translate ideas across cultures and make them usable in ordinary speech. That is why his talks kept finding listeners after his death, on public radio in California and New York and later through the internet. A line like “The reason you want to be better is the same reason you aren’t” shows his gift for turning spiritual inquiry into a sharp, memorable sentence.