Alan Watts
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| Born |
Alan Wilson Watts
6 January 1915
Chislehurst, London, England
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| Died | 16 November 1973 (aged 58) |
| Nationality |
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| Alma mater | Seabury-Western Theological Seminary |
Notable work
| The Way of Zen (1957) |
| Spouse(s) |
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| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| School | |
| Institutions | |
Main interests
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Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher who interpreted and popularised Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, 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 in 1945, 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 considered Nature, Man and Woman (1958) to be, "from a literary point of view—the best book I have ever written." 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. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."
Early years
Watts aged 7
Watts was born to middle-class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent (now south-east London), on 6 January 1915, living at 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane, which was previously lived in by author John Hemming-Clark in the early 1900s.[4] Watts' 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 modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral
surroundings and Watts, an only child, grew up playing at brookside,
learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies. Probably because of the influence of his mother's religious family
the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in. It mixed with
Watts's own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the
mysterious Far East.
Watts also 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..."
These works of art emphasised the participatory relationship of people
in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life and one that he
often wrote about.
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. It was not long afterward that 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 had been established by Theosophists, and was then run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization's secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.
Education
Watts attended The King's School, Canterbury, next door to Canterbury Cathedral.
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 Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as "presumptuous and capricious."
When he left secondary school, 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" named Dimitrije Mitrinović. (Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied 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 afforded Watts a considerable number of opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors, e.g. the artist, scholar, and mystic Nicholas Roerich, Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey.
In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D. T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism.
Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, Watts absorbed, by
studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.
Influences and first publication
Watts's fascination with the Zen
(or 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 (or Zen) synthesis
of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism after 700 CE 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 after
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 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.
He later published Myth & Ritual in Christianity (1953), an eisegesis of traditional Roman Catholic
doctrine and ritual in Buddhist terms. However, 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.
As recounted in his autobiography, Alan was ordained as an Episcopal priest
in 1945 (aged 30) and resigned the ministry by 1950, partly as a result
of an extramarital affair which resulted in his wife having their
marriage annulled, but also because he could no longer reconcile his
Buddhist beliefs with the formal doctrine of the church. He spent the
New Year getting to know Joseph Campbell and Campbell's wife, Jean Erdman, as well as the composer John Cage.
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 Saburō Hasegawa (1906–1957), Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama
Tada Tōkan (1890–1967), 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. It was
during this time he met the poet, Jean Burden with whom he had a four-year love affair.
Alan credited her as an "important influence" in his life and
gave her dedicatory cryptograph in his book "Nature, Man and Woman", to
which he alludes in his autobiography (p. 297). 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 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 philosophy and the concept of the Logos in classical Greek philosophy and Eastern Christian theology.
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.
Middle years
Watts
left the faculty for a career in the mid-1950s. In 1953, he began what
became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA
in Berkeley. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored
station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts. These weekly broadcasts
continued until 1962, by which time he had attracted a "legion of
regular listeners".
Watts continued to give numerous talks and seminars, recordings
of which were broadcast on KPFA and other radio stations during his
life. These recordings are broadcast to this day. For example, in 1970
Watts lectures were broadcast on Sunday mornings on San Francisco radio
station KSAN; and even today a number of radio stations continue to have an Alan Watts program in their weekly program schedules. Original tapes of his broadcasts and talks 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.
In 1957 Watts, then 42, 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 Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and the German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.
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 became increasingly interested in how
identifiable patterns in nature tend to repeat themselves from the
smallest of scales to the most immense. This became one of his passions
in his research and thought.
Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, he was Professor of Comparative Philosophy at the California Institute of Integral Studies (as mentioned above), had a fellowship at Harvard University (1962–1964), and was a Scholar at San Jose State University (1968). He also lectured to many college and university students as well as the general public.
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, as he had from the early sixties, that he was
not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer".
Experimentation
Some of Watts' writings published in 1958 (e.g., his book Nature, Man and Woman
and his essay "The New Alchemy") mentioned some of his early views on
the use of psychedelic drugs for mystical insight. Watts had begun to
experiment with psychedelics, initially with mescaline given to him by Oscar Janiger. He tried LSD
several times in 1958, with various research teams led by Keith S.
Ditman, Sterling Bunnell Jr., 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' 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. 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."
For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology (such as Psychotherapy East and West),
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.
Applied aesthetics
Watts sometimes ate with his 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". Druid Heights was founded by the writer Elsa Gidlow, and Watts dedicated his book The Joyous Cosmology to the people of this neighborhood. He later dedicated his autobiography to Elsa Gidlow, for whom he held a great affection.
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".
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, Watts had discussed the theme in his own book, Nature, Man and Woman,
in which he discusses the possibility of the practice being known to
early Christians and of it being kept secretly by the Church.
Later years
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 discourses on Zen, he was also influenced by
ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta. He spoke extensively
about the nature of the divine reality which 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.
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.
Watts also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological
predicament. Writing, for example, in the early 1960s: "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?" These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for NET
(National Educational Television) 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.
Death
In October 1973, Watts returned from a European lecture tour to his cabin in Druid Heights, California. Friends of Watts had been concerned about him for some time over what they considered his alcoholism. On 16 November 1973, at age 58, he died in his sleep. He was reported to have been under treatment for a heart condition. His body was cremated very shortly thereafter. His ashes were split, with half buried near his library at Druid Heights and half at the Green Gulch Monastery.
A personal account of Watts' last years and approach to death is given by Al Chung-liang Huang in Tao: The Watercourse Way.
His son Mark Watts has prepared a biographical documentary that details
questions surrounding his father's death and performed ritual cremation
on a nearby beach. His father's ashes were returned to the cabin where he had died.
Views
On spiritual and social identity
In regards to his ethical outlook, 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 taijiquan, with an Asian colleague, Al Chung-liang Huang.
Worldview
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.
Supporters and critics
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. Werner Erhard
attended workshops given by Alan Watts and said of him, "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."
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
must entail 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.
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."
In his talks, Watts addressed the issue of defining zazen practice by
saying, "A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up,
stretches, and walks away", and referring to Zen master Bankei: "Even when you're sitting in meditation, if there's something you've got to do, it's quite all right to get up and leave".
Watts's biographers saw him, after his stint as an Anglican
priest, as representative of no religion but as a lone-wolf thinker and
social rascal. In David Stuart's warts-and-all biography of the man,
Watts is seen as an unusually gifted speaker and writer driven by his
own interests, enthusiasms, and demons.
Elsa Gidlow, whom Alan called "sister", refused to be interviewed for
this work but later painted a kinder picture of Alan's life in her own
autobiography, Elsa, I Come With My Songs.
However, Watts did have 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."
Personal life
Watts
married three times and had seven children (five daughters and two
sons).
Watts met Eleanor Everett in 1936, when her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett,
brought her to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge,
were engaged the following year and married in April 1938. A daughter,
Joan, was born in November 1938 and another, Anne, was born in 1942.
Their marriage ended in 1949, but Watts continued to correspond with his
former mother-in-law.
In 1950, Watts married Dorothy DeWitt. He moved to San Francisco in
early 1951 to teach. They began a family that grew to include five
children: Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane. The couple separated in
the early 1960s after Watts met Mary Jane Yates King (called "Jano" in
his circle) while lecturing in New York. After a difficult divorce he
married King in 1964. The couple divided their time between Sausalito, California, where they lived on a houseboat called the Vallejo, and a secluded cabin in Druid Heights, on the southwest flank of Mount Tamalpais north of San Francisco.
Some regard Watts as having been an unfaithful husband and a poor father.
Watts' eldest daughters, Joan and Anne, own and manage most of
the copyrights to his books. His son, Mark, serves as curator of his
father's audio, video and film and has published content of some of his
spoken lectures in print format.
Jean Burden, his lover and the inspiration/editor of Nature, Man and Woman, remained in his thoughts to the end of his life.
Watts was a heavy smoker throughout his life and in his later years drank heavily.
