Alan Watts

Alan Watts (born January 6, 1915, Chislehurst, Kent [now in southeast London], England—died November 16, 1973, Marin county, California, U.S.) was a British-born American writer, philosopher, and lecturer who is credited with introducing and popularizing Eastern philosophy and religion among Western audiences in the mid-20th century. Watts was widely recognized for his ability to convey ideas and perspectives associated with Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, and other Eastern traditions through writings that were entertaining and accessible to general readers in the West. His writings became influential, helping to spur the counterculture of the 1960s in the United States and Great Britain and making Watts one of the most widely discussed philosophers of his time. In a review of his work, the Los Angeles Times famously described Watts as “perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West” who displayed “the rare gift of ‘writing beautifully the un-writable.’ ”

Early life and education

Alan Watts was the only child of Laurence Wilson Watts, an employee of the Michelin Tyre Company, and Emily Mary Watts (née Buchan), a teacher at a boarding school for the daughters of Christian missionaries. As he recounted in In My Own Way: An Autobiography, 1915–1965 (1972), from an early age Watts was fascinated by Oriental tapestries and prints that missionaries had presented to his mother upon their return from China and Japan.

Watts attended King’s Public School, an elite boarding school in Canterbury, England. Despite excelling academically at King’s, he failed to obtain a scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford, because he had written his essay examination in the style of Friedrich Nietzsche, which apparently failed to impress a university evaluator. Because he could not afford to attend college without a scholarship, Watts took up various day jobs while independently pursuing his intellectual interests and becoming more involved in the Buddhist Lodge in London, which he had joined in 1930, at the age of 15. In 1931 he became editor of the Lodge’s journal, The Middle Way. In 1932 he published his first written work, a booklet entitled An Outline of Zen Buddhism.

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In 1936 Watts attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met D.T. Suzuki, a world famous Japanese scholar of Zen Buddhism whose writings had informed Watts’s Outline. In 1938 Watts immigrated to the United States and began formal training in Zen Buddhism in New York City. Because he disapproved of his teacher’s method, however, he left the program without being ordained a Zen monk. Watts then entered the Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, near Chicago, earning a master’s degree in theology in 1945. (A popular edition of his thesis, in which he integrated Christian theology, mysticism, and Eastern philosophy, was published in 1947 as Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion.) Watts was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church and served as a chaplain at Northwestern University in Evanston until 1950. In that year he officially left the Episcopal Church.

Career and later life

After leaving the Episcopal Church, Watts moved to San Francisco to join the American Academy of Asian Studies, where he served as a teacher and administrator through the mid-1950s. At the Academy, Watts also studied Japanese art and culture and Chinese language and calligraphy. In 1953 Watts accepted a weekly slot on a community-supported radio station in Berkeley, California, where he also worked as a programmer. His long-running broadcast series, The Great Books of Asia and Way Beyond the West, were widely popular in the Bay Area.

During this time, a “Zen Boom” was occurring among Beat intellectual circles in San Francisco, New York, and other liberal enclaves, and Watt’s written works, including his international bestseller The Way of Zen (1957), as well as his popular lecture tours in the United States and Europe, proved to be of supreme importance to this trend. Watts was much admired for his unique writing style, which was informal and engaging but also nuanced in a way that reflected his sophisticated understanding; his books and articles thus appealed to both average and more educated readers.

In the early 1960s the United States and Great Britain began to experience a countercultural revolution of sorts, and Watts became an influential figure among young people newly concerned with spirituality and mysticism. The explosive popularity of vegetarianism, yoga, psychotherapy, and transcendental meditation from the 1960s can at least partially be ascribed to Watt’s work in introducing Eastern ideas to Western audiences.

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Although Watts had a reputation as an enlightened thinker, he was not without his share of emotional and psychological problems. He was a well-known chain-smoker and heavy drinker; he was also an adulterer and a self-described neglectful father to his several children. (Watts was married three times and had seven children—two with his first wife and five with his second.) In the last years of his life, Watts fell into a deep depression and episodes of heavy drinking. In 1973, after returning from a European lecture tour, Watts died in his sleep in a cabin at Druid Heights, a bohemian community in Muir Woods, near San Francisco Bay.