Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.

Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley.

Watts was born to middle-class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent (now south-east London), 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 modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings, and Watts, an only child, grew up playing at Brookside, learning the names of wild flowers 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.

He attended The King's School Canterbury where he was a contemporary and friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

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.

(See, for instance, the last chapter in The Way of Zen. )

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 was then run by the barrister and QC Christmas Humphreys (who later became a judge at the Old Bailey).

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 became the organization's secretary at 16 (1931).

The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Upon winning a scholarship to the oldest boarding school in the country, Watts attended The King's School, Canterbury, in the grounds of 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 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" 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, 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 esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, who was there presenting a paper.

Beyond attending discussions, Watts studied the available scholarly literature, learning the fundamental concepts and terminology of Indian and East Asian philosophy.

He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the emerging hippie counter culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first best selling books on Buddhism.

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 and psychedelics in works such as "The New Alchemy" (1958) and The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

His lectures found posthumous popularity through regular broadcasts on public radio, especially in California and New York, and more recently on the internet, on sites and apps such as YouTube and Spotify.

The bulk of his recorded audio talks were recorded during the 1960s and early 1970s.

In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), he argued that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy.