Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts (Chislehurst, Kent, 1915 – Mt. Tamalpais, California, 1973) was a British philosopher who later became an American citizen, and who devoted his career to interpreting Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu thought for a Western audience. A writer, speaker, and former Anglican priest, he is often described as a "philosophical entertainer", and he helped bring Eastern ideas into the counterculture of the mid-twentieth century. His importance lies less in a system of his own than in the bridges he built between traditions, and between philosophy, psychology, and religious experience.

Watts grew up in a middle-class household. His father worked for the London office of the Michelin tyre company, and his mother, whose own father had been a missionary, encouraged in him an early curiosity about the ultimate nature of things. As a child he was captivated by Chinese and Japanese art, which seemed to him to express a participatory relationship between people and the natural world, an idea that would run through his work. In his teens he chose Buddhism over the Anglicanism around him, and by sixteen he was already secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge.

His education was largely self-directed. After years of intensive reading in philosophy, psychology, and Eastern religions, he moved to the United States in 1938. There he was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1945, a role he gave up in 1950 after a separation from his wife and his conviction that lifelong monogamy did not suit him. In those years he wrote on Christian mysticism and on myth and ritual in Christianity, and in 1951 he joined the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, where he taught and later served as its administrator.

His best-known book, The Spirit of Zen, appeared in 1936, and a later version, The Way of Zen, became one of the first Buddhist books to reach a wide readership. Watts held that Zen could not be reduced to doctrine; it was a way of living, working, and making art in which the spiritual and the practical were woven together. In Psychotherapy East and West he argued that Western psychotherapy could free itself if it dropped the dualism between self and world. He regarded Nature, Man and Woman as his finest work, and in books such as The Joyous Cosmology he explored human consciousness and psychedelics.

His influence was considerable in American counterculture and in the popular spread of Eastern thought. After his death, his lectures continued to air on public radio and found a new audience online, where his recordings remain widely listened to.