Alan Watts

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Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British writer who interpreted and popularized 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.

He attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he obtained a master's degree in theology. pursuing a career.

Watts joined the Episcopal priest in 1945, then left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the American Academy of Asian Studies faculty. When working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley, Watts gained a following in the San Francisco Bay area.

Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on topics vital to Eastern and Western faith, including the then-burgeoning youth of The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling Buddhist books ever written.

Watts suggested that Buddhism be thought of as a method of psychotherapy rather than a faith in Psychotherapy East and West (1961).

"From a literary point of view, the best book I have ever written," he said. In the essay "The New Alchemy" (1958) and in the book "The Joyous Cosmology (1962), he also explored human consciousness. He divided his time in Sausalito between a houseboat and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais towards the end of his life.

"His writings and recorded talks still glisten with a deep and galvanizing clarity," he says.

Early years

Watts was born in Chislehurst, Kent, Kent (now south-east London), on January 6, 1915, and lived at Rowan Tree Cottage, 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. Laurence Wilson Watts, Watts' father, was a representative for the Michelin tyre company's London office. Emily Mary Watts (née Buchan) was a housewife whose father was a missionary. They lived in rural settings, with modest financial resources, and Watts, an only child, grew up playing at Brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies. Obviously because of the Buchans' influence, a desire for "absolute things" arose. It aligned with Watts' own obsessions in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.

Watts also wrote about a mystical dream he had as an infant while sick of a fever. He was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroidery that had been gifted to his mother by missionaries returning from China during this period. Watts' few Chinese paintings he was able to see in England gripped him, and he wrote, "I was aesthetically intrigued with a certain clarity, transparency, and expansiveness in Chinese and Japanese art." "These works of art emphasised the participatory relationship of people in nature, a subject that resurfaced in his life and one that he often wrote about. (See, for example, the last chapter in The Way of Zen.)

Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative, according to his own assessment. He was taken to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious instruction of the "Muscular Christian" type) from the start of his studies. "My religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin throughout my schooling."

Watts spent many holidays in France in his youth, assisting Francis Croshaw, a wealthy Epicurean with a keen interest in both Buddhism and exotic little-known aspects of European culture. Watts was not long afterward that he was forced to choose between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhist one he had read about in many libraries, including Croshaw's. He chose Buddhism and applied for membership in the London Buddhist Lodge, which had been established by Theosophists, and was then operated by Barrister and QC Christmas Humphreys, who later became a judge at the Old Bailey. Watts took over as the company's secretary at 16 (1931). During those years, the young Watts explored many methods of meditation.

Watts attended The King's School, Canterbury, in the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral. Despite being consistently in the top of his classes and was given privileges at school, he botched a chance for a scholarship to Oxford by rewriteng a critical research paper in a way that was described as "presumptuous and capricious."

Watts worked in a printing house and then a bank before he left King's. He spent his spare time in the Buddhist Temple and also under the tutelage of Dimitrije Mitrinovi, a "rascal guru." (Mitrinovi was inspired by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and Freud, Jung, and Adler's various psychoanalytical institutes.) Watts also read a lot in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry, and Eastern wisdom.

Watts was primarily an autodidact, according to his own estimation and also by his biographer Monica Furlong. Watts' involvement with the Buddhist Temple in London provided him with a slew of opportunities for personal growth. He contacted eminent spiritual writers, e.g. Humphreys. Nicholas Roerich, a scholar and mystic, as well as well as well-known theosophists like Alice Bailey.

In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met the respected scholar of Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, who was there presenting a paper. Watts went beyond attending lectures and learned the primary theories and terms of Indian and East Asian philosophy, as well as attending lectures.

Watts' fascination with the Zen (or Ch'an) tradition, which began in the 1930s, grew because of the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in his book Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East. Due to a spiritual focus, "work," "life," and "art" were not displayed. "the complete Ch'an (or Zen) synthesis of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism in China after AD 700. In 1936, Watts released The Spirit of Zen, his first book. In Two decades ago, The Spirit of Zen was described as a "popularization of Suzuki's earlier works," and in many respects it is inaccurate and misleading.

Eleanor Everett, who was born Ruth Fuller Everett, was married in New York to a traditional Zen Buddhist circle. Ruth Fuller later married Sokei-an Sasaki, who served as a kind of model and mentor to Watts, but he did not enroll in a formal Zen training program with Sasaki. Watts had another magical experience when walking his wife during those years, according to his later writings. They left England in 1938 to live in the United States. Watts became a resident of the United States in 1943.

Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the teacher's teaching style didn't suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt he had to find a vocational outlet for his philosophical aspirations. In Evanston, Illinois, he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and church history. He sought to achieve a synthesis of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts earned a master's degree in theology in reaction to his dissertation, which he published as a popular version of Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necess of Mysticism.

Myth & Ritual in Christianity (1953), an eisegesis of traditional Roman Catholic doctrine and ritual in Buddhist terms, was published later. Watts, on the other hand, did not deny his disdain for religious convictions, whether they were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

Watts began his studies at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco in early 1951. Here he taught from 1951 to 1957, including Saburo Hasegawa (1906-1977), Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tkan (1890-1977), and numerous visiting scholars and scholars. Hasegawa, in particular, served as a tutor to Watts in the fields of Japanese traditions, arts, primitivism, and notions of nature. He met Jean Burden, with whom he had a four-year love affair, during this period.

Burden was a "significant influence" in his life, according to Alan, who gave her a dedication cryptograph in his book Nature, Man and Woman, which he alludes in his autobiography (p. 297). Watts spent several years as the Academy's administrator, rather than teaching. Eugene Rose, a notable student of his, went on to become a well-known Eastern Orthodox Christian hieromonk and a controversial theologian in the Orthodox Church in America, which is part of the Orthodox Church of America under the jurisdiction of ROCOR. In a book titled Christ the Eternal Tao, Rose's own disciple, a fellow monastic priest, published under the name Hieromonk Damascene, the author draws analogies between 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 some of the Chinese students who enrolled in the academy. Though Watts was noted for his interest in Zen Buddhism, his research and discussions into Vedanta encompassed "the new physics," cybernetics, semantics, process logic, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

Personal life

Watts married three times and had seven children (five daughters and two sons).

Watts first met Eleanor Everett in 1936, when her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett, brought her daughter to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge the following year and married in April 1938. Joan was born in November 1938 and Anne, another in 1942. Watts' marriage ended in 1949, but Watts continued to correspond with his ex mother-in-law.

Watts married Dorothy DeWitt in 1950. In early 1951, he moved to San Francisco to teach. Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane were the first five children to be married. Watts and Mary Jane Yates King (called "Jano" in his circle) separated in the early 1960s when Watts first met Mary Jane Yates King (named "Jano" in his circle) while lecturing in New York. In 1964, he married King after a lengthy divorce. On the southwest flank of Mount Tamalpais north of San Francisco, the couple divided their time between Sausalito, California, where they lived on a houseboat named Vallejo, and a private cabin in Druid Heights. King David was born in 1993.

He maintained contacts with Jean Burden, his lover and the inspiration/editor of Nature, Man and Woman.

Watts was a big smoker throughout his life, and drank heavily in his later years.

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