Alan Watts

Now, I find it rather difficult to say what the subject matter of talk talk is going to be, because we’re going to talk about what there is….

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Alan Watts was born on January 6, 1915 in Chislehurst, just outside of London. His father was an representative for the Michelin Tire Company, and his mother taught at a religious boarding school for the children missionaries to Asia. The family lived in wooded and pastoral surroundings, and from a young age Alan was fascinated by the behaviors of the birds and butterflies in the gardens behind his home. And inside he was surrounded by Asian art, embroidered Chinese landscapes and painted porcelains, gifts to his mother from returning missionaries, and ”was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art”. Alan soon took an interest in exotic tales, in the stories of Fu Manchu and Chinese wizards and assassins by Sax Romer, and was heavily influenced by the book Glimpses of Forgotten Japan by Lafcadio Hern. His parents recognized his bright and inquiring nature, and during this time Alan attended Kings School in Canterbury, a preparatory school for the Church of England. However her soon discovered the Buddhist Lodge in London, where barrister Christmas Humphreys hosted monthly meetings of a diverse group of intellectuals, and while attending with his father surprised everyone when he and not his pager rose to speak!  Alan soon became the editor for the Lodge’s journal, The Middle Way, and in 1932 produced his first booklet, An Outline of Zen Buddhism (images) a summary based on the Zen writings of DT Suzuki. 

In 1938 he left London and moved to New York, but found Zen studies there stifling and enrolled in Seabury-Western Theological Seminary outside of Chicago, hoping to cultivate his interest in mystical theology. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in1944, however by the spring of 1950 his time as a priest had run it’s course, and Alan left the Church and Chicago for upstate New York. There he settled into a small farmhouse outside Millbrook and began to write The Wisdom of Insecurity (review). After a brief correspondence Alan met with Joseph Campbell and composer John Cage, and in October replied to an invitation from Dr. Fredrick Spiegelberg to come to San Francisco to teach Buddhism at the American Academy of Asian Studies (image). He arrived on the West Coast in early 1951. At the Academy his classes were well-attended, so much so that he was soon giving regular evening lectures open to the public to help support the school.  His talks spilled over to local coffee houses frequented by Beat poets and writers, and in 1953 Alan was offered a Saturday evening slot on the Berkley radio station KPFA.  That year he began a series on The Great Books of Asia followed in 1956 by Way Beyond the West, which was very popular with Bay Area audiences.  The show was re-broadcast on Sunday mornings, and later on KPFA in Los Angeles, beginning the longest-running series on public radio, nearly sixty years at this writing. 

By the mid fifties a ‘Zen Boom’ was underway as beat intellectuals in San Francisco and New York began to celebrate the esoteric qualities of Eastern religion, and assimilate it into an emerging world view that was later dubbed ‘the counter culture’ in the early sixties. As the movement gathered steam the San Francisco Bay area became a hotbed for radical politics, and a focal point of interest in Far Eastern ideas of enlightenment, liberation or nirvana, and karma.  The growing movement united civil rights activists, antiwar protesters, and members of the Free Speech movement as mainstream media sought to play up the other side of counter culture lifestyle and highlighted the use of drugs and sexual liberation in the press, coining the term ‘Summer of Love’ to minimize the significance of the movement. However media branding backfired, drawing thousands of young people to the Bay Area in 1967, and after a celebrated article on ’Changes’ in the alternative Oracle newspaper and a stirring performance at a Zenifit for the San Francisco Zen Center (Zen Bones delivered on April 6 at the Avalon Ballroom) Alan Watts was fully adopted as a spiritual figurehead by the revolutionary movement.  Although he never fully embraced the hippie lifestyle, and advocated ‘hanging up the phone’ on extensive drug use, his ideas cut to the chase and resonated with a wide emerging audience. His 1966 Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are sold very well, and requests for appearances poured in as college lectures were supplemented by seminars at fledgling growth centers across the country, including the Esalen Institute just to the south in the coastal highlands of Big Sur.

Meanwhile broadcasts of his talks continued at KPFA, at KPFK in LA, and now on WBAI in New York and WBUR in Boston. The weekly shows attracted a wide audience as Alan became a legend of the counterculture movement. By the mid sixties he had moved to Sausalito, where he lived on the ferryboat Vallejo with Jean Varda, a Greek artist and close friend of surrealist Gordon OnsloFord. The Sausalito houseboat scene was a community of bohemians, artists, and other cultural renegades, and his ferryboat soon became such a popular destination that in order to maintain his focus on writing Alan moved into a cabin on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in the late sixties and became part of an artist’s community, dubbed Druid Heights by his neighbor and friend, poet Elsa Gidlow. 

Alan continued to travel on lecture tours into the early seventies, but was increasingly drawn to life on the mountain, and there he wrote his mountain journals (later published in Cloud Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown), and worked on his autobiography and final book, Tao; the Watercourse Way.  Only days after returning from a final tour across the US, Canada and Europe Alan passed away in his sleep on November 16, 1973.  In his autobiography he had written:

 “I was filled with that odd sensation the Japanese call yugen: watching wild geese fly and being hidden in the clouds; watching a ship vanish behind the distant island. I feel in some sense that I have lived on this mountain, that the experiences, the meetings, the goodbyes, the smell of food wafting through the trees, encountering wandering mystics on the many wiggly paths to the summit are all a fundamental and basic part of my makeup, which, in a certain sense of the word “me”, they are. When I close my eyes I see faint images of light through the leaves, of cabins and their interiors full of Aztec hangings, singing bowls, prayer rattles, Eastern art, dresses and instruments and strange furnishings. There are some places that seem to, through a collective upsurging in creative joy, find their way to a spot outside of time and from there send waves rippling up against the shores of our own slices of the here and now.”