Alan Watts

I have no idea why, but Alan Watts just popped into my head. I was thinking of him as an example of someone very important to me at one time and who enjoyed a certain fame and perhaps notoriety at that time, but is now quickly fading into the mists.

Watts was one of the first popularizers of Zen writing in English. He himself was not a Zen practitioner, although he was in some sense a disciple of the first great interpreter of Zen philosophy writing in English, D. T. Suzuki. He also moved in Zen circles and was for several years married to the daughter of Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the first Western woman, and perhaps the first Westerner to be ordained a Rinzai Zen priest. As such his father-in-law for a time was Sokei-an Sasaki, one of the first Zen missionaries to the West.

His Zen was highly eccentric and did not include much about meditation (a small irony since the word zen itself means meditation), which he didn’t seem to enjoy as a practice. What his deeply personal vision of Zen did feature was spontaneity as a profound spiritual good. Actually I think this was a great gift at a time that was marked by the “grey flannel suit.” But it also caricatured what Zen had to offer.

I recall years ago attending a lecture about Zen by a western Zen teacher. At the end during a question and answer period, someone asked, “What about Alan Watts.” The teacher sighed and said, “Well, you probably know Alan Watts isn’t thought of very highly in most Zen circles.” He paused before adding, “But, you know, if there had been no Alan Watts, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you.”

An interesting thinker, no doubt.

And if anyone wants to explore a fascinating vision of what Christianity might look like if it were influenced by Eastern wisdoms, one couldn’t do better than read Behold the Spirit. I think it his best book. It was written during his brief tenure as an Episcopal priest. If his wandering eye hadn’t gotten in the way, he could have been one of the most interesting Anglican thinkers of the twentieth century, or so it seems to me. As it was he became a wandering itinerant western Taoist. Not a bad thing in itself…