I have found myself thinking of Alan Watts recently. And then within that mystery some like to dress up with the fifty cent word “synchronicity,” I received a note asking if I’d be interested in reviewing a forthcoming re-issue of Watt’s Psychotherapy East & West. I said I’d be happy to re-read it and if I felt I could be mostly positive, I would write it up. We’ll see if the terms are acceptable.
Alan Watts was in fact the first person to write popular books about Zen in the West, beginning in 1937 with the “Spirit of Zen,” and more importantly in 1957 with his best selling “Way of Zen.” He drew mainly on the scholarly volumes just being written by D. T. Suzuki, the first person to write authentically about Zen in European languages, through Watts engaging style made enormously readable and genuinely compelling. As I summarized in my history of Zen come West, Zen Master Who?, Watts was “an erstwhile Episcopal priest, engaging raconteur, and scandalous libertine, Alan Watts was also a prolific author whose books created an inviting sense of Zen-as-pure-experience and a do-what-you-want spirituality. These qualities both profoundly misrepresented Zen and led many people to it.”
On that last note, some years later I attended a talk by an American Zen priest. At the end, during the question and answer period, someone asked about Watts. The priest sighed, and then said, “I know there’s a lot of controversy about Alan Watts and what he really understood about Zen.” He paused. And then, added, “But, you know, without Alan Watts, I wouldn’t be standing here on this platform.” I have to say, in large part, that’s true for me as well. In the 1960s and 70s, Alan Watts opened some important doors for many of us looking for a new way.
Here are a couple of video clips where he discusses Buddhism and Christianity. I think it captures him nicely, all at once knowledgable, irritating, wise, and incredibly self-centered.
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