About Alan Watts
Early Years
Alan Watts was born in London in 1915 at the start of the first World War. At a young age he became fascinated with the Far East, and at fourteen he began to write and was published in the Journal of the London Buddhist Lodge before writing his first booklet on Zen in 1932. He moved to New York in 1938 and then to Chicago where he served as an Episcopal priest for six years before leaving the Church. In 1950 he moved to upstate New York before going on to San Francisco to teach at the Academy of Asian Studies. Among Alan Watts' earliest influences were the novelist Sax Rohmer and Zen scholars DT Suzuki and Christmas Humpreys. In late1950 he visited with Joseph Campbell and composer John Cage in NYC.
Worldview
Alan Watts was profoundly influneced by the East Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism, and by Taoist thought, which is reflected in Zen poetry and the arts of China and Japan. After leaving the Church he never became a member of another organized religion, and although he wrote and spoke extensively about Zen Buddhism he was criticized by American Buddhist practicioners for not sitting regulalry in zazen. Alan Watts responded simply by saying: "A cat sits until it is done sitting, and then gets up, stretches, and walks away."
1950's and early '60's
After teaching at the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco he became Dean, and began to give regular radio talks on KPFA, the Berkeley free radio station. In 1957 he published his bestselling Way of Zen, and in 1958 retuned to Europe where he met with CG Jung. He was an early subject in pioneering psychedelic trials, and after recording two seasons of the public television series Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life traveled to Japan several times in the early sixties. By the late sixties he had become a counter culture celebrity, and traveled widely to speak at universities and growth centers across the US and Europe.
Later Years
By the early seventies Alan Watts had become a foremost interpreter of Eastern thought for the West, and was widely published in periodicals including Earth, Elle, Playboy, and Redbook. He appeared on CBS television's Camera Three in 1969, and in 1971 he recorded a pilot for a new show titled A Conversation with Myself for NET, the precursor to PBS. When the series was not produced he recorded the shows with his son Mark and his long-time audio archivist Henry Jacobs in 1972. Overall Alan Watts developed an extensive audio library of nearly 400 talks and wrote more than 25 books during his lifetime, including his final volume, Tao; the Watercourse Way. Alan Watts died in his sleep in November of 1973 after returning from an intensive international lecture tour.
