Alan Watts

Born in Chislehurst, Kent, in 1915, Alan Wilson Watts became fascinated by East Asian art and Buddhism as a schoolboy in England, publishing The Spirit of Zen in 1936 before moving to the United States, serving for six years as an Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University, and settling in California in 1951. Through KPFA public-radio broadcasts, houseboat seminars in Sausalito and more than twenty books—most notably The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), The Way of Zen (1957) and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966)—Watts became the most recognizable Western interpreter of Zen, Taoism and Advaita Vedanta prior to his death in 1973.

Watts called himself a "philosophical entertainer" rather than a guru or Zen master. His talks challenged the Western habit of experiencing oneself as an isolated "skin-encapsulated ego" locked in combat with nature and time. Borrowing what he called the "backwards law" (a close cousin of Émile Coué’s law of reversed effort), he argued that grasping anxiously after certainty and psychological permanence creates the very insecurity a person is trying to escape, whereas meeting the present moment without trying to freeze it restores a sense of play and proportion.

Reading Watts well means acknowledging both the limits of his scholarship and the cautions of the traditions he popularized. Zen teachers and academic Buddhologists noted that Watts’s sparkling, comparative syntheses often privileged witty philosophical paradox over the patient ethical precepts, monastic community and daily sitting discipline of actual Mahayana and Soto Zen practice. In his own life, too, the gap between brilliant spontaneity on the lecture stage and heavy drinking reminded contemporaries that philosophical eloquence about non-duality does not by itself resolve human vulnerability.

Held as a conversational gadfly rather than a substitute for disciplined practice, Watts remains a sharp antidote to grim self-improvement. When your effort to control every future outcome turns into a clenched rehearsal of worry, his essays are a clear reminder that attention works best when it is curious rather than white-knuckled.