Alan WattsAlan Watts (January 6, 1915 – November 16, 1973) was best known as a popularizer of Asian philosophy to the Western world, but he was also a philosopher, writer, speaker, broadcaster, Anglican priest, and expert in comparative religion. Through his twenty-five books and hundreds of lectures and seminars (many recorded), he spread his iconoclastic teachings and personal philosophy.

Born in Kent, England, to middle-class parents and an only child, Watts became interested in Buddhism at an early age. He’d read about it in various libraries at the boarding schools he’d been sent to, and by 16, he became the secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge, which had been established by the Theosophists. Watts began experimenting with meditation. He attended King’s School and after graduation worked at a printing house and bank, while spending much of his free time at the Buddhist Lodge. Through the Lodge and denizens such as Christmas Humphreys he was exposed to many spiritual authors and Theosophists. Living in London, he was also able to attend such events as the World Congress of Faiths in 1936.

That same year, Watts published his first book, The Spirit of Zen. In 1938 he and his bride, Eleanor Everett, whose mother had connections with a Zen Buddhist circle in New York, moved to the United States. Though Watts flirted with formal Zen training, ultimately he left it to enter an Anglican seminary, where he developed his unique theology combining Christianity and Asian philosophy. Watts served as an Episcopalian priest from 1945 to 1950, and the next year moved to California and joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Here he also studied calligraphy and turned his attention to Vedanta and many philosophical subjects. After leaving the academy, Watts began a freelance career and published one of his best-known books, The Way of Zen.
 
Watts’s wide-ranging curiosity about the world and its spiritual and philosophical underpinnings led him to tour Europe, where he met Carl Jung. Upon returning to the United States, he dabbled in the psychedelic drug scene, and he continued to write books. Though he often taught for short periods of time at various universities, including a fellowship at Harvard, he preferred his independence and never stayed at any institution for long. His ideas, though, were widely disseminated not only through his book but through radio broadcasts (he had a long-running program at a radio station in Berkeley) and lectures all around the country.

The philosophy of Alan Watt’s is difficult to distill because his quick and far-ranging mind was fascinated by so many subjects, and his books tended to alight on all of them. Besides archery, calligraphy, cooking, chanting, and dancing, he was absorbed with the arts, education, cuisine, law, architecture, sexuality and child rearing. In his later years he led Westerners and students on tours of Buddhist temples in Japan, and also visited Burma, Ceylon, and India.

Watts died at the relatively young age of 58 in November 1973, three days after returning home from an international lecture tour.