![]() Watts believed that the key to the universe is fundamentally a higher consciousness or mind. Jung Institute (Zurich).Īlthough his thought is associated with Rinzai Zen Buddhism, Watts did not wish to identify himself with any religious group, "on the ground that partisanship in religion closes the mind." He once called himself a spiritual "entertainer." His own mystical idealism, however, was more an amalgamation of ideas than traditional Zen, for he also borrowed from the Taoist philosophy of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu and the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara, treating all Eastern thought monolithically and interpreting it in modern terms. From 1957 until his death on November 16, 1973, he continued to write and lecture at colleges, universities, medical schools, and mental health institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia, including Harvard Yale Cambridge the Universities of Chicago, Michigan, Indiana, and Hawaii and the C. He described himself as "an unrepented sensualist, an immoderate lover of women and the delights of sexuality, " as well as of fine food, drink, tobacco, clothes, books, and jewelry and of nature. He was married three times-to Eleanor Everett (1938 divorced 1950) to Dorothy DeWitt (1950 divorced 1963) and to Mary Jane Yates King (1963)-and had seven children. In 1959-1961 he was director and writer of the National Educational Television series Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life. Feeling as out of place in academy as he did in the church, he retired to a career of writing and lecturing. In 1964 in Beyond Theology he argued that they were in fact incompatible: "My previous discussions did not take proper account of that whole aspect of Christianity which is uncompromising, ornery, militant, rigorous, imperious, and invincibly self-righteous."įrom 1951 to 1957 Watts taught comparative philosophy and psychology at the new American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, which became a graduate school of the College of the Pacific, and served as its dean from 1953 to 1956. Among other writings in which he argued for a common mystical core underlying all religions, reflecting the influence of Aldous Huxley, a major attempt to reconcile Christianity and Eastern thought was Myth and Ritual in Christianity (1953). He sought to apply its principles to modern psychology in The Meaning of Happiness (1940). ![]() Watts returned to his early interest in Eastern thought. In an interview in LIFE magazine in 1961 Watts said that he left the church "not because it doesn't practice what it preaches, but because it preaches." ![]() Ordained an Episcopal priest, he served from 1944 until 1950 as Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University. He received his Master of Sacred Theology degree from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, in June 1948 and was given an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the University of Vermont in 1958. But, believing that Christianity could be understood as a form of a mystical and perennial philosophy, he affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Upon arrival in New York he studied under a local Zen master, Sokei-an Sasaki. Watts came to the United States in 1939 and was naturalized in 1943. From 1934 to 1938 he edited the Buddhist Lodge of London's journal, The Middle Way, and his first book, The Spirit of Zen, appeared in 1936. In 1934 a Theosophical Society member introduced him to a Yugoslavian mystic,ĭmitrije Mitrinovic, with whom he identified. He read Bergson, Nietzche, Havelock Ellis, Jung, Bernard Shaw, and Eastern texts through the understandings of modern interpreters such as Swami Vivekananda, D. He worked in his father's office from 1932 to 1939 while serving as a council member and member of the executive committee of the World Congress of Faiths in London. Raised in the county of Kent, his introduction to Eastern culture came at about the age of 11 when he read the novels of Sax Rohmer and Edgar Wallace about Fu Manchu, the inscrutable Chinese detective, "and other sophisticated Chinese villains." Watts received his secondary education at King's School, Canterbury, where he did some creative writing and participated in fencing, rowing, and debate. His writings were particularly popular among the so-called " beat generation" of the late 1950s and early 1960s.Īlan Wilson Watts was born in Chislehurst, England, on January 6, 1915. Alan Wilson Watts (1915-1973) was a naturalized American author and lecturer who interpreted Zen to the West.
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