"The great translator — the man who made Zen, Taoism and Vedanta not just comprehensible to the Western mind but genuinely delightful."
Alan Wilson Watts was born on January 6, 1915, in Chislehurst, Kent, England. From childhood he was drawn to Asian art and philosophy — developing an early fascination with Buddhism through the artefacts and books available in Edwardian England. By his teens he was already writing and lecturing on Buddhism with a precocity that attracted serious attention.
He moved to the United States in 1938, studied theology and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 1945 — an unlikely chapter for a man who would later become the defining voice of Eastern philosophy for the Western counter-culture. He left the priesthood in 1950 following a divorce, joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco and began the work that would define his legacy.
Through the 1950s and 60s Watts became the central intellectual figure of the San Francisco Bay Area's spiritual awakening — friends with beat poets, psychedelic explorers and Zen practitioners. He gave thousands of lectures, recorded hundreds of hours of talks and wrote over 25 books. His radio broadcasts on KPFA in Berkeley reached enormous audiences. His voice — warm, precise, endlessly entertaining — became one of the most recognisable in American spiritual life.
He died on November 16, 1973, on his houseboat in Sausalito, California — aged 58, his health undermined by decades of heavy drinking. His recorded lectures have enjoyed a remarkable renaissance in the internet age — his voice now reaching millions who were not yet born when he died, set to music and imagery on YouTube with a reach he never achieved in life.
Watts's alcoholism was the defining tragedy of his life — and ultimately the cause of his death at 58. He drank heavily throughout his adult life, and the drinking accelerated in his final years. His children describe a father who was brilliant and loving in his good periods and largely absent in his deteriorating ones. The gap between his public teaching about presence and acceptance and his private addiction to alcohol is the central irony of his biography.
The "entertainer" criticism is the most common serious objection to Watts. Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki — whose work Watts drew on extensively — expressed reservations about Watts's popularisations, and serious practitioners of Zen have sometimes argued that Watts made the tradition sound easier and more immediately accessible than it actually is. He had no formal Zen training and never sat a traditional retreat. Whether this invalidates his insights or merely contextualises them is debated.
He described himself in his autobiography as a "genuine fake" — someone who performed the role of wise man without being certain he had attained what he described. This honesty is either refreshing or damning depending on one's perspective. It is at minimum a rare quality in spiritual teachers.
"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."