Kazemitsu Kato, a Soto Zen priest who taught at the academy, was a paid assistant to Watts while he was writing The Way of Zen. Gary Snyder was one of the academy’s early students. In 1951, Watts moved to San Francisco, where he became director of the American Academy of Asian Studies (AAAS). During this time, Watts wrote three books on Christian mysticism, which continued to be a subject in future books though he left the priesthood in 1950.
There students joined him in spirited discussions about Christian mysticism and the wisdom of the East. Most of the forties were spent in Evanston, Illinois, where he attended the Seabury Western Theological Seminary and became an Episcopalian priest and chaplain of Northwestern University. “This-the immediate, everyday, and present experience-is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.”
There he had a close relationship with the First Zen Institute’s original teacher, Sokei-an Sasaki. He married Eleanor, the daughter of American Zen pioneer Ruth Fuller, and they moved to New York together when Watts was twenty-three. At sixteen he became the secretary of the London Buddhist Association, founded by his early mentor, Christmas Humphreys.īy his seventeenth year, Watts had already put together a pamphlet entitled An Outline of Zen Buddhism, and he published The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East when he was twenty-one, the year he met D.T. Watts was attracted early on to the Asian art his mother collected from missionary friends, and he declared himself a Buddhist about the time he hit puberty. His approach to wisdom was curious and inclusive, embracing psychology, the natural sciences, art, music, dance, humor, and the enjoyment of nature, of sex, of life. Watts wrote of the perennial philosophy-the unifying core of religion and profound inquiry in all quarters and eras. In the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted with practitioners from the early Zen Center days, Watts was the most frequently cited inspiration. His twenty-six books, and his popular radio and television broadcasts, introduced Americans of the 1950s and 1960s to a Zen that was authentic yet contemporary and accessible. He’s best known for his important role in the popularization of Zen in the West. This January, the English-born Watts would have been 101 old. “I read a book called Nature, Man, and Woman,” Jano added, “and I thought, wow, I’d sure like to make love with the man who wrote that!” Alan buried his face in his hands in mock embarrassment. “Yes,” he said dryly, “I get a penny a copy.” I told Alan that I’d read his book The Way of Zen, and that I’d seen it in so many places he must have made a fortune off it. Alan and his wife, Jano, were friendly and funny.
The first time I met him was at a party, shortly after I started practicing at San Francisco Zen Center in 1966. What good fortune it was to know Alan Watts. David Chadwick recalls his friend, the unconventional philosopher who uncovered The Way for so many. Through his bestselling books and popular broadcasts, Alan Watts did as much as anyone to introduce Americans to Buddhism. Watts in 1938, shortly before moving to America.