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Historical photograph of Alan Watts

Alan Watts

Alan Watts (1915–1973) was born in England and died in California, and in between managed to do something almost no one before him had managed quite so well: take complex Eastern ideas — Zen, Taoism, Buddhism — and make them accessible to a wide Western audience without watering them down into empty slogans. He did it mainly through lectures, radio programs, and dozens of books written in language that was clear, sharp, and often genuinely funny — a rare combination when you’re talking about things like “emptiness” or “the self as illusion.”

In 1936, at 21, he met D.T. Suzuki for the first time, one of the most influential Western scholars of Zen, and absorbed the fundamentals of Buddhist philosophy through his writings. A few years later, after moving to New York, he trained briefly under the teacher Sokei-an Sasaki, a Zen roshi who founded the first Zen institute in America — but he left the formal training because the traditional teaching method didn’t suit him. That’s a detail worth keeping in mind: Watts was never a formally certified Zen teacher in the traditional sense, and he knew that about himself perfectly well.

Which is exactly why one of his more interesting essays is “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” from 1958 — a text in which he sharply criticizes both ways the West had “adopted” Zen: on one hand as an unruly fashion among the Beat generation, on the other as a rigid, disconnected ritual in Western dharma centers. Watts didn’t spare himself or the audience he’d helped create — a kind of intellectual honesty that isn’t a given. In the 1960s he was among the figures who helped establish the Esalen Institute in California, which became a center of the “human potential movement” — and from there his influence spilled well past the borders of Buddhism, into psychology, art, and the counterculture of the era.

The central idea that runs through nearly everything he wrote is that our sense of a separate “self,” wrapped in skin, disconnected from the world, is an illusion. And as should be clear by now, Watts wasn’t a flawless figure: he struggled with alcoholism and a turbulent personal life, and never presented himself as a saint. Maybe that’s exactly why his writing doesn’t read like preaching from above — it reads like someone genuinely trying to understand, just like the rest of us.

Of the many books he wrote, The Way of Zen (1957) is the best recommendation for someone just starting out — a clear, comprehensive introduction to Zen, to its roots in Taoism and Buddhism, and to its expression in art and everyday life in the East. You can find it in English ↗ or in Hebrew ↗.

How I got to know him

My introduction to Alan Watts began as part of my entry into the world of Zen, through the teachings of my teacher, Yuval Ido Tal. One of the ideas I find most interesting about Alan Watts is the fact that we look at the world through tools that only show us part of reality, and we get confused and think that’s reality itself. We know, for example, that animals experience reality differently — they might have a more developed sense of smell, or the ability to see at night — but we assume that what we experience as reality is something objective, the truth. Another example is using a microscope to look at things, and suddenly we see a completely different world.

So what this actually means is that we perceive reality through the tools we’ve been given — sight, hearing, touch, and so on — but we forget that this is only part of reality, not reality itself. And that’s exactly the thread connecting Watts’s “self as illusion” to sitting practice itself — the moment you stop confusing the tool with what it shows you, what’s left is just what’s there.

Music

The British musician Akira The Don set recorded Alan Watts talks to music, and it’s something I really love and connect with. Two pieces worth knowing:

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