Ivan Frimmel

ALAN WATTS – THE RASCAL GURU

Alan W. Watts was born in Chislehurst, England, on January 6, 1915, and attended King’s School at
Canterbury. Early in life he developed interest in the cultures, philosophies and religions of the Far East that
led him to become one of the foremost interpreters of Oriental thought in the West. He was regarded as a
‘guru’ by many people in the hippie generation of the sixties. He died in Mill Valley, California, on
November 16, 1973, at the age 58.

Watts’ interesting, unconventional and vigorous life as a philosopher-mystic began in his early youth in
England, when he started reading books on Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Ch’an and Zen. He failed to get
scholarship to Cambridge, left school at 17 and decided to get his own “higher education” according to his
own interests. He was helped in his development by his understanding father, by Christmas Humphreys, who
was then the president of Buddhist Society in London, and by a popular London Slav-guru Mitrinovich.

Alan Watts steadfastly refused a conventional career and although (for economic reasons) he took some
regular jobs, he never allowed his jobs to sway him from his real interests. He edited The Middle Way
(Buddhist Society’s) journal in London from 1934 to 1938, worked in his father’s office raising funds for
hospitals, was active in the London’s branch of the World’s Congress of Faiths…

In 1938, while still in London, Alan Watts married Eleanor Everett Fuller, step-daughter of Zen Roshi Sokei-
an Sasaki, and in 1939 had emigrated with her to the United States. This marriage ended with divorce in
April 1950 and they had two children by that marriage. Since June 1950 until his death he was married to the
former Dorothy Marie De Witt, a mathematician, and they had five children.

Upon emigrating to the United States, Alan Watts studied theology in Evanston, Illinois, was in residence at
the seminary from 1941 to 1944 and earned his Master of Sacred Theology degree in June 1948 and later also
a doctorate of divinity. He was ordained a priest of the protestant Episcopal Church and served as a chaplain
of this church from 1944 to 1950, when he left the church. A writer in Life quoted Watts as saying that he left
the church “not because it doesn’t practice what it preaches, but because it preaches”. He taught comparative
philosophy and psychology at the College of the Pacific, was Dean of the American Academy of Asian
Studies in San Francisco and occupied himself with lecturing and writing at various universities until his
death.

He published over a dozen of excellent books on comparative religion and philosophy, including The
Supreme Identity, The Wisdom of Insecurity, The Way of Zen, The Book on the Taboo on Knowing Who You
Are, etc.

The Supreme Identity (1950) is an excellent essay on the treatment of the questions Who am I? and Who is
God? in the Oriental metaphysics and Christian religion:
To become, or realize, what we are, we must first try to become it, in order to realize effectively that it is not necessary to do so.

Realization of the Supreme Identity is found not through seeking it as remote and obscure, but in accepting the truth that nothing is
more obvious and self-evident.

To look for God as an object implies his distance from the knowing subject. To seek for him implies his absence. To set him in the
future is to imply that he is not eternal and present.

In this book Alan Watts drives home with great emphasis the point that I, as an ego, can do nothing to
produce, induce or coerce true Self/God-realization—and that the Supreme Identity, the One, that which I
truly am, needs nothing to do or realize, just be who One already is, which requires non-doing. He quotes
Zen Buddhist text by Hsi-yun:

By their very seeking for it they produce the contrary effect of losing it, for that is using Buddha to seek Buddha and using the
mind (the Self) to grasp the mind (the Self)…
In the Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) Alan Watts says:
The principal thing is to understand that there is no safety or security. To stand face to face with insecurity is still not to understand
it. To understand it, you must not face it, but be it.

I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I”
who is going to improve the bad “me”. “I”, who has the best intentions, will go and work on the wayward “me”, and the tussle
between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently, “I” will feel more separate then ever, and so
merely increase the lonely and cut off feelings which make “me” behave so badly…

The Way of Zen is his masterpiece on the history of Oriental philosophy and religion in general, and
Buddhism (especially Ch’an and Zen) in particular:
The life of Zen begins, therefore, in a disillusion with the pursuit of goals which do not really exist – the good without the bad, the
gratification of a self which is no more than an idea, and the morrow which never comes. For all these things are a deception of
symbols pretending to be realities… In short, Zen begins at the point where there is nothing further to seek, nothing to be gained.

I think that Alan W. Watts, together with Wei Wu Wei, Krishnamurti, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Osho and
Ramesh S. Balsekar, certainly ranks among the finest and most influential thinkers and writers of this
century. He left a treasury of very practical wisdom in his books and on his tapes.