Alan Watts

Alan Wilson Watts was born on 6 January 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent, and died on 16 November 1973 in Marin County, California, aged fifty-eight. He was drawn to Asian art and thought from childhood - he wrote about being captivated by a particular clarity and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese work - and as a teenager chose Buddhism over the Anglicanism he had been raised in, becoming secretary of the London Buddhist Lodge at sixteen.

Looking for a vocation that would let him do this for a living, he entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1945, spending several years attempting to hold Christian liturgy and Asian philosophy together. He resigned in August 1950 after his marriage was annulled.

What was Alan Watts actually known for?

Explaining. He moved to California in early 1951 to teach at the American Academy of Asian Studies, and from 1953 broadcast a weekly programme on KPFA in Berkeley as a volunteer, building an audience that stayed with him until the broadcasts ended in 1962. The Way of Zen, published in 1957, was among the first books on Buddhism to sell in large numbers in English and reached the Beat writers directly. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are followed in 1966. He described himself as a philosophical entertainer, and scholars including Philip Kapleau argued that he had misunderstood Zen practice and was dismissing zazen from a position of incomplete knowledge - though Shunryu Suzuki defended him as a great bodhisattva. His drinking was heavy and worried the people around him for years. His recorded lectures have since found an enormous second audience online.

Watts is dominant Ne, and his particular gift was connection rather than depth. He could take a concept from Zen, put it beside a piece of Western psychology, a joke, a physical demonstration and an analogy about water, and produce something a listener understood immediately. That is Ne at its most useful - finding the route between two systems that nobody had thought to lay - and it is why a generation encountered Eastern thought through him rather than through better-qualified people.

The auxiliary Fi is why it never became merely clever. There is a consistent personal conviction underneath everything he did: that the Western framing of the self as a separate ego arriving into a hostile world is both false and a source of enormous unnecessary suffering. He believed that, and the entire output is an attempt to hand it over.

Was Alan Watts a fraud?

The scholarly criticism is real and worth stating: he was not a practitioner, he did not sit, and he could be careless about traditions he was rendering into English. The function stack explains both the achievement and the objection. Ne opens and connects; it does not do the accumulated, repetitive, embodied work that tertiary Te and inferior Si would supply, and disciplined daily practice is exactly that kind of work. He said so himself, more honestly than his critics usually allow. The inferior Si is also the sad part of his life: no structure, no routine, and a drinking problem that a man with any relationship to daily discipline would have had more defence against.

ENTP is the most common alternative, and the wit and the appetite for paradox support it. The difference is what he was doing with the ideas. An Ne-Ti thinker takes a system apart to see whether it holds. Watts was not testing Zen, he was advocating for a way of experiencing being alive, and his objection to Western thought was that it made people miserable rather than that it was incoherent. That is Fi in second position.

INFP is occasionally suggested because of the interiority of the subject matter. But he was relentlessly outward: broadcasting weekly for nine years, lecturing constantly, writing more than twenty books, and by his own description performing. The values are private and the delivery is entirely public.