Alan Watts: What He Was, and What He Was Not

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 24 September 2026

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Alan Watts (1915–1973) was a British-born writer and broadcaster who did more than almost anyone to carry Zen and Taoist ideas into English. His authority is the contested part. He was an ordained Episcopal priest who left the church in 1950; he held no Buddhist ordination and no Zen transmission, and said as much in print himself.

That is not a debunking. It is what Watts wanted understood: he is quoted in enormous volume, and credited with a standing he took some trouble to refuse.

What he was, and what he was not

Ordained: yes — as an Episcopal priest. His biographer Monica Furlong records that “on Ascension Day 1944 Watts was ordained an Episcopal priest in the Church of the Atonement, Evanston,” and adds, drily, that “he managed to get the date wrong in his autobiography.” The estate’s site also gives 1944; we follow Furlong, who flagged the discrepancy herself.

A university degree: no. David Guy, writing in Tricycle, puts it plainly: “He had no university degree, but found a seminary that would admit him on the basis of his astonishingly wide reading.” Tricycle records that “much later he was made a Harvard research fellow and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Vermont.” The doctorate is honorary; neither it nor the fellowship is an earned degree, and “Dr Watts” is wrong.

A Buddhist ordination: no. Not as a monk, not as a priest, not in any tradition. Nothing in the sources listed at the foot of this page records one, and his own account of his standing is below.

A Zen transmission, inka, roshi title or lineage seat: no. His only formal Zen training was koan study in New York with the Zen master Sokei-an Sasaki, from about 1938. It lasted, Furlong writes, “some eight or nine months,” and ended badly: “Watts lost his temper in sanzen, shouting at his teacher that he was right. ‘No, you’re not right,’ Sokei-an replied. That was the end of formal Zen study.”

A teaching post: yes, though the title is disputed. From 1951 he taught at, and for several years ran, the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco — a separate school from the California Institute of Integral Studies, founded in 1968, which names the Academy as its progenitor. Gary Snyder studied there, and so, Guy records, did “the two founders of the Esalen Institute, Michael Murphy and Richard Price.” Sources call Watts professor, dean, director and administrator, so we will not pick one. Furlong dates his resignation to “the spring of 1957”.

He had already answered the credential question himself, in the preface to the book that made him:

The stance was deliberate. He had been inside “a traditional hierarchy — not Zen”, almost certainly meaning his years in the church, and thought that from inside “one does not know what dinner is being eaten.”

The life, in brief

Alan Wilson Watts was born on 6 January 1915 at Chislehurst in Kent. Chadwick records that he “declared himself a Buddhist about the time he hit puberty,” and that “at sixteen he became the secretary of the London Buddhist Association, founded by his early mentor, Christmas Humphreys.” Tricycle calls the same body the Buddhist Lodge in London, and Christmas Humphreys its “chairperson” rather than its founder; on the office itself the two agree — “Watts became the organization’s secretary at sixteen.” His first book, The Spirit of Zen, was published in 1936, when he was twenty-one. In 1938, aged twenty-three, he married Eleanor Everett and the couple moved to New York together, where he studied briefly with Sokei-an, then entered seminary. From 1951 he lived in California, dying in 1973 at Druid Heights on Mount Tamalpais.

The priest years, 1944 to 1950

He was Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University from 1944 — Tricycle dates the appointment to that year — until he left in 1950; the estate’s site, third-person copy read here on 24 September 2026, says only that “by the spring of 1950, Alan’s time as a priest had run its course.” He made the post strange on purpose, Tricycle records, “banning ‘corny’ hymns, limiting sermons to fifteen minutes or less,” and drawing students who “came for prayer and stayed for tea, cocktails, and regular late-night discussions.”

It ended in 1950, when his first wife, Eleanor Everett, went to Reno and obtained an annulment of the marriage, then wrote to his bishop. Two accounts give incompatible wordings for the grounds. Neither is established, and we do not reproduce either. What is established is how he went. Furlong writes that “rather than waiting for processes of dismissal or even working out his resignation, he left Canterbury House for Thornecrest Farmhouse in Millbrook, New York,” and told his bishop he “had now decided to abandon not only the priesthood, but also the communion of the Episcopal church.” He was not tried, deposed or defrocked. He resigned. Furlong adds that the outcome was settled either way: by marrying Dorothy DeWitt while the church still regarded him as married to Eleanor, he “automatically secured excommunication.”

Why he left is contested. His own account was that the church’s forms had ceased to be relevant or communicative to him. Furlong does not accept it: “it seems too striking a coincidence that the church’s value in general seemed to decline in Watts’s eyes just at the moment that it rejected him.”

What he actually taught

He is read now mostly in fragments, so it is worth saying what the argument was, because it is the same one in every book.

Zen, he wrote in The Way of Zen, is neither a religion nor a philosophy but “an example of what is known in India and China as a ‘way of liberation,’ and is similar in this respect to Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga” — and “a way of liberation can have no positive definition. It has to be suggested by saying what it is not.” He did not present it as a purely Buddhist inheritance: “The origins of Zen are as much Taoist as Buddhist.”

What it liberates you from is the attempt to make yourself secure, and the trap is that the attempt is the problem. The Wisdom of Insecurity puts it directly: “If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure.” The practice, in his account, is not an attainment but a noticing: za-zen “is simply a quiet awareness, without comment, of whatever happens to be here and now.”

The books, and the broadcasts

The Way of Zen is the famous one. It is not the first.

• The Spirit of Zen (John Murray, London, 1936) — which he placed, twenty-one years later, in The Way of Zen’s survey of the Zen literature then available: “My own Spirit of Zen is a popularization of Suzuki’s earlier works, and besides being very unscholarly it is in many respects out of date and misleading, whatever merits it may have in the way of lucidity and simplicity.”
• The Meaning of Happiness (Harper & Brothers, 1940)
• Behold the Spirit (Pantheon, 1947) — Christian theology, written as a working priest
• The Supreme Identity (Pantheon, 1950)
• The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (Pantheon, 1951)
• The Way of Zen (Pantheon Books, New York, 1957)
• Nature, Man and Woman (Pantheon, 1958)
• Psychotherapy East and West (Pantheon, 1961)
• The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (Pantheon, 1962) — his book about psychedelics
• The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Pantheon, 1966)
• In My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965 (Pantheon, 1972)
• Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975), finished with Al Chung-liang Huang and published after his death

For much of his audience he was a broadcaster first and a writer second. Furlong records him “broadcasting on the Berkeley radio station KPFA or appearing on the educational television station KQED”; the estate’s site, read here on 24 September 2026, dates the radio work from 1953 and his television series Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life to 1959. The tapes, which his son Mark has kept in circulation through the archive he runs, are why Watts has an audience that has never read him.

”Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen” — what it actually says

His essay of 1958, published in the Chicago Review and issued as a book by City Lights in 1959, is constantly cited as Watts telling off the Beats. Read whole, it is not.

It criticises two things in equal measure. “Beat Zen,” he writes, ranges from “justifying sheer caprice” to “a very forceful social criticism and ‘digging of the universe’ such as one may find in the poetry of Ginsberg and Snyder, and, rather unevenly, in Kerouac” — but is “always a shade too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen.” Then he turns on the other side, and his first target there is the Japanese institution, not the converts: “square Zen is the Zen of established tradition in Japan with its clearly defined hierarchy, rigid discipline, and its specific tests of satori. More particularly, it is the kind of Zen adopted by Westerners studying in Japan, who will before long be bringing it back home.” It “is still square because it is a quest for the right spiritual experience, for a satori which will receive the stamp (inka) of approved and established authority. There will even be certificates to hang on the wall.”

Having set the two extremes out, he declines the quarrel between them:

He diagnoses both as the same use of Zen: “The one wants a philosophy to justify him in doing what he pleases. The other wants a more plausible authoritative salvation than the Church or the psychiatrists seem to be able to provide.” Both, he writes, show “the immaturity of needing to be justified, whether before the Lord God or before a paternalistic society.” Then he files his own essay under the same charge — “the very hullabaloo about Zen, even in such an article as this, is also fuss” — adding, “but a little less so.” And the essay’s argument ends, six paragraphs after the passage above, not with a rebuke but with a blessing on the fussers:

Any summary that stops at the criticism has reported close to the opposite. The essay belongs in the story of Buddhism in the West as a document of that argument, not a verdict on it.

That is the published essay. Furlong reports his private view of Kerouac as less even-handed: Watts, she writes, “observed Kerouac’s brand of Zen with a certain amount of doubt and suspicion, feeling that it mistook sloppy, undisciplined art, selfishness of all kinds, and idleness for spontaneity” — and “was, however, careful to exempt Snyder from his strictures.”

Kerouac answered in fiction. Furlong quotes the passage: Watts appears in The Dharma Bums (1958) as Arthur Whane, at a party where most guests are naked, “smartly dressed in suit and necktie, having a perfectly serious discussion about world affairs with two naked men.” The question he is asked has two halves — “‘Well, what is Buddhism?’ someone asks him. ‘Is it fantastic imagination, magic of the lightning flash, is it plays, dreams, not even plays, dreams?’” — and Whane answers the second: “No, to me Buddhism is getting to know as many people as possible.” We have not read the novel; the lines are quoted here at second hand from Furlong.

Did he meditate?

The people who knew him disagree. Chadwick, writing in Lion’s Roar in 2020, knew him: “he did do sitting meditation. But he poo-pooed depending on meditation.” Guy, in Tricycle in 1994: “It is true that Watts never underwent — or particularly believed in — rigorous Zen training; his spiritual practice, as with that of D.T. Suzuki, was to some extent his vast scholarship and his writing (though Watts did practice calligraphy, archery, and other Zen activities).”

What he wrote is more careful than his reputation. In The Way of Zen he argues that the T’ang Chinese masters left no instruction in the kind of zazen that later filled the monasteries — “Nowhere in their teachings have I been able to find any instruction in or recommendation of the type of za-zen which is today the principal occupation of Zen monks” — and then, in the same passage, recommends it anyway:

For the practice rather than the argument, start at Zen Buddhism; koans were Watts’s own doorway.

How Zen practitioners have seen him

Mixed, and not in the direction most people expect: some of the warmest verdicts come from inside the Zen establishment. Shunryu Suzuki, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, went to a 1967 benefit talk Watts gave for Tassajara, at which, Chadwick writes, Watts “turned the talk into a guided meditation.” Suzuki “would call Watts ‘a great bodhisattva.’” Gary Snyder’s epitaph, quoted by Tricycle in 2007, defends the whole method: “Many guides would have us travel single file, like mules in a pack train, and never leave the trail. Alan taught us to move forward like the breeze, tasting the berries, greeting the blue jays, learning and loving the whole terrain.” The American Zen teacher Bernie Glassman told Tricycle in 2007: “Alan Watts and Suzuki Roshi were the two people writing about Zen in the 1960s.” (Glassman does not say which Suzuki he means; the two most often called that, Shunryu and D. T. Suzuki, were different men in different traditions.)

Against that, Guy reported in 1994 the common view among practitioners without softening it: “that he hadn’t been quite authentic, hadn’t known Zen from the inside. He had learned his Buddhism from books, and his view of liberation was facile, didn’t acknowledge the real work that was a part of it. He had been a sixties character, an alcoholic and a womanizer, one of the early experimenters with psychedelics.” Guy then argues the other way — “Watts knew more than his old fans remember” — while conceding that Watts “does perhaps emphasize the discipline of practice too little, almost makes it sound as if one can become a Buddhist simply by reading the book.”

The criticism is that he lacked credentials; the preface to The Way of Zen is him declining to claim them. He is among the famous Buddhist teachers the West knows who insisted he was not one — Chadwick: “He made it clear that he was no guru.” Watts founded no practice centre and had no students in the disciple sense; Furlong dates the resignation from the Academy to “the spring of 1957”; Chadwick, who gives no year, calls the directorship Watts left “his last attachment to any institution.” He left no organisation, and nothing on this page is a statement about anyone else’s conduct.

The last years

Furlong records him drinking heavily by the end of the 1950s, “vodka mostly”, and Guy reports Gary Snyder saying that “toward the end of his life Watts was putting away a bottle of vodka per day.” In 1968 his editor at Pantheon recorded him saying he had an enlarged liver and had been told to stop; he stopped for some months. Furlong describes a friend, Dr June Singer, visiting him in hospital, where he was suffering from delirium tremens: “‘That’s how I am,’ he said to her sadly. ‘I can’t change.’” Set beside it — our pairing, not hers; she quotes the passage two chapters earlier, against his drinking in the late 1950s — is something he had written in 1951, not about himself but about the condition:

He had seven children — two daughters with his first wife, Eleanor Everett, and five with his second, Dorothy DeWitt — left two marriages, and sympathetic writers criticised him for it. Guy’s verdict is that “he was never a faithful husband, and dismissed his child-rearing responsibilities with a few self-serving words”; Furlong, recording bitter letters about money, notes in the same breath that “he was faithful in keeping up his commitment.” Watts’s own answer, quoted from his autobiography by Tricycle, was neither a denial nor a repentance: “As I look back I could be inclined to feel that I have lived a sloppy, inconsiderate, wasteful, cowardly, and undisciplined life, only getting away with it by having a certain charm and a big gift of the gab. … A realistic look at myself, aged fifty-seven, tells me if I am that, that’s what I am, and shall doubtless continue to be.”

He died in his sleep on the morning of 16 November 1973 at Druid Heights in Marin County, California. The doctor certified heart failure. He was fifty-eight. Earlier that same year he had gone to Green Gulch Farm to talk to Richard Baker about his own funeral; Chadwick, Baker’s attendant at the meeting, records that hundreds attended the ceremony there.

How to check an Alan Watts quotation

Lines circulate over his name on image macros, quote sites and short videos that carry no book, talk or article behind them, and that we could not trace to any page he published. The rule we use: a Watts quotation needs one of his own named books, recorded talks or published articles. An aggregator is not a source, and neither is a caption. Here is the best-known thing he wrote, sourced:

For the recordings rather than the clips, Chadwick — who knew him — points readers to the estate’s own archive: “I urge you to go to the source—to read, listen, and watch him online at home or in a library,” calling alanwatts.org “a treasure trove of resources for reading, listening, and viewing.”

The same test trims a story told about him. He is widely said to have called himself “a philosophical entertainer” on a particular occasion; no source we could open gives a date or a place. What Furlong attests is that he said it repeatedly — “a ‘philosophical entertainer,’ ‘in show biz,’ ‘a genuine fake,’ and an ‘irreducible rascal’” — and why the disclaimer never stuck: “most of his listeners were no more than mildly puzzled by such statements, perhaps thinking them a sign of a rare sort of humility.” For where his books sit among the rest, see the best Buddhist books.