Alan Watts

Alan Watts was born in 1915 in Chislehurst, England, and was drawn to Asian philosophy as a teenager, publishing his first pamphlet on Zen at the age of twenty.

He emigrated to the United States, and in an unusual turn trained for and served as an Episcopal priest in the 1940s before leaving the church as his thought moved decisively toward Eastern nondual philosophy. Settling in California, he became a faculty member and administrator at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, immersing himself in Zen, Taoism, and Vedanta and refining a gift for lucid, witty interpretation.

Watts was less an original metaphysician than a supremely effective translator and popularizer, conveying nondual insight to mid-century Western audiences through accessible books, university lectures, and a long-running radio program.

The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) argued that anxiety stems from clinging to a fixed, controlling self and that liberation lies in surrendering to the flux of the present, while The Way of Zen (1957) gave a wide readership its first coherent cultural and philosophical account of Zen.

A central figure of the 1950s–60s counterculture, he made the dissolution of the separate ego—and the recognition of the self as inseparable from the universe—intelligible and attractive outside Asia, even as his bohemian later life complicated his public image.