Alan Watts

Alan Watts (1915–1973) was the great translator between East and West — the British-born writer and speaker whose silken voice and dazzling mind carried Zen, Taoism, and Vedanta into the Western imagination, and whose recorded talks, half a century after his death, now reach more people than they ever did in his lifetime. Born in a village in Kent, he was captivated by the Far East from boyhood; by his early twenties he had published his first book on Zen, and by 1938 he had crossed the Atlantic for good. His path wound through an unexpected chapter — years as an Episcopal priest and university chaplain — before he left the church in 1950 and found his true pulpit in San Francisco: at the American Academy of Asian Studies, and above all at Berkeley's KPFA radio, where his freewheeling weekly broadcasts made him the philosopher-bard of the emerging counterculture.

Watts wrote more than twenty-five books, several of them enduring classics: The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951), which taught that our craving for security is precisely what makes us anxious; The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism in the West; and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), his masterwork on the great illusion — that each of us is a separate "skin-encapsulated ego," rather than the whole universe playing at being you. Calling himself a "philosophical entertainer" rather than a guru — he was always candid about his own contradictions — he taught that life is not a journey with a destination but a piece of music to be danced to; that the point of it, like the point of a song, is not the ending but the playing. From his houseboat in Sausalito and his cabin on Mount Tamalpais, he gave hundreds of seminars that his son Mark began recording in 1968 — a decision that would prove providential.

Watts died in his sleep in November 1973, just fifty-eight, weeks after founding — with Mark — the Electronic University, an audacious plan to disseminate his talks beyond any lecture hall. That seed became the Alan Watts Organization, which under Mark's guidance has spent five decades restoring and releasing the vast archive — and then watched something remarkable happen: the internet fell in love with him. His musings, remixed over ambient music and animation, have been streamed hundreds of millions of times, making a man born in 1915 one of the most-heard philosophers of the digital age. His invitation remains as fresh as ever: to stop clutching at yourself, notice that you are something the whole universe is doing, and — in his most famous refrain — realise that "this is it": this moment, exactly as it is, is what you were looking for all along.