Authors Like Alan Watts

There is no line from Tolle back to Watts in the record; Tolle was twenty-five when Watts died. He is here for the question: The Book calls the separate ego a hallucination, and The Power of Now calls it a thought you keep having. The method is where they part. Watts argues his way there with paradox and a joke at his own expense; Tolle states it plainly and asks you to try it before lunch.

Watts met him at the World Congress of Faiths in London in 1936, at twenty-one, and his early Zen is read largely through Suzuki’s. That is the personal link, and it was not all admiration in return: Robert Aitken recalled Suzuki remarking that Watts had not understood one of the stories he retold. Read Suzuki for the material Watts was translating, before Watts translated it.

When other Zen teachers were dismissing Watts, Suzuki called him a great bodhisattva. Watts had given him a ringed staff, and at Watts’s funeral at Green Gulch Farm in 1973, Suzuki’s successor Richard Baker gave the eulogy holding it. The two men share a question and divide on everything else: Watts talks about the self until it comes apart, Suzuki tells you to sit down and stop talking.

The link is on the title page: Alpert and Leary wrote the foreword to Watts’s The Joyous Cosmology in 1962, and Watts’s recorded talks now go out as a podcast on Ram Dass’s Be Here Now Network. The question is the same; the answer is not. Watts takes the self apart with an argument. Ram Dass gives it away to a guru, and writes about it as love.

An Englishman a generation older, who made the same crossing just ahead of him: from England to California, into Vedanta, and in 1953 to a drug as a way in. Watts took LSD in 1958 and wrote The Joyous Cosmology four years later. They met at a dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1960 arranged by Huston Smith, after which Huxley described Watts as “half monk and half race-course operator.”

Watts lectured on him by name, in a talk series on Ramakrishna, Ramana and Krishnamurti. Both men take on the observer — the “I” that watches and judges and wants to improve — and both say it is not separate from what it watches. Watts laughs at the predicament. Krishnamurti never does, and he takes away the teacher as well.

He is in the same Watts lecture series as Krishnamurti, and he is the most direct version of the question this page is built on. Where Watts circles the separate self from twenty directions in a single talk, Ramana gives one instruction and repeats it for fifty years.

He was a student at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, where Watts taught in the 1950s, and later showed Watts around Kyoto. He went on to do what Watts mostly wrote about — years of formal training in a monastery — and then to make the same point about the self in a poem about a mountain rather than an essay.

No personal link to Watts; he is here as the counterweight. Both teach that the self is not a separate thing — Thích Nhất Hạnh’s word for it is interbeing — but where Watts keeps the question in a lecture, Thích Nhất Hạnh puts it in the washing-up and asks you to do it slowly.

Here because he answered Watts in print. Kapleau held that Watts had “dismissed zazen on the basis of only half a koan” — that the talk had come without the sitting. If Watts gave you the idea that the self is an illusion, Kapleau is the author who asks what you are going to do about it on a cushion at five in the morning.