Author Guide · Philosophy and Zen
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Watts published his first title while he was still at school and his last at fifty-eight, and in between he was an Episcopal priest, a professor of comparative philosophy, a broadcaster on Berkeley radio and a man living on a houseboat in Sausalito. He was never a Zen master and never claimed to be one: asked what he was, he said a “philosophical entertainer”. What he did was take Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu ideas and say them in ordinary English, which is why half the internet quotes him and why some Zen teachers never forgave him. This guide has all twenty-four books he published in his lifetime, in order, sorts out the three dozen or so that came after his death, and lists the seven booklets that usually fall off the end.
By Lisanne Swart · 24 books in full · Spirituality · 1932–1973 · Updated September 2026
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Quick answer
Alan Watts published twenty-four books in his lifetime, from An Outline of Zen Buddhism in 1932, written while he was still at school, to Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown in 1973, the year he died. Close to forty more have appeared since, almost all of them edited transcripts of his lectures rather than books he wrote. Alongside the twenty-four he also published seven short booklets and one translation, which the standard bibliography leaves out and which are all listed further down this page. Start with The Way of Zen (1957) if you want the teaching, or The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) if you want the one readers say changed something. All twenty-four in order →
Where to Start with Alan Watts
If you have never read him
The Way of Zen
(1957). The book that made his name and still the clearest short account of where Zen came from and what it is for.
if you want the one people say changed something…
The Wisdom of Insecurity, 1951, about living without the guarantees you keep looking for. It is the Watts book most often described as arriving at exactly the right moment.
if you want the famous one…
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), written as the explanation he wished someone had given him as a child.
if you came for the Christianity, not the Zen…
Behold the Spirit (1947), written while he was a priest, or Beyond Theology (1964), written long after he stopped being one.
if you want the man rather than the ideas…
In My Own Way (1972), his autobiography, which is candid about the drinking and the marriages and entirely unapologetic.
All 24 Alan Watts Books, in Order
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An Outline of Zen Buddhism
Thirty-two pages from the Golden Vista Press in London, written while he was still at school and already secretary of the Buddhist Lodge in London. It is the first thing he published and it already sounds like him.
back to the shelfThe Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East
His first real book, published by John Murray when he was twenty-one, drawing heavily on D.T. Suzuki. He later thought little of it and said so; it is worth reading as the sound of someone finding the subject rather than as an account of it.
back to the shelfThe Legacy of Asia and Western Man: A Study of the Middle Way
What the West might take from Asian thought, written before he had been to America. Early, earnest, and the first sketch of the argument he spent the rest of his life making.
back to the shelfThe Meaning of Happiness
Subtitled The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East. His first American book, and the first time he put psychotherapy and Eastern thought in the same frame — twenty-one years before he wrote the book that did it properly.
back to the shelfBehold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion
Written while he was an Episcopal priest, arguing that Christianity needs its mystics or it dies. It earned him a master’s degree in theology. the American church.
back to the shelfEaster: Its Story and Meaning
A short book on the festival and what it is made of, from the priest years. One of the two he published in the year he left the priesthood.
back to the shelfThe Supreme Identity: An Essay on Oriental Metaphysic and the Christian Religion
The hardest book on this shelf. He is trying to show that Vedanta and Christian theology are describing the same thing, in the vocabulary of both. Published the year he left the priesthood.
back to the shelfThe Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
On what happens when you stop trying to make the future safe. It came out the year after his career in the church ended — his first marriage had ended in 1949, his letter of resignation went to the bishop in August 1950, and it is the book readers most often say arrived at exactly the right moment in their own lives. Short, and the least decorated thing he wrote.
back to the shelfMyth and Ritual in Christianity
Christianity read as myth rather than as history, Written after he had left the priesthood, which is why it can say what it says.
back to the shelfThe Way of Zen
The book that made him. Half of it is history — Taoism, Buddhism, how the two met in China — and half is what Zen is actually doing. It came out the year Kerouac published On the Road, and is still the book most people are handed first. Some Zen teachers thought he was explaining an experience he had not had; Shunryu Suzuki, who ran the San Francisco Zen Center and had every reason to be territorial, called him a great bodhisattva.
back to the shelfNature, Man and Woman
On the Western habit of setting spirit against body, and on sex, which he thought Christianity had made into a problem that did not need to exist.
back to the shelfBeat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen
First an essay in the Chicago Review in the summer of 1958, then a City Lights pamphlet the year after, and the most quoted thing he wrote about the Beats: Beat Zen too casual, square Zen too rigid, and the real thing neither. Twenty-odd pages, and a small landmark in what the 1950s made of Zen.
back to the shelfThis Is It: And Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience
Six essays, including the title piece on the moment when the world stops looking like a problem. It also contains the Beat Zen essay, so buying both is buying the same twenty pages twice.
back to the shelfPsychotherapy East and West
The argument that Buddhism and Taoism are closer to psychotherapy than to religion: both are in the business of getting someone out of a bind they cannot see. The book that put him on psychology reading lists as well as spiritual ones, and the one that has aged best.
back to the shelfThe Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
His account of LSD and mescaline, written after taking them under supervision in research settings and published with a foreword by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. Watts later distanced himself from the idea that the drugs themselves were the point.
back to the shelfThe Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity
A collection of myths from around the world about opposites that turn out to be one thing: light and dark, God and the devil, self and other. More anthology than argument, and handsomely made.
back to the shelfBeyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship
The book where he stops trying to rescue Christianity and starts treating it as one myth among others. The sharpest and least respectful of his religious books, and the one that annoyed his old colleagues most.
back to the shelfThe Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
Written as the book he wished someone had handed him when he was young: an explanation of why you feel like a separate self inside a body, and why that feeling is a trick of the language you were taught. It is the Watts title people quote without having read, and it is also the clearest short statement of the argument he spent his life making.
back to the shelfNonsense
A small book of playful pieces with illustrations by Greg Irons, published in San Francisco in the year of the Summer of Love. It is a joke, and it is his, and it explains something about him that the serious books do not.
back to the shelfDoes It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality
Essays on money, clothes, food, technology and the way a culture that calls itself materialist treats actual material things with contempt. The most political book he wrote, and the one that reads as if it were written this year. Pantheon published it in 1970; alanwatts.org dates it 1968, so shops show both.
back to the shelfErotic Spirituality: The Vision of Konarak
His text alongside Eliot Elisofon’s photographs of the thirteenth-century Sun Temple at Konarak in Odisha, whose carvings are explicitly erotic. A picture book with an essay, and the argument of Nature, Man and Woman in another form. In Britain it came out as The Temple of Konarak: Erotic Spirituality, which is the title to search for if you are here.
back to the shelfIn My Own Way: An Autobiography 1915–1965
The autobiography, covering fifty years and stopping eight before the end. Candid about the drinking, the three marriages and the seven children, and entirely without apology. If you want to know whether you trust him, read this rather than the books about him.
back to the shelfThe Art of Contemplation: A Facsimile Manuscript with Doodles
A short piece on contemplation, reproduced in facsimile from his own handwriting, with his doodles in the margins. Closer to an object than a book.
back to the shelfCloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal
Nineteen essays written for magazines between 1968 and 1972, on everything from ecology to death, in the loosest form he ever used. Published in the year he died, and the last book he finished himself.
back to the shelfThe Rest of It: Seven Booklets, a Translation, and the Posthumous Books
This is where Alan Watts gets confusing. Close to forty books carry his name that he did not write — almost all of them edited transcripts of lectures and seminars, assembled after 1973, mostly by his son Mark Watts. They are not fakes and several are very good, but they are talks, not books, and the shops shelve them next to the real ones without saying so.
Open a group to see the titles.
The one he did not finish
1
Tao: The Watercourse Way 1975
He died with it unfinished, and it was published as it stood. Chungliang Al Huang, his friend and collaborator, is credited on the title page and wrote the preface and afterword; the two further chapters Watts had planned were never written. It is the last substantial thing he left.
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Seven booklets the standard bibliography leaves out
7
Seven Symbols of Life: Being an Essay on Eternal Verities as Expressed in the Images of the Lotus, of Water, Wind, Fire, Man, Woman and Child 1936
A softcover essay from the Buddhist Lodge in London, published the same year as The Spirit of Zen. It does not appear on Wikipedia’s bibliography at all.
The Psychology of Acceptance: The Reconciliation of the Opposites in Eastern Thought and in Analytical Psychology 1939
From his first American years, and the earliest sign of the argument he made for the rest of his life: that Eastern thought and Western psychology are describing the same movement.
The Meaning of Priesthood 1946
Written while he was an Episcopal chaplain himself, the year before Behold the Spirit.
Zen Buddhism: A New Outline and Introduction 1947
Written, he said, as a corrective to The Spirit of Zen of eleven years before, now that better sources had reached the West. It came out in America the following year as Zen.
Zen 1948
The American edition of the 1947 booklet, published by James Ladd Delkin in Stanford. A separately published Watts title, and on almost no bibliography.
The Way of Liberation in Zen Buddhism 1955
About twenty pages with Chinese notes, published by the American Academy of Asian Studies while he was teaching there.
The “Deep-in” View: A Conversation with Alan Watts 1965
An interview rather than an essay, published as its own booklet in the middle of his busiest decade.
A translation, twice
2
Theologia Mystica: Being the Treatise of Saint Dionysius, Pseudo-Areopagite, on Mystical Theology, Together with the First and Fifth Epistles 1944
Not his book: his translation from the Greek of the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixth-century text, together with two of the epistles, and an introduction of his own. Holy Cross Press, West Park, New York, from his seminary years.
The Theologia Mystica of Saint Dionysius 1971
The same translation, new and revised, twenty-seven years later, from his own Society for Comparative Philosophy in Sausalito. Catalogues treat it as a separate title, which is why you sometimes see a 1971 Watts book you cannot place.
The posthumous books, the ones you will actually find
6
The Essential Alan Watts 1975
A one-volume selection from Celestial Arts, and a reasonable way in if you do not want twenty-four. The year is a mess: catalogues show 1975, 1976 and 1977 for what looks like the same selection, alanwatts.org dates it 1985, and a different book of the same name appeared in 2006. Check the contents page, not the cover.
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Talking Zen 1994
Edited transcripts of lectures on Zen.
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Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion 1995
A seminar series, edited into chapters. The title is his phrase and the argument is the one he made all his life.
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Out of Your Mind 2017
Six lectures, edited into a book. Probably the most widely sold posthumous title. Note that an audio collection from 2004 carries almost the same name, so check the year.
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The Collected Letters of Alan Watts 2017
Edited by his daughters Joan Watts and Anne Watts. Letters rather than lectures, which makes it the most genuinely new of the posthumous books.
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Tao for Now 2023
A recent gathering of his Taoist material.
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Quick facts about Alan Watts
- Born
- 6 January 1915, Chislehurst, Kent, England
- Died
- 16 November 1973, Druid Heights, Marin County, California, aged 58
- Educated
- The King’s School, Canterbury; Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, Illinois. No university degree in philosophy and no earned doctorate. The University of Vermont gave him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1958
- Was a priest
- Ordained in the Episcopal Church on Ascension Day 1945, chaplain at Northwestern University, and out again by August 1950, after his first marriage ended in 1949
- Then taught
- Comparative philosophy at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, 1951 to 1957, where he also ran the place for several years as its administrator
- On the radio
- Weekly on KPFA in Berkeley from 1953, unpaid, which is where most of the recordings that circulate today begin
- Lived
- A houseboat in Sausalito, the Vallejo, and a cabin at Druid Heights on Mount Tamalpais
- Family
- Three marriages and seven children
- Positions
- He held a Harvard fellowship from 1962 to 1964, a scholar’s post at San Jose State in 1968, and an honorary doctorate from Vermont in 1958
- What he was not
- A Zen master, a monk, a guru or an academic philosopher. Asked at Santa Cruz in 1970 what he was, he said a “philosophical entertainer”
The Objection to Alan Watts, and Why the Books Lasted Anyway
The case against him is real and worth stating. He knew the Zen teacher Sokei-an Sasaki in New York and chose not to enter a formal training relationship with him, and that is as close as he came. He wrote about states of mind that his critics said he had read about rather than reached. Philip Kapleau and D.T. Suzuki are both reported to have thought he got important things wrong. He drank heavily for most of his adult life. He left a priesthood, a marriage and a good deal of wreckage, and he was never especially sorry.
The case for him is equally simple: he could say it. Most English-language writing on Zen and Taoism at the time assumed you already had the vocabulary, or the patience to acquire it. He wrote as if he were talking to you, kept the jokes in, and refused to make the reader feel that understanding was something you had to earn with years of preliminary suffering. Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center, told a student off for missing the point about Watts and called him a great bodhisattva.
What has kept the books alive is that he was not really teaching a religion. He was making one argument, over and over, in whatever vocabulary was to hand: that the separate self you experience is produced by the way you were taught to talk about yourself, and that a great deal of ordinary suffering follows from taking it as solid. Christianity, Zen, Vedanta, psychotherapy, LSD — he used all of them to say that, and the argument does not depend on any of them being true.
If you want the same territory from people who did sit down and practise, that is Thich Nhat Hanh and Ramana Maharshi. If what you want is the argument about the self without the Eastern frame, that is Eckhart Tolle, and behind him Carl Jung and Erich Fromm, who was writing about the same problem from psychoanalysis. The rest are on my spirituality list and my psychology list.
Watch
Alan Watts: A Conversation with Myself
A 1971 television recording in which he walks in the mountains and talks about the limits of technology, and about the problem of trying to keep track of an infinite universe with a single mind. Posted by his son, Mark Watts.
Frequently asked questions about Alan Watts’s books
How many books did Alan Watts write?
Twenty-four in his lifetime, between 1932 and 1973, if you count the way Wikipedia’s bibliography counts. The organisation his family runs files the 1932 booklet under booklets rather than books and so arrives at twenty-three, and lists seven further lifetime booklets and a translation on top of that. This page puts all of them on one page so you can draw the line yourself. Close to forty more have been published since he died in 1973, but almost all of those are edited transcripts of his lectures and seminars rather than books he sat down and wrote. Tao: The Watercourse Way (1975) is the one in between: he left it unfinished and Chungliang Al Huang, who is credited on the title page, wrote a preface and an afterword; the two chapters Watts still had planned were never written.
What is the best Alan Watts book to start with?
The Way of Zen (1957) if you want the ideas explained properly, or The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) if you want the one readers say landed. The Book (1966) is the most famous and is also a fine place to begin.
What order should I read Alan Watts in?
Any order. Nothing follows on from anything else and he repeats his central argument in every book, which is either a flaw or the point depending on your mood. The list on this page is in publication order so you can see the thinking change.
Was Alan Watts a Zen master?
No, and he did not say he was. He had no dharma transmission, no monastic training and no teaching lineage, and when students at Santa Cruz asked him in 1970 what he was, he answered that he was a “philosophical entertainer”. That is also the heart of the objection to him: critics including Philip Kapleau objected that he dismissed zazen on the strength of half a koan, and argued he was describing an experience he had read about rather than one he had practised into.
Was Alan Watts a priest?
Yes, briefly. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1945 and served as chaplain at Northwestern University. He left in August 1950, after his first marriage ended in 1949. Three of the books on this page — Behold the Spirit, Easter and The Supreme Identity — come out of those years.
What is The Book about?
Its full title is The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. It argues that the sense of being a separate self, sealed inside a body and looking out, is something you were taught rather than something you discovered, and that most of the trouble follows from that. He wrote it as the explanation he wished an adult had given him as a child.
Did Alan Watts take LSD?
Yes. He took mescaline first, given to him by the psychiatrist Oscar Janiger, and LSD several times in 1958, in research settings before it was illegal. The Joyous Cosmology (1962) is his account of it, with a foreword by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. He did not think the drug was the destination, and spent the rest of his life saying so.
Are the posthumous Alan Watts books really by him?
They are really his words, but they are mostly not his books. The great majority are transcripts of recorded lectures and seminars, edited into chapters after his death, largely by his son Mark Watts. That is worth knowing before you buy: they read like speech, they repeat each other a great deal, and a shop will shelve them beside the twenty-four he actually wrote without telling you which is which.
Which Alan Watts quotes are real?
Fewer than the internet suggests. He is widely misquoted, for two reasons: most of what he said exists only as recorded audio with no page to check it against, and the style is easy to imitate. If a line has no book, chapter or lecture attached to it, treat it as unverified until you find one.
How did Alan Watts die?
He died at Druid Heights in Marin County on 16 November 1973, aged 58, shortly after returning exhausted from a European lecture tour. He had been under treatment for a heart condition and had drunk heavily for years.
Is Tao: The Watercourse Way finished?
No. Watts died with the manuscript incomplete and the two further chapters he had planned were never written. It was published in 1975 as it stood, with a preface and an afterword by his collaborator Chungliang Al Huang, who is credited on the title page. The text is Watts’s; the book is unfinished.
What did Alan Watts actually believe?
He resisted the question, which is a fair answer in itself. Across Christianity, Zen, Taoism, Vedanta and psychotherapy he made one argument: that the separate self you feel yourself to be is a product of how you were taught to speak about yourself, and that a great deal of ordinary unhappiness follows from believing in it too hard.
Footnotes
- Alan Watts bibliography — Wikipedia (titles, subtitles, years and publishers)
- Books and Articles — alanwatts.org, the official organisation (which titles are posthumous)
- Alan Watts — Wikipedia (dates, the priesthood, the Academy, KPFA, the Harvard fellowship, the criticism, and the “philosophical entertainer” self-description)
- About Alan Watts — alanwatts.org (the organisation his family runs, on how he presented himself)
- Behold the Spirit — Wikipedia (what the 1947 book argues)
Bibliography last verified 26 September 2026. Years are those of first publication; several titles were reissued by a different publisher in the early 1970s with new prefaces, and the shops often show those years instead. The count of twenty-four follows Wikipedia’s bibliography. alanwatts.org, run by his family, counts twenty-three, because it files the 1932 booklet with the booklets; the line between a book and a booklet is genuinely blurred in his case, so the seven further lifetime booklets and the translation are listed further down rather than left out.
The notes on this page are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
Twenty-four books in forty-one years, and he still called himself a philosophical entertainer.
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