Alan Watts (1915–1973) was English, wrote his first book on Zen at twenty, moved to
the United States, trained and served as an Episcopal priest, and left the priesthood in
1950. He spent the rest of his life as a writer and broadcaster, most famously on KPFA
in Berkeley, explaining Buddhist, Taoist and Vedantic ideas to Western audiences in
plain, funny English.
He was explicit that he was not a Zen master and held no transmission — he called
himself a philosophical entertainer, and meant it as a description rather than a
disclaimer. The books that matter most are The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951),
The Way of Zen (1957) and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You
Are (1966).
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
— Alan Watts
“You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.”
— Alan Watts
“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.”
— Alan Watts
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
— Alan Watts
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
— Alan Watts
“No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.”
— Alan Watts
“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.”
— Alan Watts
“The greater part of human activity is designed to make permanent those experiences and joys which are only delightful because they are changing.”
— Alan Watts
“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.”
— Alan Watts
“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.”
— Alan Watts
“Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.”
— Alan Watts
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
— Alan Watts
“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.”
— Alan Watts
“The art of living is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging on the other.”
— Alan Watts
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
— Alan Watts
The majority of quotable Watts comes from recorded lectures rather than books, which
is why the phrasing is so conversational and why the same idea appears in six slightly
different forms. He improvised, repeated himself deliberately, and built to a laugh. The
family maintains the recordings and a great deal of it is available in full — hearing a
line inside its twenty-minute lecture usually changes what you think it meant.
One argument runs under nearly everything: that the sense of being a separate ego
inside a body, looking out at a foreign world, is a hallucination produced by language
and social convention rather than a fact of experience. He called it the skin-
encapsulated ego. Everything else — the material on insecurity, on play, on death, on
the uselessness of chasing a future moment — follows from that single claim.
Watts’s Zen is a Western literary Zen: brilliant at conveying the flavour, largely
uninterested in the discipline. Traditional practice involves years of formal sitting,
a teacher who corrects you, and monastic tedium — none of which he did or recommended,
and Zen teachers of his era said so directly. He was also candid about his drinking. If
you take him as an explainer of ideas he is superb; as a model of a practising life he
is a poor one, and he would have agreed.
The Wisdom of Insecurity is the short one and still the best entry: a
hundred and fifty pages arguing that the search for security is itself the source of
anxiety. The Way of Zen is the most useful as history, with the caveat that the
scholarship is seventy years old.
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