The Way of Zen (Alan Watts)
The Way of Watts
[My 4-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts.]
I still have the original 1957 version of this text, which I bought about forty years ago. It had been in storage for God knows how long, and when I received my copy a number of months ago, I put it on my (almost endless) list of books to review.
Rereading this text was fun for a few reasons. First, Alan Watts is a superb writer, and now that I’m an author, I enjoyed gleaning “tips” from the master’s prototypical prose. Ken Wilber confesses that he became an accomplished writer by copying Alan Watts’ texts by hand, so I’m not the first writer to seek improvement by studying Watts’ words.
Second, it was a felicitous read—concise, lucid prose seasoned with Watts’ anti-Procrustean perspectives on Zen and life. In eight chapters—The Philosophy of the Tao, The Origins of Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, The Rise and Development of Zen, “Empty and Marvelous,” “sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing, Za-zen and the Koan, and Zen in the Arts—Watts provides a fine summary of the Background and History of Zen, as well as its Principles and Practice. Moreover, he does so in unsurpassed style.
Third, now that I’m an expert—“beginner’s mind” is for the birds in my opinion—in Eastern philosophy, I had a field day picking out passages that pointed out my differences with Watts. Here are a few of them, followed by my comments in parentheses:
“One might as well use ‘blah’ – which is almost exactly what Buddhism does with the nonsense word ‘tathata.’ For the function of these nonsense terms is to draw attention to the fact that logic and meaning, with its inherent duality, is a property of thought and language but not of the actual world.”
(First off, “tathata” (suchness) is hardly a nonsense word. And if Watts had truly grokked its meaning, he’d have realized that it is equivalent to Divine being-ness, which a yogi experiences when he unites his consciousness (the immanenent, contracted Dharmakaya) with Clear-Light Energy (the Sambhogakaya). Secondly, although logic is a property of thought, it is rooted in the actual world, because it identifies, without contradiction, the facts that pertain to reality.)
“If Nirvana is is actually here and now so that to seek it is to lose it, realization through progressive stages is hardly appropriate. One would have to see into into it in the present moment, directly.”
(The Buddha himself described the attainment of Nirvana in progressive terms. Because of the multi-sheathed nature of incarnated humans, an individual must undergo a divinization process in real time before he can attain Nirvana, Buddhahood.)
“The duality of subject and object, of the knower and the known, is seen to be just as relative, as mutual, as inseparable as every other. We do not sweat because it is hot; the sweating is the heat.”
(I don’t know about you, but even though I may sweat because of the heat, it is clear to me that my sweat and the heat are distinct from each other. And sometimes I don’t sweat when it is hot.)
“To put it another way, it becomes vividly clear that in concrete fact I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”
(We are not aware of things about ourselves that others are. Hence, one’s self exceeds one’s awareness. Furthermore, one’s self also includes one’s body.)
The most negative aspect of this text is Watts’ disrespect for meditation, sometimes referred to as “za-zen” (or “sitting”) in Zen parlance. He writes:
“Although the name Zen is ‘dhyana,’ or meditation, other schools of Buddhism emphasize meditation as much as, if not more than, Zen—and at times it seems as if the practice of formal meditation were not necessary to Zen at all... Yet however much za-zen may have been exaggerated in the Far East, a certain amount of “sitting just sit” might well be the best thing in the world for jittery minds and agitated bodies of Europeans and Americans—provided they do not use it as a method for turning themselves into Buddhas.”
(In direct contradistinction to Watts, I say that meditation is a sine qua non if one wants to attain Buddhahood. Watts’ dissing of meditation fostered the spread of Beat, or pop, Zen, and the result has been an endless proliferation of Maynard G. Krebs-type “Zen masters.”)
Speaking of “Zen masters,” the way Watts describes them, one has to wonder if he he ever encountered a true Zen master. Watts writes:
“Zen masters are quite human. They get sick and die; they know joy and sorrow; they have bad tempers or other little ‘weaknesses’ of character just like anyone else, and they are not above falling in love and entering into a fully human relationship with the opposite sex. The perfection of Zen is to be perfectly and simply human.”
Given the fact that Watts personally knew many “Zen masters,” and knew that none of them was truly En-Light-ened, it’s not surprising that when he encountered the teachings of Franklin Jones (a.k.a. Bubba Free John, Da Free John, and, finally Adi Da) fifteen years after he wrote “The Way of Zen,” he declared, “I have been waiting for an Avatar all my life, and now he has come.”
I spent years studying and practicing Zen, and like Watts, when I read Adi Da, I realized the limitations of Zen. Zen is to Dzogchen what Advaita Vedanta is to Kashmir Shaivism—its poor sister. Nevertheless, Zen is still worth studying and practicing, and Watts’ book, despite its limitations, is an amenable introduction to the subject.
[My 4-star Amazon review (NDA) of “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts.]
I still have the original 1957 version of this text, which I bought about forty years ago. It had been in storage for God knows how long, and when I received my copy a number of months ago, I put it on my (almost endless) list of books to review.
Rereading this text was fun for a few reasons. First, Alan Watts is a superb writer, and now that I’m an author, I enjoyed gleaning “tips” from the master’s prototypical prose. Ken Wilber confesses that he became an accomplished writer by copying Alan Watts’ texts by hand, so I’m not the first writer to seek improvement by studying Watts’ words.
Second, it was a felicitous read—concise, lucid prose seasoned with Watts’ anti-Procrustean perspectives on Zen and life. In eight chapters—The Philosophy of the Tao, The Origins of Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, The Rise and Development of Zen, “Empty and Marvelous,” “sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing, Za-zen and the Koan, and Zen in the Arts—Watts provides a fine summary of the Background and History of Zen, as well as its Principles and Practice. Moreover, he does so in unsurpassed style.
Third, now that I’m an expert—“beginner’s mind” is for the birds in my opinion—in Eastern philosophy, I had a field day picking out passages that pointed out my differences with Watts. Here are a few of them, followed by my comments in parentheses:
“One might as well use ‘blah’ – which is almost exactly what Buddhism does with the nonsense word ‘tathata.’ For the function of these nonsense terms is to draw attention to the fact that logic and meaning, with its inherent duality, is a property of thought and language but not of the actual world.”
(First off, “tathata” (suchness) is hardly a nonsense word. And if Watts had truly grokked its meaning, he’d have realized that it is equivalent to Divine being-ness, which a yogi experiences when he unites his consciousness (the immanenent, contracted Dharmakaya) with Clear-Light Energy (the Sambhogakaya). Secondly, although logic is a property of thought, it is rooted in the actual world, because it identifies, without contradiction, the facts that pertain to reality.)
“If Nirvana is is actually here and now so that to seek it is to lose it, realization through progressive stages is hardly appropriate. One would have to see into into it in the present moment, directly.”
(The Buddha himself described the attainment of Nirvana in progressive terms. Because of the multi-sheathed nature of incarnated humans, an individual must undergo a divinization process in real time before he can attain Nirvana, Buddhahood.)
“The duality of subject and object, of the knower and the known, is seen to be just as relative, as mutual, as inseparable as every other. We do not sweat because it is hot; the sweating is the heat.”
(I don’t know about you, but even though I may sweat because of the heat, it is clear to me that my sweat and the heat are distinct from each other. And sometimes I don’t sweat when it is hot.)
“To put it another way, it becomes vividly clear that in concrete fact I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”
(We are not aware of things about ourselves that others are. Hence, one’s self exceeds one’s awareness. Furthermore, one’s self also includes one’s body.)
The most negative aspect of this text is Watts’ disrespect for meditation, sometimes referred to as “za-zen” (or “sitting”) in Zen parlance. He writes:
“Although the name Zen is ‘dhyana,’ or meditation, other schools of Buddhism emphasize meditation as much as, if not more than, Zen—and at times it seems as if the practice of formal meditation were not necessary to Zen at all... Yet however much za-zen may have been exaggerated in the Far East, a certain amount of “sitting just sit” might well be the best thing in the world for jittery minds and agitated bodies of Europeans and Americans—provided they do not use it as a method for turning themselves into Buddhas.”
(In direct contradistinction to Watts, I say that meditation is a sine qua non if one wants to attain Buddhahood. Watts’ dissing of meditation fostered the spread of Beat, or pop, Zen, and the result has been an endless proliferation of Maynard G. Krebs-type “Zen masters.”)
Speaking of “Zen masters,” the way Watts describes them, one has to wonder if he he ever encountered a true Zen master. Watts writes:
“Zen masters are quite human. They get sick and die; they know joy and sorrow; they have bad tempers or other little ‘weaknesses’ of character just like anyone else, and they are not above falling in love and entering into a fully human relationship with the opposite sex. The perfection of Zen is to be perfectly and simply human.”
Given the fact that Watts personally knew many “Zen masters,” and knew that none of them was truly En-Light-ened, it’s not surprising that when he encountered the teachings of Franklin Jones (a.k.a. Bubba Free John, Da Free John, and, finally Adi Da) fifteen years after he wrote “The Way of Zen,” he declared, “I have been waiting for an Avatar all my life, and now he has come.”
I spent years studying and practicing Zen, and like Watts, when I read Adi Da, I realized the limitations of Zen. Zen is to Dzogchen what Advaita Vedanta is to Kashmir Shaivism—its poor sister. Nevertheless, Zen is still worth studying and practicing, and Watts’ book, despite its limitations, is an amenable introduction to the subject.
