Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British and American writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer",[2] known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.

His lectures found posthumous popularity through regular broadcasts on public radio, especially in California and New York, and more recently on the internet, on sites and apps such as YouTube[5] and Spotify.

Watts was born to middle-class parents in Chislehurst, Kent (now south-east London), on 6 January 1915, living at Rowan Tree Cottage, 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane.

It seemed to float..."[12] These works of art emphasised the participatory relationship of people in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life and one that he often wrote about.

"[14] Watts spent several holidays in France in his teen years, accompanied by Francis Croshaw, a wealthy Epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and exotic, little-known aspects of European culture.

He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge, which was then run by the barrister and QC Christmas Humphreys (who later became a judge at the Old Bailey).

[15] Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that he said was read as "presumptuous and capricious".

He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru", Dimitrije Mitrinović, who was influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.

Through Humphreys, he contacted spiritual authors, e.g. the artist, scholar, and mystic Nicholas Roerich, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey.

In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, where he met the scholar of Zen Buddhism, D. T. Suzuki, who was presenting a paper.

[17] Beyond attending discussions, Watts studied the available scholarly literature, learning the fundamental concepts and terminology of Indian and East Asian philosophy.

Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology for his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion.

Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

[citation needed] In early 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco.

Here he taught from 1951 to 1957 alongside Saburo Hasegawa (1906–1957), Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tada Tōkan (1890–1967), and various visiting experts and professors.

[21] Watts credited Burden as an "important influence" in his life and gave her a dedicatory cryptograph in his book Nature, Man and Woman, mentioned in his autobiography (p. 297).

While he was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics", cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen in India and China and Japan, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski) and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published.

In 1958, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung and the German psychotherapist Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.

"[citation needed] Some of Watts's writings published in 1958 (e.g., his book Nature, Man and Woman and his essay "The New Alchemy") mentioned some of his early views on the use of psychedelic drugs for mystical insight.

"[34] Watts sometimes ate with his group of neighbours in Druid Heights (near Mill Valley, California), who had set up a community, living in what has been called "shared bohemian poverty".

In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chan (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages.

[39] Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature".

[40] Writing, for example, in the early 1960s: "Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?

[51] In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism or panentheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic Self-playing hide-and-seek (Lila); hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe and forgetting what it really is – the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise (Tat Tvam Asi).

His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support.

He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his "Light[s] along the Way" in the opening appreciation of his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati.

"[61] Unabashed, Watts was not averse to acknowledging his rascal nature, referring to himself in his autobiography In My Own Way as "a sedentary and contemplative character, an intellectual, a Brahmin, a mystic and also somewhat of a disreputable epicurean who has three wives, seven children and five grandchildren".

The couple separated in the early 1960s after Watts met Mary Jane Yates King (called "Jano" in his circle) while lecturing in New York.

The couple divided their time between Sausalito, California,[63] where they lived on a houseboat called the Vallejo,[64] and a secluded cabin in Druid Heights, on the southwest flank of Mount Tamalpais north of San Francisco.