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PREFACE

WITH ITS RADICALLY SIMPLE and direct title, Zen was among the earliest books by Alan Watts to intrigue spiritual seekers. This edition of Zen, appearing some seventy years after the original small printing, is sure to do the same for a new generation of readers. It offers a clear, concise, and informative introduction to a path that inspired Alan Watts from an early age and continued to intrigue him throughout his life.

Zen was published in England in 1947 under the title Zen Buddhism: A New Outline and Introduction. The American edition, published by James Ladd Delkin, came out in 1948, the same year as the second edition of Watts’s The Spirit of Zen. “Since writing The Spirit of Zen . . .many valuable sources of information on the general nature of Zen have been available to me,” Watts writes in his foreword to Zen, adding that the new book, “though brief, will in several important respects provide a corrective to the former volume.”*

Among those “valuable sources” was D. T. Suzuki, as well as the Zen master Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki and his disciple Ruth Everett, who became Sasaki’s wife in 1944, the year before his death. Ruth Everett was the mother of Eleanor Everett, who married Watts in 1938, two years after the first edition of The Spirit of Zen.

Precocious and intellectually adventuresome, Watts had been delving into Buddhist teachings even while in boarding school at King’s School in Canterbury, England. After reading Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, he borrowed from a friend The Creed of Buddha by Edmond Holmes, which contained a pamphlet written by Christmas Humphreys about the work of the Buddhist Lodge in London. Becoming a member and subscribing to the lodge’s journal, The Middle Way, he submitted his first writing on Zen for publication.

As Alan’s daughter Joan Watts writes in The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, on the basis of that essay he “was invited to speak to the members, who were shocked to learn that Alan Watts was a mere lad of fifteen.”^† Humphreys became his mentor, and it was through him that Watts met D. T. Suzuki. At around the same time, he exchanged letters with Sokei-an Sasaki, who wrote to the brilliant young seeker, “It is very hard to judge the ultimate attainment of Zen without observing the daily life and establishing a close contact between teacher and disciple in order to make certain whether attainment is one of mere conception or that of really standing in its center. . . . I am quite sure you are on the way of Zen and I hope some day in the future we will meet each other.”‡

That meeting took place in 1938, when Watts and his new wife, Eleanor, arrived in the United States. However, Watts himself never established the kind of connection with a Zen master that Sokei-an Sasaki had recommended, despite his mother-in-law’s long immersion in traditional training at Nanzen-ji and years later at Daitoku-ji (where Ruth was ordained and installed as abbot of Ryosen-an, a sub-temple there) and her association, along with Sokei-an, with the First Zen Institute in New York and Kyoto.

For the young Watts, Zen was not only a corrective to The Spirit of Zen; it was a deeply personal response to what he saw as the shortcomings of Western metaphysics and, in particular, of Christianity. While writing Zen, Watts was preparing for ordination in the Episcopal Church, working as chaplain and living at Canterbury House at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, with Eleanor and their young daughters, Joan and Anne.

From several letters of that period, it’s clear that Watts viewed his engagement with Christianity as a means toward changing the Church from within. The revelations of oneness he found in Zen paralleled what he considered the most important truth of Christianity: the mystery of God. He equated the mystical in Christianity with the naturalness of Zen; the ineffability of God with the nowness of Zen awakening. Indeed, in an earlier book, The Legacy of Asia and Western Man (1937), he had called for “a Christianity reinforced by all that Asia (i.e., Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, etc.) can give.”§

Writing Zen while taking on all the rituals and trappings of ecclesiastical Christianity must have been appealingly surreptitious. By the time of his ordination, he had grown impatient with the strictures of the Church and with what he felt was an untenable narrow-mindedness among its leaders. Two years after the US publication of Zen, he submitted his resignation to Bishop Wallace Conkling with, as Joan Watts notes, “a barrage of criticism of the Church.”|| She quotes a letter to his friends in which he wrote, “During the past years I have continued my studies of the spiritual teachings of the Orient, alongside with Catholic theology, and, though I have sometimes doubted it, I am now fully persuaded that the Church’s claim to be the best of all ways to God is not only a mistake, but also a symptom of anxiety.”^¶

Zen presents an eminently accessible overview of Buddhist teachings, calling for the cessation of grasping and rejecting the inherent dualism of any intellectual formula. Rather than trying to possess God, he wrote, it was necessary to allow God — and life — to possess you. For Watts, to be fully alive was the essence of Zen; it could not be defined. How could one convey that essence? Only through immediate insight into the nature of Reality. It could only be transmitted, as Buddha did while holding up a flower, silently. Words would always and immediately lead to concepts, creating an intellectual divide between the nowness of spiritual experience and any attempt to define it.

Nonetheless, Watts was in love with words. Ever the scholar of comparative religions, he offers in Zen a brief overview of the Hindu Upanishads, early Indian Mahayana Buddhism, Chinese Taoism and Confucianism, and the development of Zen monastic practice in Tang dynasty China and in Japan, noting that Mahayana Buddhism was “somewhat infected with the characteristically Indian desire to escape from the world of form, but in China it lost this desire almost entirely.”** Zen Buddhism, for Watts, was “the synthesis of the contemplative insight of Indian religion, the dynamic liveliness of Taoism, and the down-to-earthness of Confucianism.”^††

In the process of writing Zen, Watts was keenly aware of how quickly one can get entangled in dualism, warning his readers not to form “the concept of a pure and unchanging consciousness separate and apart from the changing forms of thoughts and things.” He was encouraging the “perpetual self-abandonment” to the pure Mind, “an identification of itself with its changing forms, which in Christian language would be called the divine love.” It’s not “that we have to make the pure Mind perform this act of self-abandonment,” he noted; “it does it by itself all the time, in us and through us.”^††

Zen’s final section addresses the instantaneous action through self-abandonment found in the traditional Zen arts, whether in calligraphic brushstrokes or haiku, flower arranging or stone gardens, tea ceremony or archery — and the deep training and discipline necessary for that instantaneous action to be authentic.

It’s remarkable how in such a slender volume — what he called his little booklet — Watts could convey Zen’s challenges and its possibilities for life-changing breakthroughs. More than an outline or overview, Zen itself is like a haiku, a condensation of profundity that beckons to new understandings.

— Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat

Abbot of the Zen Studies Society, New York, 2019

* See p. 17.

† Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. xiii.

‡ Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. 8.

§ Quoted in Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. 254.

|| Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, p. 261.

¶ Ibid.

** See p. 33.

†† See p. 37.

‡‡ See pp. 48–49.