Zen. Alan Watts

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Zen - Alan Watts


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imageNew World Library14 Pamaron WayNovato, California 94949

      Copyright © 1948 by Alan Watts, © 2019 by Joan Watts and Anne Watts

      All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

      Originally published in the United States in 1948 by James Ladd Delkin, Stanford, California

      First New World Library printing, July 2019

      ISBN 978-1-60868-588-2

      Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-589-9

      Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

image New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative.

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

       To

       Ruth Fuller Sasaki

      CONTENTS

       The Background in Indian Religion

       The Background in Chinese Religion

       The Momentous Harmony

       Direct Pointing

       Zen Meditation

       The Cultural Effects of Zen

       Conclusion

       Bibliography

       The Drawings and Symbols

       About the Author

       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.

      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.

      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.


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