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Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chiselhurst, Kent, England in 1915. His father was a tire salesman, his mother a housewife who’s own father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in bucolic surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies, playing at creekside, and performing funeral ceremonies for birds. Probably due to the influence of his mother’s religious family, the Buchans, an interest in “ultimate things” seeped in. But it mixed with Alan’s own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East. Watts also later wrote of a mystical sort of vision he had experienced while ill with a fever as a child.
Watts was sent to boarding schools (which also had a strong religious, as well as academic, dimension) from early years. During holidays in his teen years, Francis Croshaw, a wealthy epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and the exotic, little-known aspects of European culture, took Watts on a trip through France. It was not long later that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s. He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge which had been established by Theosophists, and was now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization’s secretary at 16. The young Watts experimented with several styles of meditation during these years.
Though Watts was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically, and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as presumptuous and capricious.
Hence, when he graduated from secondary school, Watts was thrust into the world of employment, working in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a “rascal guru” named Dmitrije Mitrinovic . He also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology and psychiatry, and Eastern wisdom. In 1936, at 21 years old, he got his first book published, The Spirit of Zen, which he acknowledged later to be mainly digested from the translated writings of D.T. Suzuki.
In 1939, at the age of 24, he and his bride left England to live in America. He had married Eleanor Fuller, whose mother Ruth Fuller was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. Ruth Fuller soon married the Zen master (or “roshi”), Sokei-an Sasaki , and this Japanese gentleman served as a sort of model and mentor to Alan, though Watts was too independent to remain within a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki. During these years, according to his later writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his wife.
Due to his need to find a professional role and his desire to sidestep America’s military draft in the early 1940s, Watts entered an Anglican (Episcopalian) school (Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, in Evanston), where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and Church history. He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a masters degree in theology in response to the thesis which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that were dour or guilt-ridden, whether found within Judaism, Christianity, or certain "life-denying" versions of Hinduism and Buddhism.
All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopalian priest, until his young wife had their marriage annulled due to disagreements with Watts over his views on sexual ethics. Watts left the ministry by 1950 and not long after joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies, based in San Francisco. Here he taught alongside Sabro Hasegawa , Frederick Spiegelberg , Haridas Chuadhuri , lama Tokwan Tada , and various visiting experts and professors.
Always an avid and self-directed learner, Watts studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, with its origins in China, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, “the new physics,” cyberneticsCybernetics is a theory of the communication and control of regulatory feedback. The term cybernetics stems from the Greek (meaning steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder). Cybernetics is the discipline that studies communication and control in living bein, semanticsIn general, semantics (from the Greek semantikos or "significant meaning," derived from sema sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. Semantics is often opposed to syntax, in which case the former pertains to what something means while t, process philosophy, natural historyNatural history is an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. Most definitions include the study of living things (e. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to inclu, and the anthropologyAnthropology (from the Greek word ANTHROPOLOGIA consists of the study of humankind (see genus Homo . It is holistic in two senses: it is concerned with all humans at all times, and with all dimensions of humanity. Central to anthropology is the concept of of sexuality.
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