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Copyright © 1948 by Alan Watts, © 2019 by Joan Watts and Anne Watts
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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
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To
Ruth Fuller Sasaki
CONTENTS
Preface by Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat
The Background in Indian Religion
The Background in Chinese Religion
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