Alan W. Watts (1915–1973)
Auteur van Zen-boeddhisme
Over de Auteur
Alan Watts (1915-1973) was a renowned lecturer and the author of nearly thirty books, including The Way of Zen and The Book. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. He received a master's degree in theology from Seabury-Western toon meer Theological Seminary and served as an Episcopal priest before leaving the ministry in 1950 to move to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies (now the California Institute of Integral Studies). toon minder
Fotografie: From 'Man in Nature'.
Werken van Alan W. Watts
The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East (Wisdom of the East) (1958) 352 exemplaren
The Meaning of Happiness: The Quest for Freedom of the Spirit in Modern Psychology and the Wisdom of the East (1970) 169 exemplaren
Essence of Alan Watts, Vol. 7: Philosophical Fantasies (The Essence of Alan Watts) (1975) 18 exemplaren
The early writings of Alan Watts : essays by the leading interpreter of Zen to the West (1987) 8 exemplaren
A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy? 4 exemplaren
Psychedelics and Religious Experience 3 exemplaren
Petrokiller 2 exemplaren
Udha zen 2 exemplaren
A Vida Contemplativa 2 exemplaren
Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching 2 exemplaren
Het boek 2 exemplaren
From Time To Eternity: A Speech 2 exemplaren
Suyun Yolu Tao 1 exemplaar
EL ESPIRITU DEL ZEN 1 exemplaar
Zen-Buddhismus Tradition und lebendige Gegenwart 1 exemplaar
Alan Watts Lectures and Essays 1 exemplaar
The Meditation Experience: Volume III 1 exemplaar
What to do With the Church 1 exemplaar
Zen -buddismen 1 exemplaar
HI Isegreti del Tao 1 exemplaar
The Christian doctrine of marriage / 1 exemplaar
Theologia mystica 1 exemplaar
Ο δρόμος του Ζεν 1 exemplaar
Beat Zen, Square Zen & Zen (Original Mix) 1 exemplaar
What happens after Death? 1 exemplaar
Alan Watts Essential Lecture Collection, Eastern Wisdom Collection, Biographic Edition, and Essential Seminars. 82 CDs. (2000) 1 exemplaar
La Suprema Identidad. Una nueva y reveladora aproximación a la espiritualidad oriental. (1961) 1 exemplaar
Thiền Đạo 1 exemplaar
What God is Dead? 1 exemplaar
Images of Man 1 exemplaar
Buddhism: Man and Nature 1 exemplaar
The Mood of Zen 1 exemplaar
Zen and the Limits of Explanation 1 exemplaar
Why Not Now: Dhyana, The Art of Meditation 1 exemplaar
Birth, Death & the Unborn 1 1 exemplaar
The Scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism 1 exemplaar
The Unpreachable Religion 1 exemplaar
Philosophy of Nature 1 exemplaar
The Surprise of Mahayana Buddhism 1 exemplaar
Living Free 1 exemplaar
Sense of Nonsense & Coincidence of Opposites 1 exemplaar
Zen Buddhism A New Outline and Introduction 1 exemplaar
On Being God 1 exemplaar
Suspension of Judgment 1 exemplaar
The Joker 1 exemplaar
Mahayana Buddhism 1 exemplaar
Two Kinds of DIscipline 1 exemplaar
Death and Rebirth 1 exemplaar
psicoterapia del Este psicoterapia del Oeste 1 exemplaar
o homem;a mulher e a natureza 1 exemplaar
On Being God 1 exemplaar
The Wisdom of Insecutiry 1 exemplaar
Gerelateerde werken
Lord of the Four Quarters: The Mythology of Kingship (Jung and Spirituality Series) (1966) — Voorwoord, sommige edities — 64 exemplaren
World Religions Volume 3 : Meditation, Prayer and Trance [video recording] (2006) — Featured — 2 exemplaren
World Religions Volume 4 : Zen Meditations with Alan Watts [video recording] (2006) — Featured — 2 exemplaren
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Gangbare naam
- Watts, Alan W.
- Officiële naam
- Watts, Alan Wilson
- Geboortedatum
- 1915-01-06
- Overlijdensdatum
- 1973-11-16
- Graflocatie
- Cremated with ashes buried half at Druid Heights, Marin County, California, USA and half at Green Gulch Monastery. Muir Beach, California, USA
- Geslacht
- male
- Nationaliteit
- UK
- Geboorteplaats
- Chislehurst, Kent, England, UK
- Plaats van overlijden
- Druid Heights, Marin County, California, USA
- Woonplaatsen
- New York, New York, USA
Sausalito, California, USA
London, England, UK - Opleiding
- Seabury-Western Theological Seminary (M.Th.)
The King's School, Canterbury - Beroepen
- philosopher
writer
speaker
priest
philosophical entertainer - Organisaties
- American Academy of Asian Studies
KPFA - Korte biografie
- A prolific author and speaker, Alan Watts was one of the first to interpret Eastern wisdom for a Western audience. Born outside London in 1915, he discovered the nearby Buddhist Lodge at a young age. After moving to the United States in 1938, Alan became an Episcopal priest for a time, and then relocated to Millbrook, New York, where he wrote his pivotal book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety. In 1951 he moved to San Francisco where he began teaching Buddhist studies, and in 1956 began his popular radio show, “Way Beyond the West.” By the early sixties, Alan's radio talks aired nationally and the counterculture movement adopted him as a spiritual spokesperson. He wrote and traveled regularly until his passing in 1973.
Leden
Besprekingen
Quick Review: Finished this book with my heart racing and my mind feeling as if the universe were expanding into infinity and my self was riding it, knowing exactly my part in the whole. I'll never see the world the same way again.
In recent years, I've slowly transitioned from someone who was apathetic (if not a bit antagonistic) towards religion in my younger years to a more complicated place. I still wouldn't call myself a believer in any sense, but maybe it's a fact of aging that you notice how certain religious ideas are just *right* in a way that their secular equivalents just can't match. I think the last 10 or so years in the West have presented lots of challenges to the Good Ole Fashioned Liberal Mindset (GOFLM) that I and many of my ilk had previously ascribed to, as much as we may have denied that affiliation. At some point, humanity will have to come to terms with the fact that we can't know everything, and that actually, we shouldn't. I think the greatest block that the religious mindset sets out for this kind of person is that there are some insurmountable limits on life and society, and no matter how much "progress" we have, we won't over come them.
The Zen tradition offers lots of interesting ideas to someone caught at this intellectual crossroads. Whereas other religions might try to scare or threaten people into accepting their version of the limits on progress, Zen has no such aspirations. It encourages not only submission to the limits, but a kind of ecstatic appreciation of the beauty that comes from realizing the pitiful extent of which our attempts to control the world actually goes. The GOFLM has brought some freedom for some oppressed people, and has liberated the modern mind from much of the pointless self-flagellation that people in the past used to subject themselves to simply for being different. This "liberation" however has also done much to bound us up in ropes of our own weaving - we are so "conscious" of what we think is making us tick, and so beholden to the manipulative cries to "be ourselves" that we don't even realize that we are obsessing over a phantom.
Zen teaches us to stop spreading our ego out into the diaphanous wraith that tuggings of the world are constants trying to turn us into. When you clear the air of the smog of the past and the haze of the future, you realize that we've all become prisoners of time. I can't imagine what the writers and thinkers that formulated Zen a thousand years ago would think of the way the world has become even more obsessed with time, where so much is built upon clock-ins and clock-outs, chiming alarms, projections and analysis. Zen calls on us to recognize not only that we've become prisoners of time, but also that the prison is completely of our own making, and that with some reflection, it just might be possible to stroll right out of the cell without anyone to stop you.
This line of thinking is, of course, at odds with the reality of how our world is set up in 2023. One thing that makes this book special is the extensive space that Watts spends explaining how the precursors of Zen influenced it, especially Daoism. I remember reading the Dao De Jing in high school and feeling conflicted about a part where Lao Zi talks about how one should deal with an invading army. Lay down your arms, it says, don't resist. The Dao is moving and it is pointless to fight against it. This can feel like the kind of fatalism that comes packed into so many traditions of religious thought, a passivity anathema to the modern mind which is told that it is capable of anything. And yet to fight back is to propagate the violence that is counter to the goal that people actually want: peace. Zen might say that the injustices of the world today, which would seem to be a huge barrier to the kind of liberation from suffering that is its goal, are the result of everyone simply doing too much. To fight against what you see as wrong is also doing too much, just as those who are committing the wrongdoing are doing too much. The idea of a struggle is merely another endless chain of contingency, reliant to its core on false concepts of past and future that are lashing us to the wheel of suffering.
One cool thing about Zen that Watts devotes a whole chapter to is that unlike other religions, to be into the aesthetics of Zen is effectively to be into Zen itself. To ponder a work of a Zen master is to lean towards satori, to ape the Zen lifestyle is to be its most genuine practitioner. Thus, the Zen tradition again sets itself apart from other religious traditions that through ideas of conversion or faith merely bind themselves up in the cage of identity that brings us so much pain.… (meer)
The Zen tradition offers lots of interesting ideas to someone caught at this intellectual crossroads. Whereas other religions might try to scare or threaten people into accepting their version of the limits on progress, Zen has no such aspirations. It encourages not only submission to the limits, but a kind of ecstatic appreciation of the beauty that comes from realizing the pitiful extent of which our attempts to control the world actually goes. The GOFLM has brought some freedom for some oppressed people, and has liberated the modern mind from much of the pointless self-flagellation that people in the past used to subject themselves to simply for being different. This "liberation" however has also done much to bound us up in ropes of our own weaving - we are so "conscious" of what we think is making us tick, and so beholden to the manipulative cries to "be ourselves" that we don't even realize that we are obsessing over a phantom.
Zen teaches us to stop spreading our ego out into the diaphanous wraith that tuggings of the world are constants trying to turn us into. When you clear the air of the smog of the past and the haze of the future, you realize that we've all become prisoners of time. I can't imagine what the writers and thinkers that formulated Zen a thousand years ago would think of the way the world has become even more obsessed with time, where so much is built upon clock-ins and clock-outs, chiming alarms, projections and analysis. Zen calls on us to recognize not only that we've become prisoners of time, but also that the prison is completely of our own making, and that with some reflection, it just might be possible to stroll right out of the cell without anyone to stop you.
This line of thinking is, of course, at odds with the reality of how our world is set up in 2023. One thing that makes this book special is the extensive space that Watts spends explaining how the precursors of Zen influenced it, especially Daoism. I remember reading the Dao De Jing in high school and feeling conflicted about a part where Lao Zi talks about how one should deal with an invading army. Lay down your arms, it says, don't resist. The Dao is moving and it is pointless to fight against it. This can feel like the kind of fatalism that comes packed into so many traditions of religious thought, a passivity anathema to the modern mind which is told that it is capable of anything. And yet to fight back is to propagate the violence that is counter to the goal that people actually want: peace. Zen might say that the injustices of the world today, which would seem to be a huge barrier to the kind of liberation from suffering that is its goal, are the result of everyone simply doing too much. To fight against what you see as wrong is also doing too much, just as those who are committing the wrongdoing are doing too much. The idea of a struggle is merely another endless chain of contingency, reliant to its core on false concepts of past and future that are lashing us to the wheel of suffering.
One cool thing about Zen that Watts devotes a whole chapter to is that unlike other religions, to be into the aesthetics of Zen is effectively to be into Zen itself. To ponder a work of a Zen master is to lean towards satori, to ape the Zen lifestyle is to be its most genuine practitioner. Thus, the Zen tradition again sets itself apart from other religious traditions that through ideas of conversion or faith merely bind themselves up in the cage of identity that brings us so much pain.… (meer)
Lijsten
Misschien vindt je deze ook leuk
Gerelateerde auteurs
Statistieken
- Werken
- 193
- Ook door
- 10
- Leden
- 14,749
- Populariteit
- #1,562
- Waardering
- 4.0
- Besprekingen
- 166
- ISBNs
- 484
- Talen
- 16
- Favoriet
- 52
Alan Wilson Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker, who held both a Master's in Theology and a Doctorate of Divinity. Famous for his research on comparative religion, he was best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Asian philosophies for a Western audience. He wrote over 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, the meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness. In his books he relates his experience to scientific knowledge and to the teachings of Eastern and Western religion and philosophy.… (meer)