Watts

“I read a book called Nature, Man, and Woman, and I thought, wow, I’d sure like to make love with the man who wrote that!” Alan’s wife Jano said. Alan Watts buried his face in his hands in mock embarrassment. David Chadwick recalls his friend, “What good fortune it was to know Alan Watts. The first time I met him was at a party, shortly after I started practicing at San Francisco Zen Center in 1966. Alan and his wife, Jano, were friendly and funny. No pretention…”

“Alan Watts came to Green Gulch to meet with Richard Baker… It was early in the day, and he seemed to be in good health. But what he had come to talk about was his funeral… I found it a little strange that he was going on about all these details about his funeral as if it were around the corner. Turns out it was. Late in the year he died in his sleep, of heart failure it was said. I thought, wow, he predicted his own death just like the Zen masters in the stories.”

Richard Baker delivered the eulogy holding Watts’ jangling staff, which he’d inherited from Suzuki:

“Alan, Daiyuin Yuzan Myoko, Daizen Jomon, here is your lineage from Buddha through the Buddhas and Patriarchs to you. Alan Watts was a philosopher, a poet, a calligrapher, a lover, a friend, a dharma reveler, a revealer, a great founder of the spirit for all of us. He saw the true emptiness of all things. He taught us to be free. To see through the multiplicities and absurdities to the Great Universal Personality and Play. He gave us the Dharma Eye of a new age. Our blessings go with you now. Wide Mind, Joyous Mind, Careful Loving Mind. For the true life is beyond life and death, origination, and extinction. We are with you in the many paths you opened for us.

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Go! Go! Great Hermit! Great Founder!”

“Watts gave us words with passion, in sound and print. That’s where his moxie shines and that’s all we have of him. I urge you to go to the source—to read, listen, and watch him online at home or in a library. While people who maybe should be spanked speculate on Watts’ practice, personal habits, degree of enlightenment, and depth of understanding, his fresh-air spirit is still present in our thoughts and aspirations. It’s in the strata and the substrata. Much gratitude to this—as he called himself—fake, rascal, philosophical entertainer, ego inside a bag of skin, Alan Watts, our own renaissance man.”

~ David Chadwick is the author of Crooked Cucumber, a biography of Shunryu Suzuki, and Zen Is Right Here: Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki. His website, cuke.com, is an archive of the world of Suzuki Roshi and those who knew him.