Alan Watts: priest, scholar, monk, author, trickster guru.: . . . Alan Watts was one of the best-known interpreters of Eastern philosophies for the West. He published his first essay on Buddhism when he was just 20 years old, in 1935. By the time he died on his famous house-boat in the San Francisco Bay, in 1973, he had published more than 25 books and hundreds of essays, articles, lectures and seminars. His life was an adventure: he was an Anglican priest, Buddhist scholar, professor of philosophy, consultant at psychiatric hospitals, and entertainer. He was a gifted and prolific writer, but he was not a man who spent his life sitting alone in a room with a typewriter.  His life drove his writing much more than his writing drove his life.

When I wrote earlier that Watts was a bit of a “trickster guru,” what I meant was that he really understood the essence of Eastern philosophies – particularly Zen Buddhism – so well that he saw the illusion underlying everything, including his own brilliance and fame. So his teachings on the big questions: the nature of life and death, of love, of transcendence, of reality, of consciousness, and so on – were all infused with humor and self-deprecating irony. He was, above all, a guru who didn’t take himself, or his teachings, too seriously.