![]() ![]() During school holidays - while he was a scholar at King’s School in Cambridge - he went on trips with the Buddhism enthusiast Francis Croshaw, who first developed his interest in Eastern religion. In later life, Watts wrote of mystical visions he’d had after suffering fever as a child. His father had been a sales rep for the Michelin tyre company and his mother was a housewife whose father had been a missionary. Watts was born in 1915 in Chislehurst, Kent. But he remained largely unknown in Britain, even though he was English, albeit an expatriate. I discovered that Van Morrison had written a song about him, and that Johnny Depp was a follower. I found a DVD of an animation of Watts by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (of South Park fame). ![]() I stopped writing novels and worked my way through every one of them instead. They had intriguing titles such as ‘On Being Vague’, ‘Death’, ‘Nothingness’ and ‘Omnipotence’. He died in 1973, after producing not only 27 books but also scores of lectures, all of which were available online. Photo by Nat Farbman/Time Life Pictures/GettyĪlan Watts had been prolific in his 58 years. ![]() No time for received wisdom: a young Alan Watts (L) and friends reading haiku poems written for a contest. This time, it was as if I was reading for dear life. My depression - and that original sense of meaninglessness - resurfaced. In 2004, three close friends died in sudden succession. Then, years later, a bad spell in my life propelled me back into a chasm. Impressed though I was, I more or less forgot about Watts after I finished his books, and pursued my career as a fiction writer. Trying to see all of life is like trying to explore a vast cave with a box of matches. This, too, is a typical Zen understanding - that life cannot be described, only experienced. That nothing is a given and, since everything is uncertain, we must put together a world view that might fit roughly with the facts, but is never anything other than a guess - a working fiction. Watts, like Rowe, showed me how we construct our own meanings about life. Life was, in Zen parlance, yugen - a kind of elevated purposelessness. The Meaning of Happiness (1940) and The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951) are striking primers to his work, and they underlined what Rowe was already teaching me: that life had no intrinsic meaning, any more than a piece of music had an intrinsic ‘point’. I wasn’t interested in the Four Noble Truths, or the Eightfold Path, and I certainly didn’t believe in karma or reincarnation.Īll the same, I read a couple of Watts’s books. I was suspicious at first, perceiving Zen Buddhism to be a religion rather than a philosophy. But through Watts and his writing, I was exposed directly to the ideas of Zen Buddhism. ![]() His name evoked the image of a paper goods sales rep on a small regional industrial estate. It was through Rowe’s writing that I first came across Alan Watts, and he sounded like an unlikely philosopher. Truth is not to be found by picking everything to pieces like a spoilt child Secret, because Rowe knew what the term ‘Buddhist’ implied to the popular imagination (as it did to me) - magical thinking, Tibetan bell-ringing, and sticking gold flakes on statues of the Buddha. While I was researching it, I read the work of the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, a quiet, almost secret, follower of Buddhist philosophy. The consequence of this was my first book, a memoir called The Scent of Dried Roses (1996). Which is perhaps why I fell into an acute depression at the age of 27, and didn’t recover for several years. A sense of encroaching mental chaos was always skulking at the edges of my life. I have never been able to support either strategy. Or they fall for an ideology, perhaps religious or political, that appears to render the world a comprehensible place. Most people seem to have a talent for denying or ignoring life’s contradictions, as the demands of work and life take them over. It is an uncomfortable mindset, and as a result I have always felt the need to build a conceptual box in my mind big enough to fit the world into. Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea - in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event - that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary. ![]()
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