In this short film, recorded at this year’s Port Eliot Festival, Tim Lott talks about Alan Watts, the philosopher who brought Eastern philosophy to the West in the sixties.

And below, we publish an extract from Tim’s essay on Watts from the forthcoming Idler.

EVER since I was a child, I have been acutely aware – in the way that other people seem to feel only after a bereavement or after some shockingly unexpected event – that the world makes no sense. That everything is contradiction and paradox, that no-one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary.

It is an uncomfortable mindset, and as a result of that, I have always wanted to build a conceptual box in my mind big enough to fit the world into. Most people seem to have a talent for denying or ignoring life’s contradictions, as the demands of work and life take them over. Or they fall into a mindset, perhaps religious or political, which purports to make the world a comprehensible place.

I have never been able to support either strategy. A sense of encroaching mental chaos was always skulking at the edges of my life. Which is perhaps why I fell into acute depression at the age of 27, not recovering for several years.

The consequence of this was my first book, The Scent of Dried Roses. While I was researching it, I read the work of the psychologist Dorothy Rowe. It was through Dorothy that I first came across the name of Alan Watts, and, through Watts, was exposed to the ideas of Zen Buddhism.

Watts sounded like an unlikely philosopher. The name suggested a paper goods sales representative on small regional industrial estate. And I was suspicious of Zen Buddhism, as I perceived it that time to be a religion rather than a philosophy. I wasn’t interested in the Four Noble Truths, or the Eightfold Path and I certainly didn’t believe in karma or reincarnation.

All the same, I read a couple of his books. They made a significant impact on me. The Wisdom of Insecurity and The Meaning of Happiness are striking primers to his work, and they underlined what Dorothy was already teaching me – that life had no intrinsic meaning, any more than a piece of music had an intrinsic ‘point’. It was, in Zen parlance, jugen – a kind of elevated purposelessness.

Watts, like Rowe, showed me how we construct our own meanings about life. That nothing is 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, ultimately, a guess, a working fiction. This too, is a typical Zen understanding – that life cannot be described, only experienced. Trying to see all of life is like trying to explore a vast dark cave with a box of matches.

Impressed though I was, after I finished the books, I more or less forgot about Watts, and pursued my career as a fiction writer. I was weary of introspection. Then, years later, a bad spell in my life propelled me back into a chasm. In 2004, three close friends died suddenly in succession. One died in front of my eyes. Another was murdered. A third succumbed to cancer. My depression – and my sense of meaninglessness – resurfaced. I turned to Alan Watts again. This time it was as if I was reading for dear life.

Watts had been prolific in his 57 years of life (he died in 1973) not only producing 27 books, but scores of lectures, all of which were available on the Internet. With intriguing titles like ‘On Being Vague’, ‘Death’., ‘Nothingness’ and ‘Omnipotence’, I stopped writing novels and instead worked my way through every one of them.

I found a DVD of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s (of South Park fame) animation of Watts. I discovered that Van Morrison had written a song about him, and that Johnny Depp was a follower. But he remained largely unknown in this country, even though he was English, albeit an expatriate ( he was born in Chislehurst in 1915). He published his first book on Zen when he was 21 and moved to America in 1939.

I felt powerfully attracted to Alan Watts. Not only to his ideas, but to him, personally. Watts was no dry, academic philosopher. With eyes hooded and penetrating like Alistair Crowley’s, he was a jester as well as a thinker, describing himself as a ‘spiritual entertainer’. He carried a silver cane ‘for pure swank’, he hung out with Kesey and Kerouac (he is parodied in On the Road as ‘Arthur Whale’.). His English public school educated voice was rich and deep, like a prophet’s, and his laugh juicy and contagious.

But it was the thinking that most excited me. As an orientalist, and former Anglican priest, he was, if not the the earliest, then the foremost translator of Eastern Philosophical ideas to the West. In some ways he was a radical – for instance he dismissed the core Zen idea of zazen – spending hours in contemplative meditation – as unnecessary. “A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away,” was Watts’ forgiving interpretation. – a great relief for someone like me who finds meditation boring. He also rejected the conventional ideas of reincarnation and the popular understanding of karma. But this was what made his ideas so fresh – he had no time for received wisdom, even from those who claimed to know Zen inside out.

Many Zen ideas have become debased now into the “new age” – basely transmuted into wishful thinking, quasi-religious mumbo jumbo and the narcissistic fantasies of the ‘me’ generation’. But before the beatniks and later, the hippies got hold of Buddhism, Zen philosophy was hard edged, practical, logical and in some ways oddly English in tone, as it had deep strands of skepticism and humour. (You’ll never see Christian saints laughing. But most of the great sages of Zen have a smile on their faces as does Gautama Buddha)

Zen and Taoism are more akin to psychotherapy than religion, as Watts explains in his book ‘Psychotherapy East and West’. They are about finding a way to maintain a healthy personality in a culture that tends to tangle you up in a lot of unconscious logical binds – for instance on the one hand telling you to be ‘free’ and on the other hand insisting that you follow the demands of the community. Or instructing you that you ‘must’ be spontaneous.

These kind of snags, or double binds, produced inner tension, frustration and neurosis – duhkha. Watts saw his job, via Zen philosophy, as teaching you to think clearly, so that you could penetrate conventional thinking and see through to a place where your mind could be at peace inside a culture that could have been designed to generate anxiety.

Watts, although a highly entertaining writer who presents his ideas with a quite brilliant clarity, had a difficult job on his hands – mainly because Zen and Taoism are so fundamentally counter intuitive to the Western mind. Western philosophers and laymen find Eastern thinkers frustrating, because Buddhist sages don’t have the same emphasis on the power of language, reason and logic to transform the self, or to ‘know’ in the way Westerners think of the word

The riddles, or koans, that Zen thinkers speak in are all about tripping you up and making you realize how inadequate words – either spoken or as ‘inner dialogue’ – are in making sense. Zen emphasizes intuition and an ‘empty mind’ (mushin) over planning and thought. The ideal is that your mind can be unblocked from maya (meaning both ‘illusion’ and ‘play’) , and thus acquire a kind of resonance or instant reflection, munen, which translates awkwardly as ‘now/mind/heart’.

This makes it alien to Western traditions, which tend to distrust spontaneity, since it supposedly clears the way for the dominance of brute animal instincts and dangerous passions. But the idea, as it were, of walking around with a metaphorical big stick in your hand to whack yourself with if you make a mistake, or get carried away by your emotions, is foreign to a Zen master.

Zen, after all, was used the Samurai warriors, who had to strike immediately without reflection or die. Intuition, in a healthy soul, is more important than conscious reflection. Millions of years of evolution has made the human unconscious wise, not reckless. You can find similar ideas in modern books like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, which emphasises the value of ‘gut reactions’.

There are no end of surprises when you start go deeply into Zen – which, incidentally, started as a reaction against the highly conventionalized and ritualized Japanese society from which it emerged. In such a society, spontaneous behaviour becomes impossible. Zen was a technique to re-claim spontaneity for the desperately anxious and neurotic Japanese man in the street.

The word ‘Zen’ itself, is a Japanese way of pronouncing ‘Chan’, which is Chinese way of pronouncing the Indian Sanskrit. Dhyana, or Sunya, meaning emptiness or void. This is the basis of Zen itself – that all life and existence is based on a kind of dynamic emptiness (a view now supported by modern science, which sees phenomena at a sub atomic level popping in and out of existence in a ‘quantum froth’).

In this view, there is no ‘stuff’, no difference between matter and energy. Look at anything closely enough – even a rock or a table – and you will see that it is an event, not a thing. Every-thing is happening. This too, accords with modern scientific knowledge. Furthermore there are not a multiplicity of events – there is just one event, with multiple aspects, unfolding. We are not just separate egos locked in bags of skin. We come out of the world, not into it. We are each expressions of the world, and the universe, not strangers in a strange land.

The more you look at Zen and Taoism, the more modern it seems. One of the most challenging aspects of Zen philosophy is the idea of acausality – the idea that things are not ‘caused’, they ‘just happen’. As one sage, Dogen, remarked, ‘Spring does not lead to summer. There is spring. Then there is summer. A wood fire does not become ashes. There is wood. Then there is fire. Then there are ashes.”

This is hard to grasp for the way our minds have been trained to think, used as they are to seeing everything in terms of past causes – to think in chains, so to speak, of past, present and future. Causality is certainly a valid way of looking at things – the car drove of the cliff because it was going too fast and hit a patch of oil. World War One happened because Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo.

But the trouble with this way of seeing this is that it easily becomes a prison. Everything from the beginning of time is predetermined by a previous cause. There is no room for freedom. This is the meaning of maya – that we think in chains, where no chains exist. Watts expresses the Zen view that there is only ever one singular present moment. He points out that the universe began with the Big Bang. That was a now moment. And all there have ever been since are now moments, right up to…now.

It may be true that the past leads to the present – but the present also creates the past, a fact we tend to discount. Once more, this is accords with scientific thinking, which finds acausality, both at quantum level and in the origins of the universe. There was no cause of the Big Bang. It just happened.

It is this emphasis on the present moment that is perhaps Zen’s most distinctive characteristic. In our western relationship with time, in which we compulsively pick over the past in order to learn lessons from it, and then project into a hypothetical future in which those lessons can be applied, the present moment has been compressed down to a tiny sliver on the clock face between a vast past and in infinite future. Zen, more than anything else, is about reclaiming , and expanding, the present moment.

It tries to have you understand – without arguing the point – that there is no purpose in ‘getting’ anywhere if when you get there, all you are doing is thinking about getting to some other future moment. Life exists in the present, or nowhere at all, and if you cannot grasp that you are simply living a fantasy.

For all Zen writers, life is, as it was for Shakespeare, akin to a dream – transitory and insubstantial. There is no ‘rock of ages cleft for thee’. There is no security. Looking for security, Watts says, is like jumping of a cliff holding on to a rock for safety – an absurd illusion. Everything passes and you must die. Don’t waste your time thinking otherwise. And neither Buddha nor his Zen followers had time for any afterlife ( the doctrine of reincarnation can be more accurately thought about as a constant rebirth and death throughout life, and the continual coming and going of universal energy before and after death.)

Another challenging matter for western thinkers when struggling with Zen is, than unlike western religion and philosophy, it has no particular moral code. The Noble Truths are not moral teachings. Zen, unlike Mahayana Buddhism with its ‘Eightfold Path’, makes no judgment about good or bad, except to say that they are both necessary to make the universe dynamic.

Like the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, there is no idea of good out to destroy evil, or vice versa. Evil cannot be destroyed any more than good because they are polar opposites of the same thing, like poles of a magnet. Destruction is as necessary as creation. Chaos must exist if we are to know what order is. A person blind from birth does now know what darkness is. Both aspects of reality, in tension with one another are necessary to keep the whole game going. This is called the unity of opposites.

This can lead to some fairly shocking moral reasoning. The Zen follower John Cage of the Velvet Underground, when asked, ‘but surely there’s too much suffering in the world’, answered, ‘ I think there’s probably just about enough’. This encapsulates, and yet somewhat satirises the Zen world view – that the dark and light, the negative and positive, the yin and the yang, are all necessary parts of the overall whole.

Behind this thinking is the idea that, for the accomplished follower of Zen – the ‘No Mind Man’ – moralists are dangerous, because they will destroy everything in pursuit of their vision of The Good. Simple greed may result in the destruction of the local village to get their wealth and women. But the destruction won’t be too bad because they want to preserve the wealth and the women.

But if you are on a moral crusade, you will destroy everything in your wake. And who can deny that the history of the 20th century bears this view out , with the ideologies of Nazism and Communism causing such havoc? After all, Hitler was an idealist too. So Confucius, for instance – who was not, admittedly, part of the Zen tradition, although he influenced it – puts the greatest value not on absolute good, but ‘human heartedness’, or jen. If you are human hearted, you are unlikely to want to do any great ill, even without any great moral vision to guide you. And even if you do, the damage you cause will be limited by your own self-interest.

This lack of a clear moral code is perhaps why Zen is not a philosophy wholly appropriate for the young or immature mind. Watt’s critiqued the Beatnik appropriation of Zen in the 1950’s in his book ‘Beat Zen, Square Zen’. The apparent fatalism of Zen seems to open the door to an individual doing ‘whatever they like’.” But Watts responds to this with a clever paradox – that such a statement suggests that absolute fatalism implies absolute freedom. Again, you can look at it both ways.

A longer version of this essay appears in our forthcoming book, Idler 47: Cultivate Yourself, which is published in October of this year.

To see Tim Lott’s trailer for his “Beyond Mindfulness” course, CLICK HERE.