Lee Hardy Dydo

Starting with Alan Watts

October 21, 2026

That night at Pour House, I got talking with the person working the door about Alan Watts. Watts spent his life carrying ideas between cultures, and the one he carried most was simple: to know the world you have to know yourself, and to know yourself you have to know the world. She wanted to study up on him, so here's the path I'd suggest. The band that night has its own post.

Who he was

A young Alan Watts with a mustache, in a 1937 clipping
Watts in 1937, in his early twenties, already writing about Buddhism in England. Twenty-one years later, the University of Vermont gave him an honorary doctorate.2

Alan Watts (1915 to 1973) was a British-born writer and speaker who moved to the United States and spent his life explaining Zen, Taoism and Indian philosophy to Western listeners. He wrote more than twenty-five books, but most people meet him through his recorded talks. They're playful and funny, and good on a walk.1

A reading path

  1. Cover of The Wisdom of Insecurity
    Start here

    The Wisdom of Insecurity

    1951. Short and direct: why chasing security makes us anxious, and what changes when you live in the present.

  2. Cover of The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
    Then

    The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

    1966. His big idea in plain language: the separate self is a story we tell, and we're part of everything going on.

  3. Cover of The Way of Zen
    Deeper

    The Way of Zen

    1957. Where Zen came from, how it grew out of Taoism and Buddhism, and what practice looks like.

  4. Cover of Tao: The Watercourse Way
    Last

    Tao: The Watercourse Way

    1975. His last book, finished after his death, about flowing with things instead of forcing them.

A bridge both ways

A lot of Watts came from Japan. He learned Zen in large part through Japanese teachers and writers: D.T. Suzuki's books, and in the late 1930s, study in New York under Sokei-an, a Japanese Rinzai Zen teacher.3 His first wife's mother was Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who met Suzuki in Japan in 1930, trained in Zen in Kyoto, and later married Sokei-an.4 So much of the Watts we hear in English came through Japan, and this page carries him back the other way, in both languages. Nobody builds one alone.

Know yourself, know the world

Watts made the same point over and over: these are one job, not two. The Book is subtitled On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, and its argument is that the separate self we guard is a story. Look closely and you're made of the world you're looking at. Meeting another culture works the same way: you learn about them, and about what you were expecting. You can't know the world from behind a wall, and you can't know yourself without a world to see yourself in.

My favorite parts

I've been meditating on and off for twenty-some years, and the Watts idea I come back to most is this one, as I remember it: don't try to quiet the mind; the mind will quiet itself. One day when I was anxious, I tried it on the feeling itself. I didn't try to stop being anxious. I told myself it was okay to be anxious. That worked better than anything I'd forced.

The talks I keep saved:

Audiobooks

I listen to these a lot. They're his lectures, collected from the Alan Watts audio archives, in his own voice:

Most of his books come as audiobooks too. Two ways to get them that keep the money local or free: Libro.fm, where you pick an independent bookstore to support (I'd pick Quail Ridge), and Libby, with a Wake County Public Libraries card, which costs nothing.

Where to get the books

In Raleigh, Quail Ridge Books in North Hills can order any of these (quailridgebooks.com), and the library has most of them. For background, there's his Wikipedia page.

Sources

  1. Alan Watts, Wikipedia ↩
  2. Alan Watts at the University of Vermont, 15 June 1958, Wikimedia Commons ↩
  3. Sokei-an, Wikipedia ↩
  4. Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Wikipedia ↩

Photos of Watts: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (a 1937 clipping). Book covers via Open Library, shown to identify the editions.