American Buddhism as a Way of Life

Gary Storhoff, John Whalen-Bridge, Gary Storhoff, John Whalen-Bridge

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781438430942, 9781438430935
• eBook ISBN: 9781438430959
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

The US seems to be becoming a Buddhist country. Celebrity converts, the popularity of the Dalai Lama, motifs in popular movies, and mala beads at the mall indicate an increasing inculcation of Buddhism into the American consciousness, even if a relatively small percentage of the population actually describe themselves as Buddhists. This book looks beyond the trendier manifestations of Buddhism in America to look at distinctly American Buddhist ways of life—ways of perceiving and understanding. John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff have organized this unique collection in accordance with the Buddhist concept of the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The Buddha section discusses the two key teachers who popularized Buddhism in America: Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki and the particular kinds of spirituality they proclaimed. The Dharma section deals with how Buddhism can enlighten current public debates and a consideration of our national past with explorations of bioethics, abortion, end-of-life decisions, and consciousness in late capitalism. The final section on the Sangha, or community of believers, discusses how Buddhist communities both formal and informal have affected American society with chapters on family life, Nisei Buddhists, gay liberation, and Zen gardens.

Part I

Buddha: The Teacher as Immigrant

1

The Authenticity of Alan Watts

David L. Smith

Alan Watts (1915–1973) was one of the most influential teachers of Buddhism in mid-twentieth-century America, although he was neither a Buddhist nor, to his own way of thinking, a teacher. Whatever he became, he made his way by evading conventional categories. Early on, as a student at a highly conventional English preparatory school, he distinguished himself by declaring himself a Buddhist. Later, in America, he invented his own vocation as a freelance lecturer, broadcaster, and author of books on comparative philosophy in general and Zen Buddhism in particular. Throughout his adult life, however, Watts refused to call himself a Buddhist, arguing in fact that it would be un-Buddhist of him to do so.¹ He participated regularly in no Buddhist community or practice, and apart from a brief association with Sokei-an in New York, he studied with no Buddhist teachers. His “tastes” in religion, as he liked to put it, lay rather “between Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism, with a certain leaning towards Vedanta and Catholicism.”² More a connoisseur of religious ideas than a committed participant, Watts was accordingly reluctant to represent himself as a teacher of any of the traditions he loved. He preferred to think of himself as a gadfly or “philosophical entertainer.”³ He had nothing to offer anyone, he held, that they did not already know.

Watts nevertheless had a substantive message. Its core, consistently reiterated throughout his career, was a remarkably fresh and cogent version of religious nondualism. Generally speaking, nondualism is a philosophical position, or more precisely a mode of skeptical argument, that radically undermines the categories of subject and object, self and environment, and cause and effect according to which conventional views of our selves and our place in the world are structured. Nondualism is a spiritual teaching, in turn, because the adoption of a nondualist viewpoint can have consequences that are felt to be saving or liberating. To dissolve the distinction between the experiencing self and the experienced world can have the effect of untying knots that render ordinary life painful and problematic. Nondual thought and spirituality, then, figure prominently in a number of religious traditions, most notably Advaita Vedanta, Madhyamaka Buddhism, and philosophical Taoism.⁴

Not coincidentally, it was precisely these religious schools that interested Watts. Moreover, to his credit as an original thinker but to the detriment of his reputation as a scholar, it was only insofar as these traditions exemplified the logic of nondualism that he was interested in them. Commentators over the years have faulted Watts for this selective, highly individual approach to religious traditions. Often they simply point to the title of his autobiography, In My Own Way, as sufficient cause to dismiss him.⁵ As I hope to show, however, this line of criticism reflects a basic misunderstanding of Watts's intellectual project, which had less to do with scholarly reconstruction than with the creation of something new. It is true that Watts's typical strategy throughout his career was to discuss the ideas that excited him in the context of the religions in which he had discovered them—piggybacking on found poetry, so to speak. Thus, he drew extensively on Madhyamaka for its argumentation, Taoism for its poetry, Hinduism for mind-boggling cosmic dramaturgy, and Zen for practical wisdom. He even wrote books that are ostensibly about Zen, Taoism, and Vedanta.⁶ However, Watts never claimed to be the kind of scholar who represents a subject whole and on its own terms. As he put it in The Way of Zen (1957), his goal was to speak from neither the standpoint of Zen nor that of conventional scholarship, but from a third perspective that triangulated between them.⁷ Taoism and Zen were important to him, that is, because they were vehicles of nondualism, and therefore pointers to that independent third thing. Nondualism was important to him, in turn, not because it was Buddhist or Chinese, but because it seemed to authenticate itself through its power to illuminate circumstances closer to home—the foibles of Western society and the wonder of being alive.

Watts's distinctive version of nondualism seems to have grown out of his own experience of the paradoxes of the spiritual quest. A conversation he reports from 1937 is paradigmatic. Inspired by the writings of Krishnamurti, Watts was straining desperately at the time to realize perfect concentration on the present moment. His girlfriend, however, pulled the rug out from under his effort with an offhand comment: “ ‘Why try to concentrate on it? What else is there to be aware of …? The present is just a constant flow, like the Tao, and there's simply no way of getting out of it.’ ”⁸ This deft piece of spiritual jujitsu left Watts feeling suddenly freed from all the traps he had been struggling to escape. It became, in effect, his model for how to deal with the human spiritual predicament.

The epigraph to a book he published in the same year stated the point concisely: “To seek after the Tao is like turning round in circles to see one's own eyes. Those who understand this walk straight on.”⁹ Human beings long for wholeness and meaning, that is, and they typically seek it as if it lay elsewhere. Watts's discovery, however, was that the wholeness sought is already implicit in our condition. There is no essential difference between the life we desire and the life we live. A larger, more mysterious reality than our conscious selves is already the seer of our seeing, the agent of our actions, our real nature. We may not be able to observe It, but we are It. Watts was thus convinced that the sense of alienation that gives rise to the desire to become whole should be relatively easy to overcome, if only we could get past the stubborn illusion that we are anything other than whole in the first place. A second epigraph to that early book completes the thought: “it is only when you seek [the Tao] that you lose it.” We will become ourselves when we stop trying to become ourselves.

Watts was never sure how to characterize this insight, which he took to be at once the heart of all wisdom literature, the key to human freedom and sanity, and as common as grass. To call it “mystical” or “spiritual” seemed too otherworldly, for the awareness and its object were perfectly natural. “Cosmic consciousness” likewise had “the unpoetic flavor of occultist jargon.”¹⁰ Satori, moksha, enlightenment, and grace were all appropriate in their ways, he believed, but came trailing too much doctrinal baggage from their respective traditions. The insight was independent of any religious system, and so it provided a critical perspective on all of them. As he found in his mature works, it could be discussed as readily in the language of science as that of theology.¹¹

Accordingly, Watts's approach to all traditional religious forms was indeed highly individual and selective, and in refusing the Buddhist label, he was only being honest. There is another sense, however, in which the same qualities of individualism, eclecticism, and universalism that made him impatient with conventional schools of the dharma relate Watts to an important Buddhist lineage of a different kind: the international movement characterized by Donald Lopez as “modern Buddhism.”¹² As Lopez and others tell the story, over the last century and a half, scholars, seekers, and religious reformers in both the orientalist West and the nationalist East have colluded in the development of a form of Buddhism that understands itself to transcend particular historical styles, creeds, and modes of worship.¹³ It is a Buddhism shaped by distinctively modern values of rationalism, egalitarianism, universalism, and individualism, which nevertheless understands itself to represent the original, uncorrupted insights of the historical Buddha—a pure and timeless truth unmixed with ritual and doctrinal accretions. Watts learned Buddhism from the modernizers, especially from the early writings of D. T. Suzuki. His own work, in turn, exemplified the basic themes of the movement in its selective preference for the intellectual, nondualist elements of Buddhism as distinct from its developed traditions of ritual, belief, and practice. Watts valued Buddhism, in fact, precisely because it seemed to him to have an intellectual, practical core that was separable from its ritual and doctrinal husk; it was preeminently, as he liked to say, “the religion of no-religion.”¹⁴ Thus, Watts could only be the sort of Buddhist he wanted to be by refusing to be a Buddhist, just as he could only be the sort of teacher he wanted to be by denying that he had anything to teach.

Watts is best understood, then, as a spokesman for the supposedly timeless truth of nondualism rather than as a Buddhist—and yet as someone closely aligned with a particular kind of Buddhism for all that. Likewise, he was more an artist of the written and spoken word than a scholar, and more a trickster than a teacher—and yet an unusually effective teacher in consequence. His books, lectures, and radio broadcasts reached hundreds of thousands. Even some of his harshest detractors acknowledge his role as an awakener or precursor to a spiritual or scholarly engagement with Buddhism. Edward Conze, for example, writing in the 1970s, noted that “most of my American students first became interested in Buddhism through Alan Watts. It is true that they had to unlearn most of what they had learnt. It is equally true that he put out the net that caught them in the first place.”¹⁵ Although the current climate of academic opinion makes most readers reluctant to admit that they ever took him seriously, his after-image and influence have been remarkably persistent. This chapter aims, then, to bring Watts in out of the cold by drawing attention back to the heart of his intellectual project. First, it outlines Watts's life and career with an eye to his associations with other modern Buddhist teachers; second, it attempts a summary of the central themes of his thought to demonstrate their essential coherence; third, it surveys some of the ways he applied his ideas in cultural and religious spheres; and finally, it assesses his continued relevance as a religious thinker in his own right.

Life and Career

Watts was born in Chislehurst, a suburb of London, in 1915. As he remembered it, his otherwise unremarkable middle-class home was filled with oriental art. His mother taught at a school for the children of Anglican missionaries, and many copies of classic Chinese and Japanese landscape paintings had come to her as gifts from students. Watts recalled being fascinated, even as a child, by an elusive quality in those paintings, especially apparent to him in their treatment of flowers and grass. “There was something about the treatment that struck me as astonishing, even though the subject matter was extremely ordinary…. I had to find out what the strange element in those bamboos and grasses was.”¹⁶ This interest, in turn, fatefully influenced Watts's choice of a means of adolescent rebellion. As a scholarship student at King's School, Canterbury, away from home and painfully class-conscious, Watts crafted a distinctive identity for himself out of the literature of turn-of-the-century orientalism. As he tells it, a friend of the family with a well-stocked library

lent me Edmond Holmes's masterly book, The Creed of Buddha, which happened to contain a yellow pamphlet, written by a certain Christmas Humphreys, about Buddhism, and the work of the Buddhist Lodge in London. I was also reading Lafcadio Hearn's Gleanings in Buddha-Fields, where I found an essay on nirvana which gave me such a convincingly different view of the universe from the one I had inherited that I turned my back on all I had been taught to believe as authority. That did it. I wrote to the Buddhist Lodge, became a member …, and shortly sought out Christmas Humphreys.¹⁷

After sabotaging his one chance to win a scholarship to Oxford by freakishly choosing to write his qualifying exams in the style of Nietzsche,¹⁸ Watts had little to fall back on besides this affiliation with the Buddhist Lodge. With the continued support of his family, Watts left formal education behind to try his luck in the cultural ferment of London in the 1930s. He read diligently in the fields of religion, philosophy, and psychology, as he continued to do throughout his life. He published widely in the small journals of esoteric religion and visionary politics that flourished at the time, and in 1936, he became the editor of the Lodge's theosophically flavored journal, Buddhism in England.¹⁹ Through Christmas Humphreys, Watts also came into contact with people and books that crucially shaped his future course. One of these was Fredric Spiegelberg, a comparative philosopher and enthusiast for the writings of Sri Aurobindo who first introduced Watts to the concept of a “religion of non-religion,”²⁰ and who later, in America, helped to place Watts in the only academic post he ever held. Even more consequentially, Humphreys encouraged Watts's interest in the early writings of D. T. Suzuki, whose ideas Watts found so congenial that he wrote his own first book, The Spirit of Zen (1935), in an attempt to put Suzuki's thoughts into more lucid prose.

In Watts's reworking of Suzuki, however, one also sees the distinctive features of his own thought beginning to emerge. Suzuki's presentation of Zen emphasized a number of broadly romantic themes: iconoclasm, irrationalism, experience over belief, and religious insight as a return to the ordinary—all ideas that were also dear to Watts. Watts's characteristic nondualism is apparent, however, in the way he subtly veers away from Suzuki's presentation of satori as the essence of Zen. Suzuki, at least in the early Essays, characterized satori as a goal or attainment, a “fiery baptism” to be achieved by means of a distinctive course of practice and discipline.²¹ In so doing, Suzuki relied uncritically on the metaphor of religion as a path or quest with a transformative experience as its goal. Watts, by contrast, was drawn to a more paradoxical side of Zen teaching, alluded to by Suzuki but unstressed, according to which path and goal are one, and thus according to which enlightenment consists in the realization that there is really nothing to be achieved. Zen insight, to this way of thinking, was less the object of a quest than an open secret, hidden in plain sight.²² According to Watts in The Spirit of Zen:

it is really a paradox to speak of the secret of Zen, and in spite of all the apparently abstruse or ridiculous answers of the Zen masters to the urgent questionings of their disciples, nothing is being hidden from us. The truth is that Zen is so hard to understand, just because it is so obvious, and we miss it time and time again because we are looking for something obscure; with our eyes on the horizon we do not see what lies at our feet.²³

The point was to become Watts's constant theme: the self and the world, the self and its potential wholeness, are always already nondual. The very idea that the lost and lonely self is something that needs to be saved, cured, or eliminated, he insisted, is based on an illusion—the illusion that we could ever have been anything other than whole, anything other than what we are. The Spirit of Zen gropes toward this point in its conclusion:

to chase after Zen is like chasing one's own shadow, and all the time one is running away from the sun. When at last it is realized that the shadow can never be caught, there is a sudden “turning about,” … and in the light of the sun the dualism of self and its shadow vanishes; whereat man perceives that what he was chasing was only the unreal image of the one true Self—of That which he ever was, is and shall be.²⁴

The imagery of sun and shadow is still too dualistic for the purpose, and to my knowledge Watts never used it again.²⁵ Nevertheless, the underlying idea of the nonduality of the everyday self and the self to be attained is one that he spent the rest of his life refining and applying.

In 1937, the intellectually flourishing but impecunious Watts met and fell in love with a young American heiress, Eleanor Everett, whose mother, Ruth Fuller Everett—later Ruth Fuller Sasaki—had visited the Buddhist Lodge one evening to report on her studies of Zen in Japan. Alan and Eleanor married and moved to New York in 1938, where Ruth paid the rent on their Manhattan apartment. Ruth also provided Watts with access to a wide circle of American friends, including the Jungian wing of the New York psychoanalytic community and local Buddhists. One of these Buddhists was the independe...

Table of contents

• Seriespage
• Introduction
• Part I. Buddha
• Part II. Dharma
• Part III. Sangha
• List of Contributors