Alan Watts

I've been listening to a lot of Alan Watts' talks lately, and I want to start reading him. Before I go in blind, I have a couple questions:

Where do I start?
How do you feel about his work?

>where do I start
Up butt

>How do you feel about his work
Poop

wish i had seen this early. Start with the way of Zen. But I honestly think lectures are the way to go. He is a much better speaker then he is author. He can get his ideas across through text but there is just so much that gets lost in translation.

Alan Watts is trash.

He's an entrainer at best, no actual value when it comes to Eastern thought. If anything he's a detriment.

wrong.

He's a charlatan and a pseud lit fraud.

There. I saved you a lot of time.

Ignore everyone who tells you to read meme books about Ch'an/Zen. To understand Zen koans - and they do have a single correct interpretation - you need to be a scholar of Chinese Buddhism. There's probably good and accessible scholarship out there about Ch'an but it's so buried under the massive shitpile of "the zen of X" books that I've never looked for it. Instant clue that someone is an uninformed ass-talker: they attribute "all is one" to Buddhism. In the Pali canon Gotama flatly rejects the doctrine "everything is a oneness" as hedonist/materialist philosophy, and in Madhyamaka to advocate for a monad is tantamount to affirming the svabhava that Nagarjuna and co. so stridently argued against. Monism is Vedanta, not Buddhist.

Alan Watts is garbage. Even D.T. Suzuki, a jingoistic "Grorious Nippon" neo-Platonist who swindled gullible beatniks into thinking he was an authority on Zen Buddhism, thought Alan Watts was a clueless tool. This thread is trash.

he's none of those things. He is an entertainer attempting to translate eastern philosophy to a western audience.

Solid refutation.

> Instant clue that someone is an uninformed ass-talker:

Any other clues to watch out for?

Not specifically. Read these if you are interested.
Rupert Gethin - The Foundations of Buddhism
Richard Gombrich - What The Buddha Thought
Bo Wang - Zhuangzi: Thinking Through The Inner Chapters
Brook Ziporyn: Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings
Jan Westerhoff - Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction

Thanks Ive already got a backlog of Dzogchen essentials, the dhammapada and one of the collections of the Pali canon.

This stuff gets so terribly complex so quickly once you get past the whole Samatha meditation and the eightfold meme.

>even some other zentertainment guru competing for the same market thought he was rubbish.
No surprises there. Seriously, though, the criticisms of Watts always seem to be, in a nutshell, he's shit because he doesn't condense every single nuance and framework of every single eastern discipline with full detail into a one hour talk, or that he is an entertainer. These things don't make him garbage.

It's like saying that someone who does a first year lecture on philosophy is a tool because he doesn't completely summarise all of Western thought from the Greeks to derrida in an afternoon, or if he DOES do this, you get annoyed because he made some generalisations along the way.

Fucking hell, get of your high horse.

dont

What Alan Watts teaches is factually wrong, that the problem.

His teachings are a weird mish-mash of several traditions that he barely had a grasp on to begin with, creating some kind of weird personal philosophy that is then peddled to the people under the guise of 'hip' oriental aesthetics. It is not actually indicative of actual Eastern thought, not even on a superficial level.

>It's like saying that someone who does a first year lecture on philosophy is a tool [...]

Imagine if that person barely had a grasp on philosophy to begin with, then started combining several schools into one, and passing it of as 'philosophy 101'. That would be problematic, and he would not be respected within the philosophical community.

Boy you're a real stickler for tradition and order.
>EVERYTHING MUST BE IN ITS PLACE! VE DO NOT QVESTION TRADITION! IDEAS ONCE SET CANNOT BE REARRANGED OR PUT TO ZE WRONG PVURPOSE! ZIS IS VERY SERIOUS!

Anyway, my point is that Watts is a free-thinker, borrowing heavily from Eastern ideas as needed. He's not a history of philosophy teacher.

Yeah dude, fuck the actual meanings of things right.

Plato? Yeah, I heard his philosophy was based around raping babies. Oh what's that? I'm wrong. Fuck off you stickler.

see

He can be whatever you want him to be, he's still wrong and his talks are meme videos for Joe Rogan type 16 year olds.

Also good to know is that the guy was an alcoholic, so he couldn't even alleviate his own toils. The guy is literally a grade-A New Age bullshit peddler.

bump

OP here. Thanks for the response. Managed to read it by the time I woke up.
I've liked his lectures so far, but a problem has been that I'd only listened to them on Youtube so far, so they're all in 45-minute unlabeled snips. Just got around to downloading his organized work, so I'll probably be spending more time with them soon.

This is something I was concerned about. The fact that his Wikipedia page lists him as "an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy" was a bit of a red flag that he didn't quite know what to make of it.
That said, I'm not totally averse to reading/listening to digested knowledge. It's accessible and familiar to me as a layman, and it's leagues better than not hearing their teachings at all.

I'll definitely try out one of these, probably Gethin.

wrong.

Nobody's suggested this yet, but I loved The Book: On the Taboo of Knowing Who You Are. It's a short read but I remember that after I first read it I felt changed. Have fun exploring more Watts, OP.

ok so besides what everyone already said about him being a shitty interpreter of eastern thought, he was also a TERRIBLE person. he didnt believe in any of his lectures and used people around him for money. he was unfaithful in every relationship and tried to promote some polygamy bullshit when he got caught (not that i think polyamory is inherently wrong, just that its retarded to explain your infidelity with "but we are all one so its ok") also he was an alcoholic degenerate and died from alcohol use. which means that with all his guru know-how he was still just as lost as any commoner, which basically makes him useless as a "guru".

your biggest red flag with him should be the fact that every freshman hippie girl has him on her youtube playlist. his lectures were kinda fun when i was in high school and was first experimenting with psychadelics. its sad that Terrence Mckenna is clumped up with this asshole on most channels, because you can probably get more about eastern thought out of a TM lecture on aliens than you can from an AW lecture about anything.

attacking his character doesn't invalidate any of his points though.

OP don't listen to any of these close minded individuals. They are against him, clearly, but they've also never listened and enjoyed his lectures or writings. If you enjoyed them, listen to them. I'm certain of your own ability to qualify his merit as an intellect rather soley listening to what qualifies as petty character attacks. "Let ye who is without sin cast the first stone", more or less everyone is a hypocrite,including those posters. His merit as a speaker and lecturer is derived from the fact he can break down highly difficult to grasp ideas down into digestible bits. Take the concept of purposelessness, this is something almost entirely impossible to understand with a western mindset. When someone meditates it should be purposeless, as in, not attempting to attain any end goal. The process is its own purpose. But to convince a westerner to meditate you must explain all the benefits of meditation. He is a kin to Bankei. Another Zen guru deeply resented by traditionalist. Who basically told all to burn all doctrine, and forgo all disciplinary practices, because they already have what they are looking for. That the most egotistical pursuit in the whole world is to get rid of one's ego. These are highly complicated concepts that only make sense if you first grasp eastern philosophy by its roots, but to translate that to a young and uneducated western audience is quite a difficult process. Detractors are merely traditionalist who cling fast to tradition as they are safe within the confines of someone elses philosophies. Think beyond these close minded individuals and come to your own conclusions.

So much this, only weeaboos and reddit zennists think Watts has value.

There is a reason why his entire corpus is ignored by modern buddhological studies, with preferring even fucking trash-tier Suzuki "I-Insert-Western-Woo-As-I-Please" Roshi to Watts.

Am I time traveling or some shit? This reads like I wrote most of it.

Keep it up user.

He's garbage.

But he never said be WAS a guru, in fact he specifically said he's not. So you attacking him for being "not a good enough guru" honestly makes you look like the idiot in this equation.

Also, criticising a person because of their fans? Fuck, you got me all trigg'd.

Captcha: Paradise Closed

>Lay Buddhists meditating
The greatest western meme ever told.

He's most compelling as a speaker

You are time traveling.

>Don't mind me, just you from the past.

t. alan watts

bump

Can't say I appreciate the attack on Watts' character instead of his work, but tell me more about Terrence McKenna. I'm interested.

I wish McKenna talked more about neurochemistry, that was his strongest point I thought

>He didn't believe in any of his lectures

Source?

>Used people around him for money

Source?

>QVESTION
nice touch, kek

His lectures are hella entertaining. The hate he's getting atm is unfounded. He's not a scholar.

>He's not a scholar.

Not an argument. John Green isn't a scholar but that doesn't make his factually inaccurate historical videos any better either.

If something is factually incorrect it's trash, no matter who the 'speaker' is.

>factually inaccurate historical videos
To be fair those history videos were a lot better than his literature videos, holy fuck those were legitimately primary school levels of bad.

Complete waste of time, religion is bollocks.