Alan W. Watts

Kent, then Illinois, then the Bay Area. Alan Wilson Watts was born at Chislehurst in 1915, took a master's in theology at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1945, then resigned the priesthood in 1950 when his first marriage ended. That is the sum of his formal religious credential; he held no ordination in any Buddhist lineage, and his standing rested on reading, on lecturing, and on an ear for putting Eastern ideas into plain English. The Wisdom of Insecurity, subtitled A Message for an Age of Anxiety, appeared in 1951 and argues the case in its title: the demand for security is what manufactures the anxiety, and a mind gripping the present moment to keep it safe has already let it go. He taught at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco from 1951 to 1957 and broadcast weekly on KPFA in Berkeley from 1953. The Way of Zen followed in 1957. Watts died in Marin County on 16 November 1973, aged 58.