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    Zen: A Short Introduction with Illustrations by the Author
    Zen: A Short Introduction with Illustrations by the Author
    Zen: A Short Introduction with Illustrations by the Author
    Ebook56 pages50 minutes

    Zen: A Short Introduction with Illustrations by the Author

    By Alan Watts and Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat

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    About this ebook

  • Zen is a facsimile gift edition of a rare early work by Watts, first published in 1948.

  • Features chapter-opening ink drawings and calligraphy by Watts

  • Watts’s lectures frequently appear on YouTube, with some accompanied by animation or electronic music.

  • Several Facebook pages host ongoing discussions of Watts’s work, collectively generating hundreds of thousands of likes.
    • LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew World Library
    Release dateJul 30, 2019
    ISBN9781608685899
    Zen: A Short Introduction with Illustrations by the Author
    Author

    Alan Watts

    Alan Watts published over 25 books, including The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, The Way of Zen and Tao: The Watercourse Way. He was a philosopher, academic and theologian, who wrote and spoke widely on Asian philosophy and theology. He is best known as an interpreter of Zen Buddhism in particular, and of Indian and Chinese philosophy in general. He was the author of more than twenty books on the philosophy and psychology of religion. He died in 1973.

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    Book preview

    Zen - Alan Watts

    Copyright © 1948 by Alan Watts, © 2019 by Joan Watts and Anne Watts

    All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, or other — without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

    Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

    Originally published in the United States in 1948 by James Ladd Delkin, Stanford, California

    First New World Library printing, July 2019

    ISBN 978-1-60868-588-2

    Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-589-9

    Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

    10987654321

    To

    Ruth Fuller Sasaki

    CONTENTS

    Preface by Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat

    Foreword

    Introduction

    The Background in Indian Religion

    The Background in Chinese Religion

    The Momentous Harmony

    Direct Pointing

    Zen Meditation

    The Cultural Effects of Zen

    Conclusion

    Bibliography

    The Drawings and Symbols

    About the Author

    PREFACE

    WITH ITS RADICALLY SIMPLE and direct title, Zen was among the earliest books by Alan Watts to intrigue spiritual seekers. This edition of Zen, appearing some seventy years after the original small printing, is sure to do the same for a new generation of readers. It offers a clear, concise, and informative introduction to a path that inspired Alan Watts from an early age and continued to intrigue him throughout his life.

    Zen was published in England in 1947 under the title Zen Buddhism: A New Outline and Introduction. The American edition, published by James Ladd Delkin, came out in 1948, the same year as the second edition of Watts’s The Spirit of Zen. "Since writing The Spirit of Zen . . .many valuable sources of information on the general nature of Zen have been available to me," Watts writes in his foreword to Zen, adding that the new book, though brief, will in several important respects provide a corrective to the former volume.*

    Among those valuable sources was D. T. Suzuki, as well as the Zen master Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki and his disciple Ruth Everett, who became Sasaki’s wife in 1944, the year before his death. Ruth Everett was the mother of Eleanor Everett, who married Watts in 1938, two years after the first edition of The Spirit of Zen.

    Precocious and intellectually adventuresome, Watts had been delving into Buddhist teachings even while in boarding school at King’s School in Canterbury, England. After reading Lafcadio Hearn’s Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, he borrowed from a friend The Creed of Buddha by Edmond Holmes, which contained a pamphlet written by Christmas Humphreys about the work of the Buddhist Lodge in London. Becoming

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