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chapter ten Buddhist Wisdom in the West: A Fifty-Year Perspective on the Contributions of Alan Watts Kaisa Puhakka As a student of Indian and Comparative Philosophy in the mid-1960s, I witnessed the encounter between Asian wisdom and American culture from a particular perspective—that of the scholar and philosopher in the Academy. At conferences I listened to philosophers and linguists discoursing on topics like “knowledge” and “reality” and the epistemological implications of “enlightenment” in the Sanskrit and Tibetan texts of Vedanta and Buddhism. Yet I often found myself wondering about these scholars, whether they really knew what they were talking about. Arrogant thoughts from a graduate student to be sure, but I could not help but feel that something was missing in these learned and highly technical discourses. The prevailing attitude in the Academy was that scholarly objectivity could only be maintained if one did not get personally involved in the traditions one was studying. “Involvement” meant taking up a practice, such as meditation , the prescription of which seemed to be the conclusion of many of those scholarly texts. On occasion, there were hushed rumors in those circles about so-and-so having a secret “practice,” and oh, how scandalous! The paradox in the situation did not escape me: These fine scholars were studying texts about reality and about knowing reality that said you have to change your usual ways of knowing to actually know what the texts were saying. They were drawn to these texts no doubt by that very challenge yet thought they should not undertake the disciplined practice necessary to meet it. I took up meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition. For twenty-five years, mine was a solo practice in which I was initially guided by my renegade scholarly mentor. My sense of being alone in my practice was reinforced by my belief that Buddhism and Asian wisdom in general could not break through the barrier I had seen in the Academy to make a real impact on American culture. Certainly, philosophy, linguistics, or religion as understood and taught in the Academy were not the door through which Asian wisdom would enter into the general American culture. 203 204 ALAN WATTS—HERE AND NOW As it turned out, I was wrong about Asian wisdom not being able to make an impact on the American culture. There was already then a movement afoot known as the Counterculture, and it was bringing Buddhism and especially Zen to the American popular consciousness. Alan Watts (1915–1973) was a key figure in this movement. He had written his first book about Zen that stirred his Western audiences already in the 1930s (The Spirit of Zen, 1936/1955a) and had written voluminously on the subject after that time (Watts, 1940/1970, 1948, 1955b, 1957/1989b). Watts’ mission was to bring Zen and Asian wisdom to people in the streets of America. And his unique talents allowed him to be remarkably successful at this mission. By the end of the millennium, Zen had become a household word if not in mainstream America, certainly in the Counterculture and the subsequent New Age popular movements. But I was right in thinking that religion, philosophy, and linguistics were not the door through which Asian wisdom would enter into the general American culture. There was another door, and it was psychotherapy. Alan Watts had discovered it. In the opening lines to his Psychotherapy East and West (1961/1975), Watts said: “If we look deeply into such ways of life as Buddhism and Taoism, Vedanta and Yoga, we do not find either philosophy or religion as these are understood in the West. We find something more nearly resembling psychotherapy ” (p. 3). Those words struck me when I read them in the mid-1960s, and they continued to resonate with me several years later when I left philosophy to study psychology and psychotherapy. I found a natural fit between the Buddha ’s practical emphasis and intent to alleviate suffering and the profession of psychotherapy. This fit had been entirely missed in the Academy where the lines were sharply drawn among disciplines. Academic psychology, having extricated itself from philosophy, was busy trying to be objective and scientific, and there was no room in it for Eastern thought or Buddhism. Psychotherapy, however, mostly takes place in the world outside of the universities where the objective scientific posture tends to soften and fade into irrelevance in the face of the myriad forms of real-life suffering for which people...

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