The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: A Complete Review and Guide

What Is The Way of Zen?

Published in 1957, The Way of Zen was Alan Watts's attempt to give Western readers a genuinely scholarly yet accessible introduction to Zen Buddhism. It was written at a moment when Zen was becoming culturally fashionable in the United States, the Beat Generation's infatuation with it was at its height, and Watts wanted to provide a more rigorous foundation than the popular romanticized version circulating in literary circles.

The book divides into two parts. The first traces the intellectual and spiritual background of Zen: the Taoist philosophy of ancient China, the development of Indian Buddhism into the Mahayana schools, and the particular synthesis that produced Zen when Buddhism arrived in China. The second examines Zen as it is actually practiced: koan practice, zazen, the role of the teacher, and the expression of Zen insight in Japanese art and everyday life.

Watts's qualifications for writing this book were unusual. He had studied with D.T. Suzuki, the scholar most responsible for introducing Zen to the West, and with Sokei-an, one of the first Zen teachers to settle in America. He had been ordained as an Anglican priest, had studied Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese philosophy, and had spent years working through the primary sources that most Western commentators on Zen had only skimmed. The result was a book that has remained in print for nearly 70 years and continues to be the most commonly recommended introduction to Zen for serious Western readers.

The Taoist Roots of Zen

Watts begins with Taoism because he considers it impossible to understand Zen without understanding the Chinese philosophical world into which Buddhism arrived. Taoism is the soil from which Zen grew, and the distinctive flavor of Zen, its earthiness, its impatience with elaborate doctrine, its preference for direct pointing over conceptual explanation, comes directly from Taoist influence.

The Tao, in the philosophy of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, is the nameless principle underlying all existence, the ground of being that cannot be captured in language because language works by making distinctions, and the Tao is prior to all distinctions. The famous opening of the Tao Te Ching, "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao", establishes this limit at the very start. Any description of the Tao is already a distortion.

From this recognition follows a characteristic Taoist attitude toward knowledge, effort, and social life: if the source of all things cannot be grasped through analysis, then the attempt to manage life through elaborate control and striving is fundamentally misguided. The appropriate response to reality is not grasping but yielding, following the natural course of things rather than imposing a predetermined pattern on them.

This is the origin of wu wei, the concept that Watts considers central to both Taoism and Zen. And it is in tension with almost everything the modern Western mind takes for granted about the relationship between effort, will, and achievement.

Wu Wei: Non-Doing and Spontaneous Action

Wu wei is often translated as "non-action," but this translation misleads. Wu wei does not mean inactivity or passivity. It means action that is not initiated or controlled by the ego, action that arises from the natural situation rather than from a self trying to impose its will on that situation.

Watts's preferred analogy is water. Water does not try to flow downhill; it simply flows. It does not resist obstacles; it goes around them. In doing so, it eventually wears away the hardest stone. This is wu wei: the power of yielding, the efficacy of not-forcing, the intelligence of following rather than driving.

The application to meditation and spiritual practice is direct and challenging. The common assumption, that spiritual progress requires sustained effort, discipline, and willpower, is, from the Taoist and Zen perspective, the primary obstacle. The meditator who is trying to become enlightened is, in this view, the meditator who will not become enlightened, because the trying is itself the barrier. The attempt to grasp enlightenment reinforces precisely the grasping self that enlightenment would dissolve.

This is why Zen instruction so often seems paradoxical: "try without trying," "practice with no goal," "meditate without meditating." These are not riddles. They are attempts to point at a quality of engagement that is wholehearted but not egoic, full presence without the overlay of a self monitoring and managing the experience.

Indian Buddhism and the Mahayana

Watts traces the intellectual background of Buddhism from its origins in the Pali Canon through the development of the Mahayana schools that would eventually arrive in China. Several Mahayana developments are particularly important for understanding Zen.

The Prajnaparamita literature, the Perfection of Wisdom texts, of which the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra are the most famous, developed the concept of shunyata (emptiness): the teaching that all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, without fixed, independent identity. The Heart Sutra's famous declaration "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" is a concentrated expression of this teaching. Watts unpacks this carefully: emptiness does not mean nothingness. It means that things have no inherent, fixed identity, they exist only in relationship, only in process, only in the context of everything else.

The Yogacara school developed the concept of the alaya-vijnana (store consciousness), a kind of subterranean mind that underlies and generates ordinary conscious experience. And the Tathagatagarbha (Buddha-nature) doctrine taught that every sentient being already possesses the seed of awakening. These became foundational in Chinese Buddhism and, through it, in Zen.

The Birth of Zen in China

Buddhism arrived in China around the first century CE and spent several centuries being translated and adapted. The encounter with Taoism was decisive. Chinese translators, seeking equivalents for Sanskrit Buddhist concepts, reached for Taoist vocabulary, and in doing so, they shaped how Buddhism would develop in Chinese soil.

The legendary founder of Zen, Bodhidharma (Daruma in Japanese), arrived from India around 520 CE and established what would become the Ch'an (Zen) school through a famous encounter with the Emperor Wu of Liang. When the Emperor asked what merit he had accumulated through building temples and supporting monks, Bodhidharma replied "No merit whatsoever." This exchange, which Watts analyzes with care, encapsulates the Zen rejection of merit accumulation as a spiritual path and the insistence on direct realization rather than institutional piety.

The classical period of Chinese Zen produced the koan literature and the great masters, Hui-neng (the Sixth Patriarch), Huang Po, Rinzai (Lin-chi), and Joshu, whose exchanges have been the subject of Zen study ever since. Watts traces the development of the koan system, the transmission from teacher to student, and the gradual formalization of what had been, in its origins, a completely spontaneous and non-institutionalized form of practice.

Koan Practice and the Rinzai School

The Rinzai school of Zen, founded by Lin-chi (Rinzai in Japanese), uses koan practice as its primary method. The student is assigned a koan, a question or statement that cannot be resolved by rational analysis, and is expected to work with it intensively until something breaks through.

The famous koans are well-known outside Zen: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" "What was your face before your parents were born?" "Does a dog have Buddha-nature? Mu!" These questions are not riddles with hidden answers. They are designed to exhaust the conceptual mind, the part of the mind that keeps looking for an answer by manipulating concepts. When the conceptual mind has genuinely exhausted itself, the koan is said to "open", not because an answer is found but because the need for an answer dissolves.

Watts is at his best explaining what koans are not: they are not puzzles requiring lateral thinking, not Zen jokes, not tests of cleverness. The teacher who is working with a student on a koan is not looking for the "right answer" but for evidence that the student has genuinely moved through conceptual processing into direct seeing. The traditional Rinzai interview (sanzen or dokusan) is designed to test this: the teacher poses the koan directly and watches the student's response for any sign of conceptual hesitation.

Soto Zen and Shikantaza

The Soto school of Zen, brought to Japan from China by Dogen Zenji in the 13th century, takes a different approach. Its primary practice is shikantaza, "just sitting." Not sitting in order to become enlightened. Not sitting while focusing on a koan. Just sitting, with complete presence, as an expression of the enlightenment that is already the nature of sitting.

Dogen's philosophy, as Watts presents it, is subtle and demanding: enlightenment is not something that practice produces; it is something that practice expresses. Zazen is not a means to awakening, zazen, done properly, is already awakening in activity. The Soto practitioner is not waiting for something to happen. They are practicing what is already real.

This is the paradox of Soto Zen: if you sit in order to become enlightened, you are not sitting correctly. If you sit because you are already enlightened, you are sitting correctly. The distinction between these two modes of sitting is not visible to an outside observer. It is entirely interior, a matter of the quality of attention and the absence or presence of the striving self.

Suchness and the Direct Experience of Reality

One of the most important concepts in the book is tathata, Sanskrit for "suchness" or "thusness," the bare, unmodified nature of things as they actually are. Watts uses this concept to describe what Zen practice is ultimately pointing toward: not a special state of consciousness but a quality of ordinary experience when it is no longer filtered through the overlay of conceptual judgment.

The Zen phrase "when I am hungry, I eat; when I am tired, I sleep" is often cited as pointing to suchness. The ordinary activities of life, not the special activities of meditation or spiritual practice, but eating, walking, working, sleeping, can be lived with complete presence, without the mental commentary that ordinarily accompanies them. This quality of presence is not something achieved through effort; it is what is left when the effort to be somewhere other than where you are is released.

Watts connects this to the Taoist concept of tzu-jan, "self-so" or spontaneity, the quality of things that happen without external compulsion, that are what they are without needing to justify themselves. The flowering of a tree is tzu-jan. The breaking of waves on shore is tzu-jan. And human consciousness, when it is not trying to be something other than it is, is also tzu-jan.

Zen in Japanese Arts

The second half of Watts's book examines how Zen philosophy manifested in the Japanese arts that absorbed it: calligraphy, ink painting (sumi-e), the tea ceremony (chado), flower arranging (ikebana), Noh theater, archery (kyudo), and swordsmanship (kendo).

What these arts share, in their Zen forms, is the quality of mushin, "no-mind", the absence of the self-conscious observer who monitors, judges, and adjusts. The Zen calligrapher does not draw a character and then assess whether it is correct. The assessment and the drawing are simultaneous, or, more precisely, they are not separate moments at all. The tea master's every gesture is exact without being deliberate. The archer's release is not chosen; it happens when it is ready.

Watts analyzes these arts through the framework Eugen Herrigel developed in Zen in the Art of Archery (1948), one of the most widely read books on Zen in the West before Watts's own. Herrigel, a German philosopher who spent six years in Japan studying kyudo, described the experience of learning to release the bowstring "without releasing it", allowing the release to happen rather than making it happen. This, he argued, was the physical expression of the Zen non-doing that Watts had described philosophically.

Watts's Contribution and Its Limits

Alan Watts made Zen accessible to a Western audience at a depth that no previous writer had achieved. His gift was the combination of genuine scholarly knowledge, clear and elegant English prose, and a philosophical sensibility trained in both Western and Eastern thought. The Way of Zen is not a simplified popularization, it is a serious intellectual work that happens to be readable.

Its limits are equally worth noting. Watts was more philosopher and writer than meditator. He acknowledged this himself: he understood Zen intellectually at a level very few Westerners had reached, but his personal practice was intermittent, and his life did not consistently reflect the qualities the book describes. This gap between understanding and lived embodiment is something that serious Zen teachers, including D.T. Suzuki, who admired Watts's scholarship, have noted.

The book also reflects its era. Written in 1957, before the wave of Japanese and Tibetan teachers arrived in the West, it presents Zen largely through the lens of Chinese and Japanese texts and through D.T. Suzuki's interpretation, which has itself been questioned by subsequent scholarship as emphasizing the sudden-enlightenment experience of the Rinzai tradition at the expense of the gradual, practice-based approach of Soto.

These are minor qualifications of a major achievement. The Way of Zen opened the door to serious Zen study for generations of Western readers, and for many of them, including Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac among the Beat writers, it was the first serious encounter with a living philosophical tradition that could match the depth of what they were looking for.

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