Gordon spoke of his first meeting with Saburo Hasegawa in an interview with Michael Wenger of the San Francisco Zen Center:
I should perhaps say how my interest in calligraphy started. There was a well-known japanese painter called Sabra Hasegawa, who had been in New York, and had been a great friend of Franz Klein. Hasegawa was the editor of a calligraphy magazine in japan, and he was interested in the liaison between the East and the West. He was scheduled to talk at the Asian Academy. Alan Watts, who was then the dean, telephoned me and told me that he was going to stay for a week, and would I look after him, and I agreed. So I went to Hasegawa's lecture, which was absolutely brilliant.
The next day I met Hasegawa and I took him for a walk in Muir Woods. We walked for two hours. Hasegawa was a man of tea. He was dressed in the most immaculate brown kimono. We walked for two hours, and he didn't say anything, and I didn't say anything. When we came back, I said to him, "Would you rather go and have some lunch at my house or would you rather go to my studio?" Hasegawa said "I would rather go to your studio." My studio was on board a ferry boat at that time. When we got on board, he looked around-he looked at the floor and he indicated that he would like to do some calligraphy. He started clearing the junk away and prepared a beautiful little place. Out of his sleeve he brought a wonderful stick of two-hundred-year-old ink and a beautiful roll of paper. And then he made a few characters. He made the character for infinity, and he made a one-two-three, which is a magnificent composition, as you know, because each line has to have a different weight and there is a different spacing between each line. That one-two-three was given to Alan Watts. Alan Watts said that D. T Suzuki was coming, and that he would point it out to him, an Hasegawa said that he would be so happy if D. T. Suzuki would walk by it without noticing it.
The story about Hasegawa's calligraphy was one of Alan Watts's favorites and became familiar to listeners of a series of public radio talks Watts gave in Berkeley beginning in 1951. At the station he met program director Richard Moore, who years later at KQED in San Francisco would produce the Alan Watts television series Eastern Wisdom and Modem Life.
During this period Watts's occasional evening lectures at the academy were well attended, and he soon became known for his comfortable speaking style and for the vitality of his philosophical inquires. His weekly radio show gained widespread popularity as he allowed his natural sense of humor to play into the context of his talks, and by the late fifties he was speaking quite playfully in such talks as "The Sense of Nonsense," "Unpreachable Religion," and "The Smell of Burnt Almonds."
In his autobiography he wrote about the academy and his own role in the formative period of the counterculture movement:
The American Academy of Asian Studies was one of the principal roots of what later came to be known, in the early sixties, as the San Francisco Renaissance, of which one must say, like Saint Augustine when asked about the nature of time, "I know what it is, but when you ask me, I don't." ... I know only that between, say, 1958 and 1970, a huge tide of spiritual energy in the form of poetry, music, philosophy, painting, religion, communications techniques in radio, television, and cinema, dancing, theater, and general life-style swept out of this city and its environs to affect America and the whole world, and that I have been intensely involved in it. It would be false modesty to say that I had little to do with it, and I am at once gratified and horrified to see how a younger generation has both followed and caricatured my philosophy.
This philosophy included a blend of classical Eastern thought, insights and observations from his own mystical experiences, and a pragmatic view of man as an integral part of nature a full generation before ecological issues became popular. He felt, as he later told a group of college professors, that, in essence, mystical experience and ecological awareness were simply two ways of talking about the same experience, and he would refer to his topic by one or the other-depending upon his audience and inclination. At other times he presented an interpretation of religious experience revealing a Jungian influence, and at times he credited Buddha with being the world's first great psychotherapist for recognizing the psychological trap inherent in any view of a divine self. However, some of his most dramatic and controversial talks involved direct comparisons between psychotic and religious experiences. "If Christ were to show up today," he would ask, "would he be welcome in the church, or locked up in an insane asylum?" The local Beats enjoyed his irreverent expositions immensely, and Watts participated in evening coffeehouse discussions running into the early-morning hours, and in wild poetry readings where he recited interpretations of British nonsense poems.
In 1953 Watts-now the father of two young children-moved from the San Francisco peninsula to the hills of Marin County just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Here Gary Snyder's practical and scholarly interest in Zen was a continuing source of inspiration for Alan. When Robert Anton Wilson asked Alan about Gary Snyder during his interview for The Realist, Alan replied, "He's a true Dharma Bum, a man of complete integrity. He's just the way Kerouac describes him in The Dharma Bums-little, wiry, bearded, Oriental-looking, always dressed in clothes that are old and patchy but scrupulously clean. I don't practice Zen the way he does, but there are many ways of doing it. I think very highly of Gary." Alan was living with Dorothy and their growing clan of children in Homestead Valley, and Gary was living in a cottage on a nearby hill that was called alternatively Marin-an, or "the horse forest hermitage." Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were in town in those days, and they came to visit Gary, and naturally Alan became involved in their goings-on. One such affair was a famous party (recorded in The Dharma Bums) thrown by Locke McCorkle, who had a house down at the bottom of the hill below Gary's cottage. At the party, Kerouac, McCorkle, and Ginsberg all ended up running around naked, while Alan sat with old friends from Chicago dressed in their business suits.
However, the most significant aspect of the scene for Alan was not the parties but Gary's little cottage on the hill. As he later recalled:
Gary had figured out-really and truly-how to live the simple life. Everyone complained about beatniks being dirty, and having filthy pads, but here Gary had this sweet, clean, neat little place. And he explained to me how to get by on practically no money-where to go for second-day vegetables, how to get certain kinds of grains, how to use the Goodwill, and so on. He had a very nice place, and I felt that although I was trying to be involved in respectable public affairs because I had children to support, that the very existence of Gary's place gave the universe a little bit of stability.
Shortly after the famous party, Gary went off to japan to begin "a real Zen study." For a time Alan continued his involvement in the San Francisco Beat scene and in 1959 wrote Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, which eventually earned him the somewhat undeserved reputation as "father of the hip-pies." However, his 1956 classic, The Way of Zen, had become a bestseller, and while others appreciated the Beat trend for its purity as a literary movement, Alan became less interested in the Beat movement than in the assimilation of Oriental culture into Western society. He whimsically predicted that within a few years Asia would become covered with superhighways and neon-lit hamburger and hot dog stands, and that at the same time frustrated Tibetan lamas would be studying Buddhism at the University of Chicago.
Alan's second marriage did not survive the wayward influences of the Beat movement, but he spent the rest of his life speaking and writing-humorously and with insight-about Taoist, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. In his works he always expressed a particular affinity for what I think of as the earliest "beatniks": the Eastern wandering sages and masters who went "beyond the pale" and returned to the forest to regain the original state of being and to experience life as it was "on the first day" and as it is, underneath all our planning and thinking, even now.
C H A P T E R O N E
Introduction to the Way
Beyond the West
