Alan Watts Revisited
26 December / 2021
“Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. If you can't meditate in a boiler room, you can't meditate. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation.”
— Alan Watts
I discovered Alan Watts at the same time I stumbled upon J. Krishnamurti, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Carlos Castaneda, and Ram Dass. That happened when I was working as a librarian at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. Finding these minds—these tricksters, thinkers, rebels—changed my life. I became hooked on their words and started weaving their teachings into my daily thought and practice.
According to Wikipedia:
The Way of Zen is a 1957 non-fiction book on Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophy by philosopher and religious scholar Alan Watts. It was a bestseller and played a major role in introducing Buddhism to a mostly young, Western audience.
The Way of Zen was my introduction to Zen Buddhism. For a time, it became my Bible. I carried it with me through college like a sacred scroll. It was during this period that the Cheeseburger Buddha was born.
One warm Wisconsin winter day in 1979 or 1980, I was working night duty as a security guard for J&J Security. They posted me at a McDonald’s outlet on Main Street, East Side Green Bay. My job was to keep the high school kids from tearing the place apart after basketball games.
During my break, I sat in one corner by the window, a cheeseburger in one hand, The Way of Zen in the other. I was sweating from the inside—too many layers under my security uniform—and the heat in the restaurant was blasting. Outside, snow piled up along the pavement.
Then it happened.
Out of nowhere, a peaceful stillness came over me, like I was floating in a vacuum. And the thought rang loud and clear:
"You are nothing but a Cheeseburger Buddha!"
I laughed.
Fortunately, there weren’t many customers yet, and the girls behind the counter were friendly. From that day on, the Cheeseburger Buddha became my alter ego—a humorous spiritual icon I started sketching when I wanted to express myself. A character who embodied the paradoxes of my life: the sacred and the secular, the uniform and the soul, meat and mindfulness.
It was a moment of Satori.
My mind paused—just for a second—and everything fell apart and into place all at once.
Watts’s work continued to guide me, as I searched for a middle path between being a Muslim, a Buddhist, a lost soul, and a spiritual seeker. I saw the rascal in myself, just as Watts had embraced it in himself. He didn’t preach from a pedestal—he lived it, fully and honestly, warts and wisdom both.
Years later, I had the blessing of visiting his old houseboat in Sausalito, California—the Vallejo—once a decommissioned ferry turned floating studio and gathering place. It had hosted LSD summits with Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Watts himself.
While staying in Sausalito waiting to meet my first Zen teacher, Dennis Junpo Kelly, I spent a few days walking around that boat. It felt like sacred ground, a spiritual crossroad of the Beat Generation.
Later on, during my time practicing at Green Gulch Farm, a few of us would hike up the hills to Alan Watts's memorial site during the summer solstice. We would sit, talk, and sip Japanese sake in his memory.
Even today, I find myself revisiting his words—not because I’ve forgotten them, but because they are cornerstones in my own growth. Alan Watts remains for me one of the great minds—one who not only understood but lived the truth he spoke of.
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