The Zen Wisdom of Alan Watts Animated by the Creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone

Alan Watts began pop­u­lar­iz­ing the teach­ings of Zen Bud­dhism, Hin­duism, and Tao­ism in Amer­i­ca dur­ing the 1950s. He taught at the Acad­e­my of Asian Stud­ies in San Fran­cis­co, wrote Way of Zen and oth­er best­selling books, gave talks on the radio (lis­ten here), and devel­oped TV pro­grams intro­duc­ing Amer­i­cans to the seem­ing­ly exot­ic prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion. Don’t miss his 1960 TV pro­gram called “The Silent Mind.”

Watts died almost 40 years ago, but his lega­cy remains alive, part­ly thanks to his son, part­ly thanks to vin­tage videos cap­tured on YouTube, and part­ly thanks to peo­ple like Trey Park­er and Matt Stone — that’s right, the cre­ators of South Park. There’s not much infor­ma­tion known about them, but some­where back in 2007, Park­er and Stone pro­duced videos that ani­mat­ed (audio) lec­tures giv­en by Watts many moons ago. The top­ics deal with music, life, and philo­soph­i­cal per­son­al­i­ty types. Mean­while, the aes­thet­ic is dis­tinct­ly South Parkean, minus the out­ra­geous pot­ty humor, of course. The project is an old favorite of ours and today we decid­ed to bring it back.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

“The Cen­tral Phi­los­o­phy of Tibet” by Robert Thur­man, Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty. Added to the Phi­los­o­phy Sec­tion of our list of Free Online Cours­es

What If Mon­ey Was No Object?: Thoughts on the Art of Liv­ing from East­ern Philoso­pher Alan Watts


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Comments (9)
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  • Michael Ponder Jr says:

    I had no idea.
    I think Trey and Matt should try doing ani­mat­ed edu­ca­tion­al films maybe… they used the words to paint a very humor­ous demon­stra­tion of what Alan Watts means.

  • Blaine Edwards says:

    I have been a big fan of both Alan Watts and Trey Park­er and Matt Stone for years. I nev­er thought that this ever hap­pen. Great Job!! They should pro­duce more of Watts’s tapes.

  • Alan says:

    Your videos are filled with intel­li­gence. Some of them have told me very much. And they also have some houmor in them too. Thank you very much.

  • Maria Carmozina Marques Lemos says:

    Acred­i­to que seja inter­es­sante, uti­lizar ess­es vídeos, numa ten­ta­ti­va de induzir pré-ado­les­centes a assi­s­tir, refle­tir e rea­gir diante de um tex­to a ser inter­pre­ta­do. O entendi­men­to quan­do parte do con­cre­to ao abstra­to é bem mais leve e saudáv­el no apren­diza­do.

  • george says:

    The videos need more vod­ka.

  • Al Hendo says:

    This is so uplift­ing and endear­ing. A trio of fine prick­ly goo.

  • ben dover says:

    my mum said this is fake and should not e allowed on the inter­net so y is this so uplift­ing AL hen­do

  • ben dover says:

    ur a fag­got

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