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