Buddhism the Religion of No-Religion. Alan Watts

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      The widespread influence of Buddhism is due in part to the skill with which a way of liberation, first taught in ancient India, was refined by its teachers and became accessible to people of diverse cultures. For, as Alan Watts commented during a seminar aboard his ferryboat home in Sausalito, California, in the late sixties:

      The Hindus, the Buddhists, and many other ancient peoples do not, as we do, make a division between religion and everything else. Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it. But when a religion and a culture are inseparable, it is very difficult to export a religion, because it comes into conflict with the established traditions, manners, and customs of other people.

      So the question arises, what are the essentials of Hinduism that could be exported? And when you answer that question, you will find Buddhism. As I explained, the essence of Hinduism, the real deep root, is not a kind of doctrine or even a special kind of discipline, although of course disciplines are involved. The center of Hinduism is an experience of liberation called moksha, in which, through the dissipation of the illusion that each man and woman is a separate thing in a world consisting of nothing but a collection of separate things, you discover that you are, in a way, on one level an illusion, but on another level you are what they call the self, the one self, which is all that there is.

      Alan Watts’s interest in Eastern thought can be followed back to his childhood, where he was surrounded by Oriental art. His mother was a teacher for the children of missionaries who traveled abroad, and often on their return from China the missionaries would give her gifts of embroideries and landscape paintings in the style of the great classical Asian artists. Years later, while on tour in Japan with a small group of students, Watts recounted the origins of his interest in the arts and philosophies of the Far East: