Ink, Brush and Television: Alan Watts's Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

KQED is the public television station serving the San Francisco Bay Area, first going on the air on April 5, 1954, as the sixth public television station in the United States, founded by James Day and Jonathan Rice. In 1959 the station produced and aired Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, a 34 episode series written and hosted by Alan Watts introducing Eastern philosophy and religion to a Western television audience, continuing into 1960 as one of the earliest sustained television introductions to Zen, Taoist and Vedantic thought produced for an American audience.

Across the series Watts illustrated his own points on air with Chinese ink and brush, a visual teaching device distinctive to this particular broadcast work among the many recorded talks and writings he left behind, and the series stands as one of the first sustained attempts to carry this material to a mass American audience through television rather than through the print and radio formats Watts had relied on before it. KQED itself had gone on the air only five years earlier, in 1954, as the sixth public television station in the whole country, making the Watts series an early example of the young medium of public television carrying religious and philosophical content rather than only news and entertainment programming.