ABSTRACT
Alan Watts, an English-born populariser of Zen Buddhism in the decades after World War II, was particularly widely read in countercultural circles in the 1960s. Zen's stimulus to deep exploration of the self and the sense of oneness which it gave with an unchanging universe were attractive to young people alienated from a technological society riven with conflict. Zen Buddhism could also be a transient cultural fad. A lasting legacy of Zen's sense of the interconnectedness of things was a strand in the modern environmentalist movement that emerged in the 1960s.
