On January 14 1967, the American poets Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, those icons of the Beat generation, took part in a “Great Human Be-in” in San Francisco, alongside another celebrity of the era, Timothy Leary, who enjoined the crowd to “turn on, tune in and drop out”.
Next to the Americans was an Englishman named Alan Watts. Born in Kent, trained as an Episcopalian priest, Watts had become one of the best-known interpreters of Zen Buddhism in the west. Although near-forgotten today, Watts, whose patrician accent and pipe-smoking belied his expertise on Asian religions, was once one of the most prominent figures in a phenomenon whose history has lasted more than 2,000 years: the conviction of western thinkers that enlightenment lies in a region called “the east”.