About
Jonathan S. Watts is a Buddhist scholar and practitioner based in Japan who works in engaged Buddhism. He began his career in 1990 at the International Network of Engaged Buddhists in Bangkok under Sulak Sivaraksa and studied the teachings of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu. Since moving to Japan in 1993, he has held positions at multiple Buddhist institutions including the Jodo denomination's research institute, the Kodo Kyodan Buddhist Fellowship, and the Zenseikyo Foundation. He has taught contemporary Buddhism at Keio University since 2008. His publications focus on Buddhist responses to social issues, including works on care for the dying, nuclear activism in Japan, and tsunami relief.
Teaching focus
Watts appears at Upaya as part of the wider faculty Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered to teach alongside the Soto Zen core. Upaya's programs regularly bring in scholars, clinicians, scientists, poets, and knowledge holders from beyond the Zen sangha to teach in dialogue with the practice. Watts's sessions live inside that container. The work tends to ask how a particular field of expertise meets contemplative practice and what each can learn from the other. Sessions are usually held alongside zazen and the Soto Zen forms that structure the days at Upaya, so students can expect a rhythm of formal sittings, talks or seminars from Watts, group conversation, and silence. The framing is open enough for non-Buddhist participants to take part fully. The depth comes from Watts's own field rather than from technical Zen instruction. For students with a steady practice, the value is in seeing how practice meets a specific discipline, and how that discipline reads when held inside the container Upaya provides. For people newer to Zen, Watts's sessions are a low-friction way into that container.
Background
Jonathan S. Watts appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Watts has chosen to share there. Jonathan S. Watts began working at the main office of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) in Bangkok in 1990 shortly after graduating Princeton University in the United States where he was born and raised. Under the tutelage of renowned Thai engaged Buddhist Sulak Sivaraksa and the teachings of one of the earliest articulators of a progressive modern Buddhism, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, he has spent the last thirty years immersed in the international engaged Buddhist movement, writing and editing a collaborative volume by Buddhist scholar-activists Rethinking Karma: The Dharma of Social Justice. (INEB: 2009/2014) Moving to Japan in 1993, he has worked in a variety of Buddhist settings including nineteen years at the research institute of the Jodo denomination, whose teacher Honen was the first of the great Kamakura Buddhist revolutionaries where he published Buddhist Care for the Dying & Bereaved (Wisdom 2012); the last sixteen years at the Kodo Kyodan Buddhist Fellowship, a modern lay denomination emerging from the ancient Tendai denomination from which the Kamakura masters all sprang where he published Lotus in the Nuclear Sea: Fukushima and the Promise of Buddhism in the Nuclear Age (Yokohama: International Buddhist Exchange Center, 2013) and This Precious Life: Buddhist Tsunami Relief and Anti-Nuclear Activism in Post 3/11 Japan (Yokohama: International Buddhist Exchange Center, 2012).; and the last fourteen years the Zenseikyo Foundation and Rinbutsuken Institute for Engaged Buddhism, a non-sectarian foundation formed in the post-war area that is training Buddhist chaplains. He has also taught contemporary Buddhism in Japan and Asia at Keio University since 2008. This year he is published a two volume study This volume on Engaged Buddhism in Japan that documents his own work during this time to support Japanese Buddhists to develop their own Socially Engaged Buddhist movement in connection with similar movements in Asia and the West through the Japan Network of Engaged Buddhists (JNEB). That body of work places Watts inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Watts's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Watts contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Watts's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Watts's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Watts contributes as part of Upaya's wider faculty rather than as a Zen priest. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Watts's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Watts at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms held alongside teaching focused on contemplative care for the dying, grief, and serious illness. Many of these programs draw on Upaya's Being with Dying curriculum and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians. There's room for personal experience and difficult emotion, held inside the container of practice rather than processed away. The schedule is recognizable as Zen: sittings, walking, meals, talks, and time for questions. Quiet is taken seriously. Most participants leave with both a steadier practice and a more honest relationship with mortality.
