While Alan Watts was really outside the Beat scene, any discussion of the Beat writers' interest in Zen Buddhism must take into account the part he played in popularizing Taoist and Buddhist thought in America. As an expounder of Eastern philosophy for Westerners, Watts became a near cult figure in the 1950s and 1960s, and those who were attracted by Beat Generation values were likely to be interested in what he had to say about religion. Watts was nonetheless critical of what he considered to be the Beat's too ego-conscious adoption of Zen as "their thing" or their embracing "this philosophy to justify a very self-defensive Bohemianism." In his important essay "Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen" (published in the summer 1958 issue of Chicago Review), he describes Zen as "above all the liberation of the mind from conventional thought." And this liberation, he was quick to assert, is...