Watts on Kipling & the Orient

As outlined in a previous post I’m going through a number of post referring to some things that Alan Watts has written in his autobiography. Here is a short excerpt which refers to the influence Rudyard Kipling had on him

It was in this room, with its flavor of Oriental magic, that my father in his perfectly unostentiatious King’s English accent, read to me the tales and poems of that much maligned and misunderstood author, Rudyard Kipling…Today, Kipling is largely regarded as an imperialist and jingoist whose writings represented British colonialism at its most aggressive peak. Yes and no. Kipling was one of the major channels through which the high culture of India and the Himalayas flowed back into the West, and persauded me, for example, through such books as Kim, to have more sympathy for Buddhism than Christianity. Kipling was not a Max Muller or an Arthur Waley on the level of fine Oriental scholarship, but he spoke in a subtle and roundabout way to the emotions in the solar plexus, the manipura chakra, and thus echanted a small boy with curious, exotic, and far-off marvels that were simply not to be found in the muscular Christianity of the (Low Church) Church of England or the boild-beef-and-carrots English middle-class way of life.

(In My Own Way: An Autobiography, Alan Watts, 1972, p25)