KQED

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

KQED is the public television station serving the San Francisco Bay Area, first going on the air on April 5, 1954, as the sixth public television station in the United States, founded by James Day and Jonathan Rice. In 1959 the station produced and aired Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, a 34 episode series written and hosted by Alan Watts introducing Eastern philosophy and religion to a Western television audience, continuing into 1960 as one of the earliest sustained television introductions to Zen, Taoist and Vedantic thought produced for an American audience.

Across the series Watts illustrated his own points on air with Chinese ink and brush, a visual teaching device distinctive to this particular broadcast work among the many recorded talks and writings he left behind, and the series stands as one of the first sustained attempts to carry this material to a mass American audience through television rather than through the print and radio formats Watts had relied on before it. KQED itself had gone on the air only five years earlier, in 1954, as the sixth public television station in the whole country, making the Watts series an early example of the young medium of public television carrying religious and philosophical content rather than only news and entertainment programming.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

KQED is operated by the nonprofit KQED Inc., under the parent body Northern California Public Broadcasting, alongside its sister stations KQEH and the NPR member station KQED-FM, and today it remains a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service serving the Bay Area, among the largest public broadcasters in the United States by audience reach. The station's own institutional life spans far more than the 1959 to 1960 season it shares with Alan Watts's own broadcasting career.

Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life nonetheless remains one of the station's most historically significant productions from a religious studies perspective: thirty four half hour episodes that brought a sustained, visually illustrated introduction to Zen, Taoist and Vedantic thought into American living rooms years before such material became widely available through other broadcast or print channels, at a station that has continued operating as a major Bay Area public broadcaster for seven decades since it first signed on in 1954. KQED Inc. also operates the sister station KQEH and the NPR member station KQED-FM under the same Northern California Public Broadcasting parent body, giving the organization a broadcasting footprint across television and radio alike that reaches well beyond the single television series it is remembered for in this atlas's own context.