PREVIEW: THE BOOK NOW IN YOUR HANDS
The contents of this volume are easy to describe: they are the best essays and excerpts from Huston Smith's many books, chosen for their relevance and resonance today. In his “Welcome” Huston observes how most Readers have a random, meandering character, but this one is, or hopes to be, more than the sum of its parts.
For here, as one selection succeeds another, something about the elusive nature of religion itself is revealed. An analogy to language may be useful. A second language allows you to begin to see—beyond the idiosyncrasies of your native English or Mandarin—what language itself is and does. Likewise when you encounter sympathetically a second religion: you begin to detect the larger unstated background, the sorrowing and the goodness, the meaninglessness and the ingenuity, the humanness in the universe, out of which all religions arise. This Reader attempts to give such a bird's-eye view of the whole shebang.
In its organization the book follows a schemata Huston used when he investigated “reality” or selfhood, ascending and descending level by level through the several worlds we live in simultaneously. The book begins personally, with Huston confiding his personal experience. From there it widens out into the immediate world, the various kinds of everyday circumstances, surrounding him (and us). The third section ventures further (or deeper), into the sphere of religions itself, which suffuses mundane existence with understanding and, possibly, tools for enhancing it. In the penultimate section, Huston situates even religious experiences in a larger framework—the Big Picture or unconditional worldview—where things finite yield a more infinite aspect. This Reader thus makes, in a sense, a little tour from Berkeley, California, to the ends of the cosmos. Yet it might be truer to say that it goes nowhere at all: each sphere of life, and each section in the Reader, contains a subtle reflection of the others: and so we end with Huston personally again, as he tells about being ninety and encountering God.
Bookkeeping. The one of Huston's books not excerpted here is the one for which he is most famous. The World's Religions reads best as a whole, and with three million copies in print, you can, if you have not already read it, easily acquire a copy. Some of the selections here have been lightly edited, to avoid repeating material already discussed in another essay or dated, now-obscure references. Only a few pieces are particularly challenging (notably “The Levels of Reality” and “The Levels of Selfhood”), but they seem worth it. Writing about religion can at times be complex and difficult, Huston observed and quoted C. S. Lewis, “as difficult as modern physics, and for the same reason.” Huston is overall a pleasing and accessible stylist, though, and most chapters here provide that literary pleasure.
Once, while delivering a public lecture, Huston could find no chalk to make his point on the blackboard. “Never mind,” he said, “I'll write it in air and you will see it vividly.” This volume records what Huston said on those better occasions when he had, as it were, a blackboard and chalk in hand.
INTRODUCTION: GRAND TOUR OF ALL THE WORLDS
Who is Huston Smith? The answer seems straightforward. He is a retired college professor in Berkeley who taught at various universities, and he wrote books, one of which sold incredibly well. oh yes, there's one thing more. Huston Smith did something that nobody, no one else in the history of the world, had done or even had thought to do before.
What has Huston done that no one else had done? Simply this: he was a practitioner of practically all the major world's religions, a unique feat in the annals of spirituality. There used to be on official forms a box where you had to write in your religion; Huston would have had a hard time squeezing into that small space Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.
In the beginning: Huston was born in 1919 to missionary parents in China. To that little boy Christianity was the only religion there was, identical with faith, synonymous with spirituality itself. Next: as a young man Huston met a Hindu swami in St. Louis—the only true saint he feels he ever met—and the scales, as it were, fell from his eyes. Before he had been like the bumpkin who thinks his language—English, Inuit, or whatever—is the only language there is. When Huston learned there were other languages, or rather other religions, other worlds opened for him, and for the next decade he practiced Hinduism. In middle age Huston discovered Hinduism's stepchild, Buddhism. He had not suspected there could be such a thing: a spiritual path rooted not in faith but in experience, and at the root of experience was not Original Sin to be overcome but an innate perfection to be realized. For ten years Huston sought out Buddhist teachers and gurus, stayed in a Zen monastery in Kyoto, and strove for satori, or enlightenment. Huston had by then acquired the knack of knocking on unfamiliar religious doors, and it felt natural to now enter into Islam. He studied the Koran, joined a tariqa, or secret Muslim fraternity, prayed facing Mecca five times a day, and enjoyed a devotee's personal relation to Allah. His experience of polymorphous spirituality led him to write The World's Religions, which has sold nearly three million copies, but Huston did not pursue the different religions in order to write a book about them. He had no checklist to go down, faith by faith. In moving from Christianity to Hinduism and from Hinduism to Buddhism and from there to Islam, he was also exploring unexamined parts of himself. He decided to show others, by writing and teaching, how to do similarly, how to have the greatest inward adventure of all.
The fact that he, that anyone, could cross all religious boundaries may have some implication for our troubled geopolitical planet. For centuries, before 1900, say, the major religions were largely either ignorant of or hostile to one another. By the time Huston began teaching in the 1940s, an interfaith dialogue was under way that paid respects to the validity of faiths other than one's own. After midcentury visionaries like Thomas Merton and Thich Nhat Hanh went even further and explored other spiritual traditions to enhance their religion of origin. But Huston went furthest of all: he approached Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judeo-Christianity as though each represented a different aspect of his inner self, each providing another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of being human. At the present time when religious-sponsored hatred is a planet-threatening disease, Huston's antidote of this further possiblity should hold some interest.
This may be the most ambitious book some readers will have held in their hands. The World's Religions, written a half century ago, helped establish comparative religion as a field of study, and the book exerted an appeal far beyond academia. The World's Religions, however, is only the upper tip of the iceberg. Huston's larger ambition—visible here, as one essay succeeds and complements another—is a planet-wide, centuries-long scavenger hunt: through all historical time and all human geography he rummaged for whatever might enrich the inward life of one living today. All eras—prehistorical, ancient, medieval, modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern—are his time frame; the round earth—the civilizations of Far East China and Japan, India and Tibet, the Judeo-Christian West, and Native America—are his playing field. He would peel “reality” back to see what's there in dimensions not visible to the naked eye; he would do the same for human selfhood, descending stratum by stratum, exploring personhood's remote nooks and crannies. Possibly no one will be so intellectually intrepid again. At least not if he or she wishes to remain academically respectable.
In fact, Huston's outsized vision was not easily accommodated in modern academia. At MIT, though his courses were the most popular in the philosophy department, his colleagues mistrusted someone who not only taught religion, but actually appeared to believe it. Students came to do graduate work under Huston, but MIT forbade him to teach graduate students. Near the end of his teaching career, at a religious studies association meeting, Huston made his eloquent Grand Summation. He had not only taught the world religions, he declared, but he had humbly tried—as a professor and as a human being—to live by their living wisdom. His mission had been to provide his students a better world, a resacramentalized understanding, wherein to dwell. When his speech ended, instead of applause there was cold, stony indifference. Such a declamation might have been normal in Socrates’ Athens; at a contemporary religious studies meeting, in the university today, Huston's passion sounded questionable, if not exactly a reportable offense.
Huston did not think, however, that what was taught in a class should stay in the classroom; he wanted it replicated, not