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The Way Things Are
TIMOTHY BENEKE Tell us how you started your day.
HUSTON SMITH I began with the Islamic morning prayer to Allah. That was followed by India's hatha yoga, and after that a chapter from the Bible—this morning it was the Gospel of John—which I tried to read reflectively, opening myself to such insights that might enter. Then I was ready for coffee.
BENEKE What do those practices do for you?
SMITH Rabbis say that the first word you should think of when you wake up in the morning is the word God. Not even thank-you should precede it. I begin my day with the Islamic morning prayer as an extension of that point. I say it in Arabic. Not that I know Arabic, but I learned to pronounce the prayer phonetically because Islam is one of the three religions that require their canonical, prescribed prayers to be said in their original tongues; the other two are Hinduism and Judaism. And, of course, I know what the Arabic syllables of the prayer mean.
BENEKE What do they mean? What do they mean to you?
SMITH A great deal. That so much of what is important in life could be packed into just seven short phrases is almost proof in itself that Islam is a revealed religion.
The prayer opens with “Praise be to Allah, Creator of the worlds.” Right off we are given to understand that life is no accident. It has derived from an Ultimate Source that is divine. But what is the character of divinity? The prayer addresses that immediately, in its second line, “the merciful, the compassionate.” The Sufis from whom I learned the prayer give different nuances to those two words. Allah is merciful in having created us, and he is compassionate in that he will restore us to himself when our lives end, in keeping with the Koranic assertion “unto Him all things return.” Some Sufis use that verse to argue that everyone reaches heaven eventually. Unlike other Muslims, they see hell as a place where sins are burned away; no souls stay there forever. But to continue with the prayer: the assurances of its second line are comforting, but they run the danger of inducing complacency. So the third line counters that danger immediately by adding “ruler of the day of judgment.” Not everything goes. Actions have consequences, so we had better watch our step.
Then comes what (from the human standpoint) is the crucial fourth line: “Thee do we worship, and thee do we ask for aid.” I was taught that when you come to that central line in the prayer, you should take stock of how your day is going. If it's going well, you should accent the first phrase, “Thee do we worship,” and pour out your gratitude like Niagara Falls. If, on the other hand, it is one of those days when you wonder how you are going to get through it, you ask for help: “Thee do we ask for aid.” Swallow your pride and admit that we all need help at times.
Truth to tell, by then the prayer has done it for me. Its remaining three assertions basically recapitulate what has gone before and round it off. “Guide us on the straight path, the path of those on whom thou hast poured forth thy grace; not the path of those who have incurred thy wrath and gone astray.”
BENEKE How long have you been saying the Muslim prayers—the same prayer, five times a day?
SMITH About twenty-five years. Bodily movements accompany the words, but if circumstances don't permit them—say you are in a shopping line or on a freeway when the hour of prayer arrives—you may say the prayer silently to yourself. The prescribed times for prayer—on awakening, at noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and on retiring—frame the day nicely. Five times a day, distractions are suspended, and one's attention is drawn to the infinite.
BENEKE After the prayer you turn to yoga.
SMITH Hatha yoga centers me; it gets me into my body somewhat. Ambu, my yoga teacher in South India, would occasionally hold a pose for two hours. I hold the poses for about twenty seconds, a fair measure of the distance between our attainments.
What does hatha yoga do for me? I don't want to claim too much. In the eight steps of Patanjali's “raja yoga”—the way to God through psychophysical exercises—hatha yoga, which works with body postures, is the third step in the program that integrates body, mind, spirit. If you undertake that program seriously, you don't do hatha yoga, the body movements, unless you are also working on the minimal moral precepts that the first two preceding steps prescribe. And the eighty-four postures of hatha yoga lead to the lotus position, where you sit, legs folded, with each foot upturned on its opposing thigh. In that position, you proceed to the remaining five steps, where you work with breathing and meditation. That's raja yoga in its full sweep. I've done it along the way, but it's not my primary path, and now I can't say that hatha yoga does more than counter somewhat the stiffness that comes with age.
BENEKE And why do you follow this by reading the Bible?
SMITH That's more complicated. For over fifty years I've read a passage from one of the world's sacred texts before breakfast. I'm not the first person in history to undertake the spiritual quest, and it's only sensible to draw on the experiences of those who have preceded me. The Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran, the Bible, and the like are data banks of what they learned, so I apprentice myself to them. They are my guides on the path.
So much for the general practice. Now, to why I'm currently reading the Bible? To answer that I have to review my odyssey briefly. My parents were Methodist missionaries in China, so I had a Protestant upbringing, and I was fortunate: it proved to be positive. It “took,” so to speak. I find that many of my students look to me like wounded Christians, or wounded Jews, in that what came through to them was dogmatism—we have the truth and everybody else is going to hell—and moralism—don't do this, that, and the other. What came through to me from my religious upbringing was quite different: we are in good hands, and in gratitude for that fact it would be good if we bore one another's burdens.
China was a part of my childhood and youth, and since then I have spent about a decade immersing myself sequentially in the thought and practice of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and the Native American traditions. That pretty much covers the bases except for Judaism, which came to me through a daughter who married a Conservative Jew and converted to his faith. My ongoing involvement (with my wife) in their kosher family means a lot to me. We have a grandson named Isaiah.
During the middle decades of my life it would have been more accurate to consider me a Vedantist, a Zennist, or whatever I was then immersed in, than as a Christian, but I never severed my Christian connections. In the last year or two, though, I've developed an interest in reconnecting with my Christian roots; there's a saying, I believe, that “the child is father of the man.” In any case it feels like coming full circle. I have been approaching Christianity this time as if it were a foreign religion like the others I encountered, which in many ways traditional Christianity is in our modern, secular age. This calls for bringing to it the same openness and empathy I tried to direct to the other religions I have studied. Approaching it this way strips away many stereotypes. I'm finding that in its depths, St. Augustine, Dionysius, Meister Eckhart—not the third-grade Christianity one hears from most pulpits—this new (to me) Christianity is more interesting than that of my childhood.
It poses a problem, though. In its emphasis on loving Christ, Christianity is the most bhaktic of the world's religions—bhakti being (in Hinduism's four yogas) the way to God through love—whereas I am primarily the jnanic type that gets mileage primarily through knowing God. Interestingly, that makes Christianity the most challenging of all the religions I've tried to work my way into. Jnanic Christians do exist, it's just that you have to hunt for them. The Church fathers were heavily jnanic. They are not read much anymore, but it was they who gave Christianity the theological sinews that have powered it. Anyway, I like challenges. Perhaps working with Christianity will round out a flat side in my personality.
If it does, that will be all to the good, but having touched on the four yogas—the way to God through knowledge, love, work, and meditation—I want to put in a word for my own primary yoga, the first of the four. The knowledge it works with is not rational knowledge. It has nothing to do with quantity of information or logical dexterity—the kind universities tend to prize. It is, rather, an intuitive awareness of things, a discernment of the way things are. What could be more important or interesting than that? In any case, that is the direction of my religious search. Religion for me is the search for the Real, and the effort to approximate one's life to it. Such approximation should be easy because the Real is so real, but in fact it is difficult, because we are so unreal. “So phony” is the slang way to put it.
BENEKE Have you been much involved with religious institutions over the years?
SMITH No, I haven't. For one thing they take time—G. B. Shaw said the worst thing about socialism was that it takes too many evenings. And beyond that, institutions are ambiguous. They bring out the bad in people along with the good; I don't know any institution, religious or otherwise, that is pretty through and through. But it has occurred to me of late that in remaining aloof from the institutional side of religion I've been something like a parasite. I live by the truth of the enduring religions, but I've done precious little to help the institutions that have kept those truths alive. I am working now on changing that—trying to repay some of my debt to these religions—and Christianity (as the faith I was born into and am currently focusing on) is the natural place to pitch in.
So I am going to church again. To resurrect a phrase from the 1960s, it feels like I'm “walking the talk” more. As for which church, a friend who knows me well says, “Huston, you are the only Confucian Methodist I know. The only reason you stay with the Methodist Church is filial piety and ancestor worship. It keeps you connected with your parents.” There is something to that. As I say, my friend knows me well. But while I hold no special brief for the Methodist denomination or even Christianity vis-à-vis the other world religions, it's the tradition I was born into. And Christianity does house profundities; that's beyond question. So I am exploring them. That is a long answer to why I read the Bible this morning.
BENEKE One of the major themes of your work is the idea that behind the major religious traditions lies a deep truth that most educated secular people do not understand. It is a metaphysical truth about the universe and eternity, which involves seeing the eternal in the temporal, and seeing all the universe as a manifestation of eternity. This consciousness of the world puts one's own personality and all its accidental qualities, like gender and nationality, in a different perspective, and alters one's orientation to life. I sense that you want passionately to convey this to people.
SMITH Fair statement. As I suggested earlier, what is more important than the way things are? Sometimes when I give a talk I discover from questions that the audience is only really interested in social issues. I agree that these are important, and though we should all do more, I pay my dues on that front, I think. My wife and I were charter members of the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) in St. Louis in the 1950s. I do everything I can for the Tibetans, and my book One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church is on the injustice of the Supreme Court's infamous decision that stripped that Church of its constitutional rights.
Still, isn't it also important to find out the way things are? Religion has many facets, but if you skip the question of what finally exists, it looks pretty much like wheel-spinning to me, and it's hard for me to think of its practitioners as really serious about life's quest. Even practical dealings call for knowing the lay of the land, so to speak. Orientation. Life requires it if it is to be lived well, and orientation derives from knowing the nature of the universe.
Beyond all that, if what exists is in the end incredibly wonderful, to know that fact infuses one's life with energy, call it psychic or spiritual energy, as you wish. Joseph Campbell made that point when he wrote, “It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” I agree with that assertion, while adding that, at that level, myth and religion are indistinguishable. So beyond the minimal payoff of knowing where you are—the payoff of orientation—if where you are turns out to be breathtakingly beautiful, how much greater the reward that comes from knowing —seeing—that.
BENEKE Okay, so where are we? What is the lay of our land?
SMITH It sounds glib when I put it into words—as bland as E = MC2—but the truth is that absolute perfection reigns. In addition to being glib, it sounds dogmatic when I say it that categorically, but please understand that I see myself as basically a transmitter, reporting what the intellectual and spiritual giants of the past pretty much attest to in unison. Arthur Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being—one of the classics of intellectual history—says that up to the late eighteenth century, when the scientific worldview began to take over, virtually every great sage and prophet the world over saw reality as a vast hierarchy ranging from the barest entities at the bottom, which barely escape nonbeing, all the way up to the ens perfectissimum, perfect being, at the top. My studies confirm this report.
I admit that it sounds outlandish to say that absolute perfection reigns, but I have two arguments in its defense. First, Einstein said that if quantum mechanics is true, the world is crazy. Well, experiments since his day have confirmed quantum mechanics, so the world is crazy—crazy from the standpoint of what our senses tell us the world is like. We accept that verdict because we have to; it comes from science. But when the mystics make the same point about the world in its reach for values, we back off because they can't prove their claims.
Look at Bosnia, we say, or the Holocaust; how are you going to square them with absolute perfection? Well, in something of the way a physicist would try to explain to an eight-year-old that the ratio of solid matter to space in the chair he is sitting on is of the order of a baseball to a ballpark, which is to say, not easily. But truth is not easy or obvious in religion any more than in physics. In both we need to get beyond the third grade.
My second rejoinder to people who dismiss absolute perfection out of hand is to point out that if you do that it leads to life being incoherent and not making sense. Either we settle for its not making sense, or we press to the hilt the possibility that it is the way it should be.
BENEKE Even a tumor in your lungs?
SMITH Yes, if we can see that tumor in its total context. We are back to the point that religion takes up where our routine reactions to life leave off. At the center of the religious life is a peculiar kind of joy, the prospect of a happy ending that blossoms from necessarily painful ordeals, the promise of human difficulties embraced and overcome. We don't see the complete picture.
Eighteen months ago our oldest daughter died of sarcoma, one of cancer's most vicious forms, though what cancer isn't vicious? The anguish our family experienced was like nothing any of us had remotely known before.
BENEKE Did you have doubts about the perfection of the universe? Were you angry at the universe?
SMITH Not angry. But of course I couldn't feel perfection then. Or more precisely, in a way I did feel it, but paradoxically, through my tears. It was as if shards of perfection pierced my sobs through the heroic way our daughter and her immediate family rose to her death. These experiences gave me the conviction that her death was not the last word.
This is quite apart from my own experience. The point is that the only person who has a right to say that things are exactly as they should be is someone who at the time he or she is speaking is feeling the heel of the oppressor's boot smashing down on their face. If you can say it then, it is real. Otherwise, it is Pollyanna escapism.
BENEKE The most famous example I know of is Aldous Huxley, dying of cancer, saying, “Yes this is painful, but look at the perfection of the universe.” I can at times experience the universe as a manifestation of eternity, some great being behind the universe. I can to a degree transcend my own immediate pedestrian needs and involvement, but when this happens I experience extraordinary wonder and terror as well. Castaneda talks about balancing the wonder of being human with the terror of being human. Religion is about this sense of deep belonging in the universe, but I am not so sure that it is benign or friendly.
SMITH I distinguish between my thoughts and my emotions here. The Hindus speak of the jivanmukta, a person who, perfectly enlightened, is uninterruptedly aware of the perfection of things while still in his or her body. They cite Ramana Maharshi [a Hindu spiritual leader] as an instance. For my part, much as I revere Ramana, I'm not sure that even his bliss was unvarying. For several decades now I don't recall that my head has doubted the perfection of things, but experiencing it is a different matter. I doubt that within these mortal coils it is possible to quiet the emotional waves of ups and downs that are our human lot. But my head sees farther than my emotions, and when I'm depressed I can hear it saying, “Poor Huston. He's got the spiritual flu, but he'll get over it.”
There is more to be said about the tumor in the lungs, however. One of the reasons I did not doubt God or the eternal during the seven and a half months of our daughter's dying—I touched on this earlier, but want to spell out—was the way she and her immediate family rose to the showdown. Her life had had its normal joys and defeats, but the spiritual work that she accomplished in those thirty or so weeks of dying was more than enough for a lifetime. Her sarcoma cancer began in the abdomen and spread rapidly, exerting pressure on her vital organs. But even when her condition had her at the breaking point, her farewells to us, her parents, in our last two visits were “I have no complaints” and “I am at peace.” Her last words to her husband and children (Kendra and I arrived minutes too late) were, “I see the sea. I smell the sea. It is because it is so near.” She always loved the sea. I think it symbolized life for her.
BENEKE A lot of us lapse readily into self-pity when we are sick or in anguish and think that the universe stinks.
SMITH I have told you what I believe, but I don't think there is proof as to who is right. Life comes to each of us like a huge Rorschach blot, and people fall into four classes in the way they interpret it. First, there is the atheist who says there is no God. Next comes the polytheist who says there are many gods, gods here meaning disembodied spirits of whatever sorts. Then there is the monotheist who says there is one God. And finally, the mystic for whom there is only God. None, many, one, and only. Using God as the measuring rod, these are the basic ways we can interpret the universe. There is no way to prove which way is right.
BENEKE I don't hear you using the word faith.
SMITH That is because the word is so free-floating. Everyone who has not given up has faith in something. If not in God, then in science, life, himself, the future, something. My favorite definition of faith is “the choice of the most meaningful hypothesis.”
BENEKE That sounds a little like William James's pragmatism, which would have us believe things because of their positive effects on us.
SMITH That was James the psychologist, carrying over into James the philosopher. I'm not a pragmatist; I do not believe in believing in things because of their beneficial effects on us. I reject the argument that says, “Here is this mysterious Rorschach blot, life. Let's interpret it optimistically because that energizes us and makes us feel good.” To hell with that line of thought! The question isn't what revs us up and makes us feel good, but what is true.
BENEKE And your intuitive discernment, your jnanic faculty as you call it, tells you that the universe is perfect.
SMITH Yes, but I don't rely solely or even primarily on my own intuition here. The chief reason I accept it is that it conforms to “the winnowed wisdom of the human race,” as I like to think of the enduring religions in their convergent metaphysical claims. The word wisdom needs to be qualified, though. Not everything in the “wisdom traditions” is wise. Modern science has retired their cosmologies; and their social formulas—master/slave, gender relations, and the like—must constantly be reviewed in the light of historical changes and our continuing search for justice. It is their convergent vision of ultimate reality, the Big Picture, that impresses me more than any of the alternatives that modernity has produced.
BENEKE Could you tell us precisely what you experience when you “intuitively discern” the perfection of things?
SMITH Something like Plato's experience when he said, “First a shudder runs through you, and then the old awe steals over you.” I would not mind stopping with that, but other sensations can be added. Excitement. Exhilaration. Confidence. Selflessness and compassion. Peace.
BENEKE Underlying religion is the problem of death. Socrates defined philosophy as practice in the art of dying. You embody the traditional notion of the philosopher as a seeker of wisdom, someone who is concerned with the great questions of life. What do you think happens when we die?
SMITH I need to hesitate for a moment, for this is another place where it's easy to sound glib. The only honest answer is, Who knows? This is the ultimate mystery. Still, the mind keeps searching for answers, or at least for insights.
To pass into death is an adventure, for sure. Near the moment of his passing, Henry James said, “This is the distinguished moment.” What the passage does is to raise again the question of final perfection. I believe in universal salvation, which is to say that everyone eventually comes to something like Dante's beatific vision, which phases out of time into the Eternal Now. That term isn't easy to understand. I have heard even theologians deride eternity as boring. That flagrantly misrepresents the concept. Boredom presupposes time that endures without changes, whereas eternity is outside of time.
BENEKE Boredom is when time is a weight burdening you, and you want to get rid of it.
SMITH Exactly, which is why it could not possibly characterize eternity. There are, however, two conjectures as to what the soul experiences in eternity. We must keep in mind that we are out of our depth here, and that these are what Plato would call no more than “likely tales,” that is, human imagination's best stab at the mystery. One conjecture is dualistic. Here the soul retains its separateness and beholds, timelessly, the Glory, in keeping with Ramakrishna's dictum, “I want to taste sugar, not be sugar.” In the nondualist version, what the soul beholds is so overwhelming that it commands the soul's complete attention, all 100 percent of it. With zero attention left for itself, that self drops from sight, leaving only what its attention is fixed on. As the Hindus say, “The dewdrop has slipped into the shining sea.”
BENEKE This sounds like the German mystic Meister Eckhart saying that “the eye through which God sees us is the eye through which we see God.”
SMITH You have it word perfect, though I am still not sure I understand what those words say. Something like what I was saying, I suppose. All the traditions make the point, though, that unless you are the rare case of a Hindu or Buddhist nonreturner, your spiritual work is not complete when you “drop the body,” as Indians refer to death. Something remains to be done. Hindus and Buddhists say that something gets accomplished in this same world in the new bodies into which they reincarnate. The Abrahamic religions, on the other hand—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—defer that further work on other planes: purgatory, hell, or other bardos, to borrow Tibetan vocabulary. The similarity that underlies these different imageries is quite apparent.
In the period immediately after death there may be a lot of confusion and bewilderment. Swedenborg thought that the first job old-timers in heaven had respecting newcomers was to convince them that they were dead. (I find the thought that heaven is that much like Stockholm rather charming, but also fanciful.) But there are also indications from psychical research—which I don't totally dismiss, though you have to step carefully. There are souls on the other side that are as confused as we are. Channelers and mediums beware! A lot of static gets mixed into the messages. Some souls may even decompose into fragmented residues. The intermediate realm between heaven and earth may be a real mess.
BENEKE Do you think channeling—spirits running through people—provides evidence of the spirit world, a realm beyond the physical?
SMITH There is no conclusive proof that convinces the Bay Area skeptics. Still, Plato took his to his metaxy, his “intermediate realm,” which housed spirits like Eros, and Socrates's daimon, who never told him what to do but warned him what not to do. Plato took the spirit realm seriously, and I am inclined to do so also. I treat shamanism, for example, with respect. Roger Walsh's book The Spirit of Shamanism finesses the questions of whether the shamans’ “allies” are a part of their own psyches or exist objectively apart from them. But whatever the geography of the case, in spiritual matters, space never functions as more than a metaphor for difference. Walsh too, as a professor of psychiatry, takes shamanism seriously. Wherever we choose to position them, shamanic “allies” are objectively other than the shamans’ conscious minds, and they function accordingly. By the way, shamans appear in the oldest cave drawings we have, which date back about twenty thousand years, and suggest that shamanism may be humankind's oldest religion.
BENEKE The conventional way to dismiss all this is to say that consciousness is a product of the brain; you alter the brain in certain ways, and you alter consciousness. When the brain stops functioning, consciousness stops.
SMITH That could be the case, but I consider it a prejudice of minds that I have come to believe that what we can get our hands on is most real. My reaction to it is like T. S. Eliot's on reading Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship. He said it left him with no idea where the truth lay except that it had to be in the opposite direction from the book in hand.
I find it most interesting that the science that saddled us with reductionistic materialism in its early centuries is now going beyond that position. Quantum mechanics is telling us that the universe of space, time, and matter derives from something that exceeds those matrices. Whether or not that Primordial X is conscious, as religion holds, science cannot say. But at least materialism is now old hat.
BENEKE Noam Chomsky talks about how no one expects a cat to do algebra; similarly, there is every reason to suppose that there are fundamental laws of the universe that humans will never be able to know because of our cognitive limitations. Perhaps our ignorance is inexorable.
SMITH I was Chomsky's colleague at MIT for fifteen years, and I honor him greatly, but here mystery seems a more precise word than ignorance. In principle ignorance can be dispelled, whereas mystery cannot be, because in its case every advance that we make opens onto horizons we didn't even know existed. We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery. That is not going to change.
BENEKE Let me ask an impolite question. Religion appears to some people—Freud, for example—as a form of wish fulfillment. Because people want the world to be a certain way, and because it is emotionally satisfying to believe the world is a certain way, people hold certain beliefs about God or life after death. There is evidence that where there are harsh child-rearing practices with a lot of corporal punishment, people conceive of God as very harsh and punitive. What do you make of this?
SMITH I take heart in your child-rearing example. The fact that God has been seen predominately as a loving parent suggests that harsh, punitive, corporal punishment has been the exception rather than the rule. But your question itself I don't take as impolite at all. It introduces an important issue, the appropriateness of psychologizing. Philosophers consider psychologizing a logical fallacy for being ad hominem; it diverts attention from the content of an issue to the persons who are discussing it. “Two plus two equals four” isn't untrue because the person who said it was drunk at the time. That's a crude example of psychologizing, but Freud's critique of religion and those of Marx and Nietzsche as well have the same form.
This is not to say that psychological considerations are irrelevant. We should be wary of what drunks say, and if Freud had proved that religious beliefs derive only, or even primarily, from wishful thinking and father images, I would accept his reasoning and could live with it. But he didn't come close to doing that, so I see his theories as half-truths. There are textbook cases (I won't venture how many) in which they come close to being the full truth about beliefs. But to generalize from these and turn a half-truth into the full truth is a blatant case of disciplinary imperialism. Psychology—or, in the case of Marx's “opiate of the people,” sociology—colonizes religion and tailors it to fit its theories. You can see that I'm worked up on the point.
Furthermore, the psychologizing sword cuts both ways. If my beliefs simply reflect my character, yours reflect yours. If I believe because I am infantile, you disbelieve because you are counterdependent. You see why philosophers aren't fond of ad hominen arguments. They degenerate into trading insults. I come back to the idea of the world as a Rorschach blot. If you see it as consisting only of matter, then immaterial things that other people believe in will appear to you as projections. They, in turn, will see you as prey to tunnel vision and blind to half of what exists.
BENEKE Tell us about your experience with your Zen master in Kyoto.
SMITH I was drawn to Buddhism through D. T. Suzuki, whose writings held out the prospect of at least a taste of satori, the enlightenment experience, if one practiced Zen. I was in my mid-thirties, and at that stage I wanted that experience more than anything else in the world, so I entered Zen training, which led eventually to a monastery in Kyoto and koan training under a Zen master.
Rinzai Zen (the branch that I was in) uses koans [traditional Zen mental exercises] in its training. Koans are of different kinds, but the beginning ones are rather like shaggy-dog stories in that they involve questions—riddles, really—that make no rational sense. The one I was given was longer than most, so I won't repeat it in full, but it came down to this: How could one of the greatest Zen masters have said that dogs do not have Buddha-natures when the Buddha has said that even grass possesses it? For two months, I banged my head against that contradiction for eight hours a day. I was sitting in the cramped lotus position and reporting to my roshi, or Zen master, one-on-one at five o'clock each morning, what I had come up with. Precious little! It was the most frustrating assignment I had ever been given. I seemed to be getting absolutely nowhere, though I did discover as the weeks slipped by that the final word in the koan, mu (which translates into “no”), seemed to function more and more like the om mantra that I had worked with in Hinduism.
The climax came during the final eight days in the Myoshinji Monastery in the middle of a kind of final-exam period where everything else gets tabled so the monks can meditate almost around the clock. As a novice, I was permitted to sleep three and a half hours each night, but I found that grossly insufficient, and the sleep deprivation was the hardest ordeal I had ever faced. After the first night I was sleepy, after the second I was bushed, and it kept getting worse from there.
I still don't understand how Zen training works, but it seems clear that the initial koans force the rational mind to the end of its tether, and that sleep deprivation figures in somewhere along the line. If you can't get your mind into an altered state any other way, sleep deprivation will eventually do it for you, for deprived of dreams, the mind becomes psychotic.
Something like that happened to my mind two days before the monastic term ended. That afternoon I went storming into the roshi in a frenzy. Self-pity had long since become boring; that day I was in a rage. I was furious. What a way to treat human beings, I kept telling myself, and charged in to my roshi prepared, not just to throw in the towel, but to throw it straight at his face.
I entered the audience room with the required ritual, palms clasped together. Turning only straight corners because there are no diagonal shortcuts in Zen, I made my way to where he was sitting in his priestly robes. His short, heavy stick (for clobbering if need be) was lying in his lap. Sinking to my knees on the cushion before him, I touched my head to the floor and flexed my outstretched fingers upward, an Indian gesture that symbolizes lifting the dust from the Buddha's feet. Then I sat back on my heels, and our eyes met in a mutual glare. For some moments he said nothing, then, “How's it going?” He was one of the two roshis in the world then who could speak English. It sounded like a calculated taunt.
“Terrible!” I shouted.
“You think you are going to get sick, don't you?”
More taunting sarcasm, so I let him have it.
“Yes, I think I'm going to get sick!” I yelled. For several days my throat had been contracting to the point where I was having to labor to breathe.
Then something extraordinary happened. His face suddenly relaxed, its taunting, goading expression was gone, and with total matter-of-factness he said, “What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put both aside and go forward.”
What I despair of conveying to you is the impact those fifteen words had on me. Without reflecting for a moment, I found myself saying to myself, “By God, he's right!” How was he able to spin me around, defuse my rage, and return me to lucidity in a twinkling? I will never comprehend. Never have I felt so instantly reborn and energized. It was as if there was a pipe connecting his hara—his abdomen, where the Japanese locate the self's center—to mine. I exited in the prescribed manner, not only determined to stick out the two remaining days, but knowing that I could do so.
It didn't occur to me at the time that in that climactic moment I might have passed my koan, and I returned to the States assuming that I had not. But when I related my story to a dharma brother (someone with whom I'd undergone spiritual training) who had trained for twelve years under my roshi, he said he wasn't at all sure that I had not passed it. He reminded me that the answer to the early koans is not a rational proposition but an experience. That, at the climactic moment in my training, I was able not just to acknowledge the identity of life's opposites theoretically, but to experience their identity. In my case the identity of sickness and health struck him as a strong foretaste of the enlightenment experience.
BENEKE Therapists talk about interventions, which require a certain timing and art where the therapist picks just the right moment to say just the right thing that leads to insight. Your roshi intervened in just the right way.
SMITH Apparently so. It still seems to me like genius. He knew exactly where I was, and administered exactly the light tap—ping—that changed everything.
BENEKE Your early work focused on the historical religions, ones that have written texts and cumulative histories. At a certain point you came to appreciate oral traditions as well.
SMITH I now see that in addition to the three great families of historical religions—East Asian, South Asian, and Abrahamic, or Western—there is a fourth: the primal, tribal, and exclusively oral family which is not inferior to the other three. What enabled me to honor tribal peoples as our equals is that while writing adds, it also subtracts. We tend to think that because unlettered peoples only talk and we both talk and write, we have everything they have, and something in addition. I no longer think that it's true. Writing exacts a price, which is loss of the sense of what is important.
Visualize a tribe gathered around its campfire at the close of the day. Everything its ancestors learned the hard way, through generations of trial and error, from medicinal plants to the myths that empower their lives and give them meaning, is stored in their skulls, and there only. Obviously they are going to keep reviewing what is important for them, and let what is trivial fade into oblivion.
BENEKE Tell us about your encounter with the Masai warriors in Africa.
SMITH I was in Tanzania for a conference in the late 1960s and didn't want to leave without a glimpse of big game in its natural habitat. There were no tours, so I found a fly-by-night rental joint and took off in a rickety jalopy for the Serengeti Plain. There was no road map, but that was logical because as far as I could make out there were no roads. I did encounter one road sign during the day, but I couldn't read it, besides which it had fallen over, so I couldn't tell which way its arms pointed.
A couple of hours into the desert, it suddenly dawned on me that I was completely lost. And out of gas. When we rent a car here we assume the tank to be full. Not there. They give you about enough to get out of the lot, but I didn't know that and hadn't checked. At a total standstill, I could not think of a thing to do. The car was too hot to sit in, and there were no trees to shade me from the blistering sun. Giraffes were friendly; one virtually looked over my shoulder when I had had to change a threadbare tire. There were other animals, but at that hour no lions. Dry bones were everywhere, though—portents of my impending fate. I ate my packed lunch, started rationing my last bottle of water, and tried to think of a plan of action.
None had suggested itself when two figures appeared dimly on the horizon. I started toward them, but with every step I took, they retreated. I quickened my pace, making frantic gestures of distress, and they gradually slowed their pace to allow me to catch up with them. They were disconcertingly large and wore nothing but spears taller than themselves, and flapping cloths over their shoulders to ward off the sun somewhat.
What then could I do? I was in human company but without words to communicate. Something had to be done, so I seized one of them by the wrist and marched him to my dysfunctional car, his companion in tow. This seemed to amuse them, and why not? What had our move to a pile of metal accomplished?
The two of them conversed and then started to leave, but I seized my hostage's wrist again. Human beings were my only lifeline, and I wasn't going to let it be severed. More laughter and conversation between them, and then one of them started off while leaving his companion with me. When he returned he had in tow a small boy who knew a few words of English, such as hello, good-bye, and the like. So, pointing in different directions, I said, “School, school!”
He gave no signs of comprehension, but after more conversation, he and the man who had fetched him went off, leaving my hostage with me. In about an hour, the man returned with ten adult cohorts, and the sun set that evening on as bizarre a scene (I feel sure) as the Serengeti Plain had ever staged: a white man, seated in state at the wheel of his car steering, while twelve Masai warriors pushed him across the sands. My propellers were taking the experience as a great lark. Laughing and all talking simultaneously, they sounded like a flock of happy birds. My first thought was, Who listens? then immediately, Who cares? They were having such a great time.
Six miles across the plain they delivered me to the school I had asked for, which turned out to be Olduvai Gorge, where a decade or so earlier Louis and Mary Leakey [with their son Richard] discovered the tooth that “set the human race back a million years,” as the press reported their discovery. That encounter left me with a profound sense of human connectedness. There we were, as different in every way—ethnically, linguistically, culturally—as any two groups on our planet. Yet without a single word in common, we connected. They understood my predicament and responded with a will and with style.
Beware of the differences that blind us to the unity that binds us.
