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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION: 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 contradicted, in how one—particularly how he—lived outside of teaching hours. Almost as much as for The World's Religion, Huston is known for being a professionally lovely man. When the TV interviewer Bill Moyers met Huston, Moyers was so charmed that he created a five-part TV series on Huston for PBS. The Wisdom of Huston Smith showed the correlation between the man and the knowledge, between Huston's worldview (he prefers that word over religion) and how he embodied that worldview in day-to-day life. We might thus want to steal a glance through the window, to first gain a personal sense of the living thinker behind his written-down thoughts.
For a full portrait of Huston the place to look is his memoirs, Tales of Wonder. Given the limited space here, I propose doing something far more modest. If I recall my first encounters with Huston, it is because they are of small, manageable size and have the advantage that I know about them. They also have the advantage of being typical. Everyone, I gather, reports something similar when first meeting Huston.
Our first meeting happened almost by chance. My publisher sent Huston a manuscript of mine requesting a blurb, which he with characteristic generosity supplied; Huston also wrote me personally and ended his note with a polite, “If you are ever in the Bay Area, stop by.”
I was going to the Bay Area, for one day before heading to Northern California, so—what the hell—I phoned him. Hardly surprising, he was unavailable that particular day: he was famous and on the go, especially for someone already past his eighty-fifth year. I let the prospect drop, but in his cracking voice he said, “No, wait. If you are going to Northern California, you have to come back. What day back?”
That day he would be there, but the problem was, though Huston began going deaf in his early fifties and can read lips perfectly, he cannot lip-read over the telephone. Unable to hear, he said, “I will now proceed down the hours of the day. Stop me at the right one. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. One. Two. Three—” “That one,” I yelled.
At three P.M. on that day Huston was waiting at the Berkeley BART station. He was charming from the word go. “So you're not just a writer,” he joked. “You're a human being, too.” Huston started the car, saying, “On the drive home, we'll observe the Buddha's Noble Silence. That way, who knows, maybe we'll get there alive.” Someone else might have whined, Too damned old, can't talk and drive at the same time, but Huston, with his allusion to the Buddha, converted it into something of a game. At his house, as he got out of the car osteoporosis had his body hunched over practically in the shape of a question mark. He saw me looking and said, “I know. But it's workable.”
Once inside, conversation ranged. No subject was off-limits. Huston told of the tragedy much on his mind, of his beloved granddaughter's murder (described at length in Tales of Wonder). He described how a reporter had rudely asked him, “Is your faith in God shaken now?” Huston considered it the most foolish question ever put to him: Human tragedies do not invalidate the possibility of hallowed sacredness but, to the contrary, make it more necessary. Switching from his private life to his work, Huston reported just finishing The Soul of Christianity, and he had, he said, two more books in him to write. After that he would break his pencil, or rather turn off his computer, and read everything that he had never had time to. At present he was reading a wonderful book, Don Quixote. Before driving me back to the BART station, he asked, “Would you want the manuscript of The Soul of Christianity? Or too cumbersome for the plane?” It seemed more than mere hospitality to a passing guest. The question appeared quietly addressed as much to himself: What else can I do? How can I enhance this present moment, to nudge it toward indelibility? Every turn of the day presents either an obstacle or an opportunity, and Huston wants to maximize each, including this one, into an opportunity realized.
Obstacles metamorphose into opportunities? I recalled how over the phone Huston had arranged our appointment time: semi-deafness was not to be an obstacle. Nor was his inability to converse on the drive home; nor was his osteoporosis. Huston is a modern religious figure who shows that religion is more than theological truths and greater than moral precepts. Religion, for Huston, seems to be what allows you to take the difficult, the unacceptable, the unthinkable (such as his granddaughter's death), and, denying nothing, allows you to bear it, sorrow as the tragic other side of love. Such was my reflection as I got on the BART train.
Our next visit came about when I was to interview Huston for a magazine article about spirituality and aging. He was by then more housebound, no need to designate an hour, just say that on such-and-such a day I'd be coming. But such-and-such a day followed, as sometimes happens, after such-and-such a night. That morning I awoke too debauched to interview a groundhog. But I roused myself and once at his house talked of this and that, and in a superficial way it could hardly have been more pleasant. At the end Huston exclaimed, “So enjoyable. This wasn't an interview. It was a social occasion. And what a wonderful one!”
How gracious was Huston's remark, especially considering—though it sounded like a compliment—I could detect his disappointment. Although eighty-eight he still wanted the intellectual give-and-take, wanted to be stimulated and challenged: his mind wanted a symposium. The visit (though embarrassing to me) showed the powerlessness of age to diminish the eagerness and engagement of his mind. As for the magazine article, Huston had given me, without my needing to ask a single question, a demonstration of the vigor of spirituality and aging.
The following year his publisher asked me if I would work with Huston on his memoirs. I would have done it for free. I wanted to take down the dictation of ninety years of a better way to live, to learn the secrets of remaking adversity into its opposite. The World's Religions (and the world religions) exist out there: this would like taking a front-row seat—as the reader here has such a seat—and seeing the mind behind them from within.
To return to the beginning. For the life arc Huston was to traverse there was no earlier precedent. From the vantage point of a century ago, his career would have been flatly inconceivable. He grew up a missionary's son in a Chinese village that had no electricity, no running water, no movies, no radio, and no newspaper. Saint Augustine or Plutarch would not have suffered future shock there. As a missionary's son, Huston was a devout Christian with an unshakable faith. Today, some ninety years later, he is a devout Christian with faith unshakable. The beginning and the ending, though they sound similar, are worlds apart. Worldview (from the German Weltanschauung) is a favorite word of Huston's, for good reason. To get from point A to point Z, from there to here, he had to discard one worldview after another, the way a gangly youth sheds clothes he's outgrown. Or to use a different metaphor: A historical building, because of zoning regulations, retains its old facade but is entirely renovated inside. Likewise, his serene childhood Christianity Huston has refurbished from within, with panelings and moldings hardly known to Christianity before.
At age sixteen Huston left China to attend college in America. His ship sailing across the Pacific crossed centuries, from a missionary backwater in Asia to high-tech America, with its wheels turning and churning, all science and rationality and material progress. At age sixteen Huston felt that this-worldly sleek modernity was heaven on earth, salvation in secular terms. He mastered this secularized salvation oddly from a theologian, the renowned Henry Wieman, his professor at the University of Chicago (and subsequently his father-in-law), who had advanced religion to the point where it could dispense with, well, religion. Unitarians—so runs an old joke—believe in one God at most. In Wieman's theology the Creator has been replaced by the creative process, which is extraordinary but not supernatural; Christ the Redeemer, replaced by a Jesus who catalyzes his disciples’ creative ability to transcend societal limitations. In his twenties Huston believed in this heavenly city in the earthly here and now where everyone would be educated, equal, materially satisfied, and emotionally content. This is the modern Enlightenment (and for a while Huston's) vision: remove theological distraction, focus on what we can rationally control, and we may improve this present world until we need no other. All the founding fathers of the modern world, from Lenin and Sun Yat-sen to Atatürk and Nehru, had subscribed to some version of this beautiful secular dream.
Huston watched that semi-utopian dream—so new, so shining, so promising—shatter into pieces. All the world, Africa and Asia and the Middle East, was expected to xerox into secular middle-class replicas of Euro-America. The purveyors of this visionary modernism were caught off-guard and stunned when religious fundamentalists—instead of fading into inconsequence—began assuming control of politics and governments. Huston was early in perceiving the limitations in the Enlightenment vision. If Huston was prescient, though, it was because a worldview in which spirituality was marginalized had failed to satisfy him personally. Although he fought for racial and economic justice, from his childhood lingered more elusive longings and meanings that no civil polity, no matter how just, can fulfill. If the physical world is all, Huston thought, then we are like condemned prisoners on death row, trying to forget our situation by ordering up as tasty a last meal as possible.
All the “principal architects of the modern mind” (as he calls them in Why Religion Matters) had thought in a way Huston was ceasing to think. The intellectual headmasters of l'école moderne had all been, he now realized, rabidly antireligious. One had likened religion to a drug (Marx); another compared it to useless extra baggage (Darwin); a third, to a slave's mentality (Nietzsche); while the fourth dismissed it in one word, an illusion (Freud). Huston would hear similar disparagements about his chosen field his whole professional life. His colleagues would wonder, sometimes aloud, how anyone so likable and intelligent could believe such mumbo-jumbo and not only believe it but actually teach it in a classroom. At MIT a social scientist came up to Huston and with a witty double entendre asked, “Do you know the difference between you and me? I count and you don't.”
His secular period now behind him, Huston was counting in a different way, or rather counting on something else. Indeed, he may well have become the first person of such prominence in contemporary academia to take religion seriously. The religion department, in the few universities that then had one, had a bias, strange to say, against the very thing they taught. For the modern study of religion took place within the modern view of reality, which denies to religion (unlike politics, say, or economics) a legitimacy of its own. What was taught as religion was in effect sociology or history or anthropology, using religion as its case study. When Huston read John Updike's Roger's Version, he found a passage he could have written himself. A Jesus freak confronts the professor of religion:
What you call religion around here is what other people call sociology. That's how you teach it, right? Everything from the Gospels to The Golden Bough, Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, it all happened, it's historical fact, it's anthropology, it's ancient texts, it's humanly interesting, right? But that's so safe. How can you go wrong? Not even the worst atheist in the world denies that people have been religious.…[S]tudying all that stuff doesn't say anything, doesn't commit you to anything, except some perfectly harmless, humane cultural history. What I'm coming to talk to you about is God as a fact, a fact about to burst upon us, right up out of Nature.
The courses Huston offered in world religions did not play it safe. He tried to teach students about the vast unexplored human possibilities that he was in the process of learning himself through encountering the world's religions.
For instance? The most important thing Huston discovered was that there are radically different ways of being. Different people have contrary emotional responses to the same social stimulus; they give the same phenomenon opposite interpretations and then mistake that interpretation for the objective world. Venturing beyond Judeo-Christianity, Huston was amazed: all people believe alike even less than they all physically look alike. Dissimilar predispositions had proliferated into divers paths to salvation. In Hinduism, for instance, there are four basic human temperaments, hence there are four kinds of yogis. There are karma yogis (e.g., Gandhi) who attain liberation through action, and there are bhakti yogis (e.g., Saint Francis or Mother Teresa) who have great feeling and love their way to salvation. Raja yogis (e.g., the Buddha) meditate their way there, while jnana yogis reach the ultimate goal through intellect or vision. Thus Huston came to realize that the world is incorrigibly plural. And in a shock of recognition Huston identified himself as a jnana yogi, somebody who could use his intelligence, his teaching and writing, to help resacramentalize the world.
How can life be resacramentalized? Huston realized: Not easily, not merely by thinking it so. Lasting salvation rarely occurs in a book-lined study, and the words Huston wrote in such places reflected what he had experienced outside of them. He traveled to Japan and India; he sought out sages and swamis; he lived in ashrams and monasteries; he participated in retreats and sesshins and kumbla melas. He also spent time on Native American Indian reservations and befriended psychics and experimented with hallucinogenic drugs, for ways to enhance and ennoble the human pilgrimage.
Back in the 1960s when you said you'd returned from a trip, you might be asked, Which kind? Huston was interested in both kinds, voyages outward and voyages inward. Indeed, some cultural histories remember Huston less for what he wrote than for what he ingested. Although his use of mescaline was infrequent, Huston never denied the importance of his experience. In the blink of an eye, or rather in swallowing a pill, the curtains seemed to part, opening up another, the mystic's world(view).
The curtains part. On New Year's Eve, 1961, when Huston took two tabs of mescaline at Timothy Leary's house, it might have been odd if he hadn't. Far from bearing a stigma, hallucinogenic drugs then carried a positive connotation, a gateway to elusive wisdom. Huston recalled William James's experience after taking nitrous oxide (laughing gas):
Our normal waking consciousness…is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…. [A]pply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all there completeness….No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
Huston had read these sentences before; on the night of January 1, at Leary's house, he lived them. Mescaline allowed the mystical vision he knew from books to rise up through his senses. After taking the mescaline, his awareness crossed through the gateway of the three dimensions into normally hidden aspects of existence that evidently had been waiting there, as James had said, behind the thinnest of partitions. He laughed to think how the great religious visionaries of history, had they experiences like this—and they probably had—were just a bunch of hack reporters. In a suburban house in Newton, Massachusetts, Huston had become a visionary himself—“one who not merely believes in the existence of a more momentous world than this one but who has actually visited it.” Certain hallucinogenic (or “entheogenic”) drugs, he saw, could occasion genuine religious experiences, even if—unlike Judaism, say, or Native American spirituality—they do not solidify into an enduring religious life.
That Huston achieved his mystical experience through drugs, which were a “tool” of his particular time, does not discredit it or him. He wanted to be more than a professor; he would be the person who says, I am here, I am not aloof, I and the world are not separate. Thus after World War II, when America went from isolationism to becoming an international power, how fitting it was that Huston then reinterpreted religion using a global perspective. After the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima he joined other concerned intellectuals to oppose nuclear proliferation. Later he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to help end segregation at Washington University, and later still he protested America's war in Vietnam. During the 1960s, in the years of student activism, Huston went from lecturing formally to a give-and-take interaction in his classes, modeled on Martin Buber's I and Thou. As feminist consciousness grew, he corrected his ingrained male-superiority bias and treated his female students with equal if not greater respect. Do such things have anything to do with religion? No, and yes. Unless you would be a holy hermit, Huston thought, you must quit the cloister of abstract theories and go out and engage the spirit of your times.
Which raises a question: Was there a unique “spiritual” character to Huston's era? And what was it like to be a religious person, a jnana yogi, during the twentieth century? Let's take a look.
Everything has a history—the rise and fall of nations, the novel, even the forms of intimate relationships—so it would be hardly surprising were there a subterranean history of spirituality, too. Huston was an attentive, attuned observer of the unexpected spiritual developments unfolding in his time. For example, he studied how the lamas fleeing the holocaust in Tibet reshaped their medieval religion into contemporary, verifiable experience. Even innovations in technology, which Huston's life span was agog with, can color the complexion of religious truth. To cite one example: people who died used to stay dead, but now medical technology can occasionally resuscitate the corpse. In these near-death experiences (NDEs) the resurrected, reporting their “other side” experience, seem for the first time to actually demonstrate death terminating people's life but not their consciousness. Huston's modus operandus was not merely to observe and record but also to participate in the changed and changing human inwardness of the twentieth century. He may have begun his life as a Christian and may be a Christian today, yet through such involvement—through his love-hate relationship with science, for instance, or in his exploration of other faiths—he has reinterpreted what Christianity can mean today.
In 1896 Andrew Dickson White published his influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and that war was still waging when Huston was young. He recognized how in modernity science had replaced religion as the force that would redeem the world; it was science (and a social scientist) that told Huston that he did not count. Huston took up the challenge: in books and essays he argued that while science was valid and valuable, “scientism”—a materialist worldview extrapolated from science—was unproven, hence even unscientific. Yet even as he wrote, science was changing its tune. Dark matter, observer-determined reality, particles interacting across millions of light-years, and so on, all were so fantastical as to make angels dancing on pinheads seem positively mundane. Huston was almost incredulous: science was on his side now? Folks who believe in more than what can be vouchsafed by the five senses used to be dismissed as poets or lunatics; now they were called physicists and cosmologists. “Science that saddled us with reductionistic materialism is going beyond that position,” Huston exulted. “Materialism is now old hat.” Science, formerly the rebuttal to a speculative or nonmaterialist worldview, had become its corroboration. The mountain had come to Muhammad.
It was a new era. Huston felt its newness in the changed way religions were relating to one another. Throughout history each faith had been largely sequestered in its own territory or ideology. Now they were suddenly in each other's face: far had become near, and a slight familiarity with one's religious neighbors was a good reason for hating them. Each religion, feeling hemmed in and threatened on an ever more claustrophobic globe, developed a militant fundamentalist strain that was preaching hate or, worse, lighting dynamite. Yet there was also, across at the other end of the spectrum, a “liberal” concern as religion became plural, religions. It was the right and progressive thing to say that all were valid, but did that not dilute the absolute truth value of any particular one? If all religions are true, the worry was, then in a sense none are. Huston's response to this quandary was neither fundamentalism nor the “spiritual supermarket”: he showed a third possibility besides jihad or ecumenical conference. He had practiced Judeo-Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam and gotten some benefit from each and more from all of them together. Why straitjacket yourself? Everyone has different personae—a wife can also be a mother, a daughter, and an accountant simultaneously—and Huston likened the world's religions to humanity's various personae. Personally he had tried them all on for size, and they all fit. This may be Huston's chief lesson for the twenty-first century (in one sentence): empathizing with your enemy/neighbor is better than blowing him—and in the process, yourself—to smithereens.
Huston knew the dark, destructive side of religion, yet he chose to write about its positive aspects for the same reason that one listens to good, not bad, music. How else, he said, can you gain some personal benefit from it? Throughout his career Huston, by taking religion so seriously, was looked on by his colleagues as an atavism, a curiosity, out of step with his times. Now, in retrospect, it seems that it was he who had his finger on the pulse, after all. This Reader conveys the best of Huston Smith's endeavors to understand, finger on the pulse, spirituality in our time. More than understand: not academic monographs, his writings themselves came to play a part in the story of religion, as he attempted to make it meaningful, and helpful, for his contemporaries.
