TOP STORY: RELIGION AND CULTURE: Religion scholar Huston Smith graces PBS series

c. 1996 Religion News Service WASHINGTON (RNS)-Scholar Huston Smith literally wrote the book on world religions. It can also be said that his life story reads as if it was lifted from the pages of his most enduring work. Smith’s”The Religions of Man”-first published in 1958 when he was just 38, and since reissued as”The […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)-Scholar Huston Smith literally wrote the book on world religions. It can also be said that his life story reads as if it was lifted from the pages of his most enduring work.

Smith’s”The Religions of Man”-first published in 1958 when he was just 38, and since reissued as”The World’s Religions”-is used in more introduction-to-religion courses than any other text. Translated into 14 languages, it’s sold more than 1.5 million copies and is also available in a lushly illustrated coffee table format.


But Smith is no detached academic researcher. He’s a self-described mystic who has attempted to understand the world of religion from within. For Smith, all genuine religious expression points to the same transcendent truth.”I stand with al-Ghazali (an 11th-century Muslim mystic), who said the soul is a mosque for Muslims, a church for Christians, a temple for Hindus, an altar for Zoroastrians and a pasture for gazelles,”he said.

At 76, and still teaching part-time at the University of California at Berkeley, Smith is arguably the world’s best-known scholar of religion. His genius is making the complex readily understandable. Still, he’s hardly a household name-but that may soon change.

Award-winning TV interviewer Bill Moyers is about to launch him into media orbit.”The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith: A Bill Moyers Special”debuts on PBS nationwide on Tuesday, March 26. The five-part series-one-hour segments to be broadcast on successive Tuesdays-could well bring Smith the same mass acclaim that Moyers’ celebrated 1988 series conferred on the late mythologist Joseph Campbell.

The six-part Campbell series drew an average weekly audience of 2.2 million, making it one of PBS’s most popular presentations. PBS spokesman Stu Kantor said the network is anticipating similar viewer interest in the Smith series.

Smith-a lanky man with a close-cropped white beard, a perpetual twinkle in his eye and a poet’s feel for language-said the possibility of stardom at his advanced age seems unreal.”But I’ve been warned to expect it,”he said as he sipped water and munched Hershey kisses during a recent interview in a Washington hotel room.”Perhaps I’ll get an unlisted phone number.” Moyers, in a separate interview, called Smith a visionary who has long sought to educate the public about the need in a pluralistic society to understand the religious beliefs of others-no matter how exotic they may appear.”The changing nature of American religion-the startling growth of Islam here, the growing influence of Buddhist and Hindu teachings-is a story Huston Smith clearly identified years ago,”Moyers said.”His life’s work has been to teach that we must put aside our prejudices if we are to truly understand the beliefs of others. Look around today and you understand how important that is.” For Smith, the Moyers special is”a kind of closing of the circle.” As an obscure professor at St. Louis’ Washington University in 1955, Smith went on educational television, as public broadcasting was then known, and gave the nation a crash course in world religions. The 17-week series was a hit-100,000 viewers each week, a considerable audience in those days-and his career was launched.

With Moyers, Smith discusses his personal encounters with six of the world’s great religions-Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam and the related Chinese systems of Confucianism and Taoism. Each has influenced Smith, whose views on religion have been transformed since his days in St. Louis.

The son of Methodist missionaries in China, Smith remained essentially a mainstream liberal Protestant-despite his growing interest in mysticism-until the late 1950s, when he became a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


In Boston, he became involved with a then little-known Harvard University professor named Timothy Leary. Leary, as the world was soon to find out, was experimenting-legally at the time-with psychedelic drugs, and Smith became his consultant. His job was to compare drug-induced states of altered consciousness with the experiences described by mystics.

On New Year’s Day 1961, Smith ingested LSD (“How else could I know what they were talking about?”). He concluded afterward that the experiences described by mystics throughout the ages were”descriptively indistinguishable”from the altered consciousness brought about by certain psychedelic drugs.

Moreover, the experience validated what he was already coming to believe about religion’s mystical core.”It allowed me to experience directly what I previously had taken on faith,”he said,”which is that all things derive from an ultimate unity that is perfect in every respect, and that that perfection can be accessed and experienced.” Some years later, Smith wrote a controversial article for the Journal of Philosophy in which he argued on behalf of the religious importance of consciousness-altering drugs. But he also wrote that while drugs can produce”religious experiences … it is less evident that they can produce religious lives.””The carry-over from a chemically induced mystical awareness is minimal because the experience takes place outside of a full religious context,”Smith explained recently.”Better to cultivate natural mystical experiences.” However, even natural mystical experiences-defined by Smith as”altered states of reality in which only God seems to exist and all that exists is God”-fall short of religion’s ultimate purpose, he said. “The purpose of religion is altered traits, not altered states,”Smith said.”It’s about how we live our lives.” In 1970, Smith discovered Sufism-Islam’s mystical branch-and was taken with what he called its”depth of metaphysical penetration.”To his chagrin, he realized that the first edition of”The Religions of Man”made no mention of Sufism.”That’s how ignorant I was of the mystical back in the ’50s,”he said.

Today, Smith’s incorporation of Sufi practices-he prays five times daily in the Muslim manner-is an example of the degree to which his life mirrors his belief in the unity of spirit. But it’s just one example.

Christian and Hindu prayers and practices are also part of his daily religious regimen. One daughter converted to Judaism, and when she died Smith followed Jewish mourning practices. He spent extended time in a Zen Buddhist monastery, and his wife practices Vipassana Buddhism. He also vehemently defends the religious authenticity of what he calls the”unlettered traditions”-the world’s tribal faiths-which he considers second to none.

Yet Smith insists that his first loyalty is to Christianity, even if he feels the need to”shore up”his faith by drawing upon the teachings and practices of other traditions”to satisfy my soul.””My body belongs to the faith into which I was born,”said Smith,”and I will be buried in it. But you’d have to label me a Confucian Methodist. My loyalty to the church is a kind of ancestor worship.” Smith said that maintaining his connection to the Methodist church-he’s a regular at Sunday services-has also kept him from drifting into”cafeteria spirituality.””Religion is organic and its parts are all organically related. We think we can pick what we want and discard the rest, but the ego tends to take over and lead us astray,”he said.”One needs the outward discipline and order of one faith. But at the same time, it would be ridiculous to cage the spirit. It goes where it desires.” (STORY CAN END HERE)


In his conversations with Moyers, himself an ordained Southern Baptist minister, Smith dwells on the best that religion offers.”If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race,”Smith said.

There is relatively little mention of religion’s dark side; its concurrent history of military adventures, false prophets, intolerance and persecution.”That’s for another time,”Moyers said in a separate interview.”Besides, that’s usually all that gets on television.” But Smith can also be highly critical of organized religion as it is expressed in contemporary America.

Despite his ongoing connection to Methodism, for example, he regards the mainline Christian churches of today as”washed out theologically.” Mainline faith”has lost its sense of the infinite. … They’re great at good works, but have surrendered to a secular, scientific and humanistic worldview formed by Einstein, Marx, Darwin and Freud.”That’s a restricted way of looking at reality, because it deals only with what comes in through our sensory receptors. So the spiritual aspect slips through the rubric of life just as the sea slips through the net of the fisherman,”he said.

Smith is equally critical of conservative Christians who seek to impose their beliefs on others. He is most upset at what he calls their intolerance.”The conservatives are right to say that our spiritual life as a nation is unduly fettered by a misreading of the church-state separation clause,”he said.”But their expression of their beliefs, their protest, take forms that are quite ugly.”They are at their ugliest when they are anti-homosexual, when they use their beliefs to argue against civil liberties for those they think of as sinful.”

MJP END RIFKIN

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