The Way Things Are for Huston Smith

PREFACE The Way Things Are for Huston Smith In the summer of 1984, Huston Smith, the eminent historian of religion, arrived at the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, and like many a scholar before him, took a tour of the main library. The bounti- ful collection of books was a tantalizing sight, but as he followed the arrows and read the labels at the end of each shelf, such as History, Liter- ature, and Chemistry, it occurred to him that something vital was miss- ing. “Where is the arrow that points to Importance?” he asked himself. “Where is the arrow toward Wisdom?” In one form or another Huston Smith has been posing that question to himself—and the world—all his life. Where can we find what is ulti- mately meaningful? How can we discover what is truly worth knowing? For Smith, the poet T. S. Eliot described the dilemma more precisely than anyone else in our time when he asked in his poem “The Rock,” “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” The modern debate about learning what matters most has ancient roots. When the Ptolemies founded the Library of Alexandria in the third century b.c.e., their dream was no less than to collect a copy of everything ever written. Eventually, the library accumulated an estimated five hundred thousand scrolls and manu- scripts, but the library’s motto, etched in the stone lintel above the ix entrance, hinted at its deeper purpose: “The Place of the Healing of the Soul.” For as long as he can remember, Huston Smith tells us, he has been trying to find a balance between the secular and the sacred dimensions of learning. In his avowed love of the spiritual life, he has always felt com- pelled to explore—and champion—the world’s great religious traditions. When asked what he has gleaned from a lifetime of studying the religions of the world, he says it is “the winnowed wisdom of the human race.” More important, he adds, he has gained access to “another world to live in,” which he has variously described as the Eternal, the Timeless, the Ultimate, and the place where he encounters God. Beyond the poetic descriptions of the seemingly ineffable lies a more elemental one. “Religion is for me the search for the Real,” he told jour- nalist Timothy Beneke in 1996, “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.” Why we often feel unreal is at the core of his thinking: the dominant scientific—which Smith demotes to “scientistic”—worldview has shrunk our view of reality. Each time an eminent scientist, such as physicist Steven Weinberg, claims that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless,” Smith fears that science, while banqueting us with technological gains, is starving our souls by eclipsing the Transcendent. Defiant in the face of such nihilism, Smith has for decades communi- cated to his students and readers that this is not the way things are—life is not pointless, meaningless, purposeless. Instead, he admits to being driven to demonstrate the way things are, in fact—rich with purpose, value, and transcendental meaning. In the manner of one of his mentors, Aldous Huxley, he has cultivated “mystical empiricism” by compiling encounters with the Divine that saints, sages, and seers in every era have reported, a collection that makes a strong case for religion being the fun- damental humanizing force in history. PILGRIMAGE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS Huston Smith’s books are all still in print, his essays have been antholo- gized, and his documentary films are available on video, but the numer- ous interviews conducted with him over the years have not been col- x PREFACE lected until now. The twenty-two magazine and newspaper interviews and edited documentary film transcripts that compose this collection span three decades, from 1971 to 2002. I believe they provide a profound new source of insight into Smith’s views on the world’s religious heritage and its relevance for our times. Inevitably, the interviews cover some of the same ground as his books, essays, and articles, but these exchanges reveal a treasure trove of details about his long journey to discover the universal truths at the heart of humanity’s search for the ultimate nature of things. One of the richest discoveries for me came while I was poring through old clippings from Huston’s file cabinets. So animated were the interviews that I found myself listening to them, as if sitting in on a series of enthralling conversations. Slowly it dawned on me that not only was the content invariably brilliant, but so was the form. What emerged was evi- dence of the venerable art of conversation. I was prompted to recall Caliph Ali Ben Ali’s expression “A subtle conversation—Ah! That is the true Garden of Eden!” I thought of the time the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson confided to a friend that he would gladly walk a hundred miles through a snowstorm for one good conversation, and I remembered the incisive comment by the sociologist Peter Berger, who wrote that civilization advances by way of conversation. These interviews may also be regarded as creative dialogues, in physicist David Bohm’s sense of the “free flow of meaning” that is possible when people genuinely converse by listening to and sounding out each other. Writing and speaking are among the greatest pleasures we can cul- tivate in our lives, but there are vital distinctions between the two, which Huston respects and reflects on in his interview with educator Jeffrey Kane: Writing can be disconnected from the writer. There it is in print, dead and frozen. Speech, on the other hand, is not only alive; it is life, because it cannot be separated from the living person in one mode of his or her own being. Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them. The liveliness of these conversations with journalists, scholars, editors, and filmmakers reveals a meandering path that embodies what the poet PREFACE xi John Keats had in mind when he wrote, “A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory.” What unfolds in Huston Smith’s life is often allegor- ical of the story played out by innumerable modern people who have encountered the alternately exhilarating and terrifying brave new world of our modern multicultural times—and attempted to respect, under- stand, and then tolerate it. If our culture has become any more knowl- edgeable and accepting of other people’s religions, surely Huston has been in the vanguard of the movement. “Let your life speak,” say the Quakers, and Huston Smith’s life has spoken, sometimes as quietly as a Quaker service, and at other times almost shouting, as when he sees religious freedom being threatened. Born in 1919 as the son of missionary parents in rural China, Huston left when he was seventeen to venture off to America, where he planned to study for the ministry at Central Methodist College in Faytette, Mis- souri. By his junior year he had grown restive. One night during a fever- ish discussion with his fellow students on the meaning of life he had a realization he has described as “having the force of a conversion experi- ence.” What Smith discovered during his “night of fire,” as Pascal called his own epiphany, was the world of philosophy—the study of wisdom itself—and the encounter shifted his vocation from preaching to teach- ing. What began as an intellectual interest phased into a spiritual quest as well, which intensified during his graduate study at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. It was there, in the early 1940s, that he vowed to devote the rest of his life to reconciling what Alfred North Whitehead has called the two most powerful forces in history—science and religion. His vision, as a callow young idealist, was to bring religion in line with science, because at the time he thought science had the Big Picture. That notion quickly collapsed. But he has remained a life-long teacher whose major appointments have been evenly divided between philosophy and religious studies (a distinction he blithely ignores) at Washington University in St. Louis, Massachusetts Institute of Tech- nology, Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he retired as Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at age seventy-seven. With respect to the disciplinary distinctions between philosophy and xii PREFACE religious studies, there is one point in regard to Huston’s career that I do not find stated in these interviews or in his books, so I will state it here for the record. To my eyes, Huston Smith’s top priority is not religion, but philosophy, and even more specifically, metaphysics. When push comes to shove, he will side with religion because he feels that today, when metaphysics has pretty much collapsed, religion is the chief custo- dian of the worldview that endorses Transcendence, the radiant reality that awaits us outside of Plato’s cave. But in traditional times, which were not so much interdisciplinary as predisciplinary, the conceptual spine of the great religions comes closer to what we would now call metaphysics than theology. This is to say, Smith surely honors the contempo- rary world, even revels in the wonders of modern technology.

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