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Indophile and inter-faith icon

Chidanand Rajghatta, 1919 - 2016 - Huston Smith, Indophile & inter-faith icon Jan 03 2017 : The Times of India

Huston Smith was a Methodist who practised Hatha Yoga every day and prayed in Arabic five times a day . Called the `'Ambassador to the world's religions, he said he believed in the best of all faiths. His 97year journey involved traveling the world visiting ashrams and temples, monasteries and mosques, synagogues and gurdwaras, studying with swamis and gurus, lamas and monks, maulvis and fakirs, priests and pontiffs.

His favorite prayer, he said, was written by a 9-yearold boy whose mother had found it scribbled on a piece of paper beside his bed. “Dear God, it said, “I'm doing the best I can. On Friday , the great humanist and perennialist passed on in the final hours of 2016 at a hospice in California, after doing the best he could to promote inter-faith respect and harmony .

One of the greatest historians of religion and philosophy , he was a spiritual adventurer whose inter-faith life introduced American students ­ and workaday Americans ­ to the Bhagavad Gita, th eDhammapada, and the Five Pillars of Islam through documentaries and writings, including “The Religions of Man (1958), a standard collegiate textbook for comparative religion classes for nearly half a century now.

His spiritual fount was India and its religions, particularly Vedanta of Hinduism, after which he embraced Zen Buddhism and Sufi Islam. He went to distant dargas, mountainside monastaries, and remote ashrams in his quest.

Yet, he remained in the Methodist faith (he was born in China to Methodist missionaries and lived there till he was 17), praising it for its capaciousness, and pointing out that the pastor at his church is a lesbian and she and her baby were part of the congregation.

He said his approach to religions and his journey of discovery did not mean he was saying to goodbye to anything; he was just moving to a new idiom for expressing the same basic truths.

India ­ and its spiritual richness ­ infused and animated his life. Long after he studied and practised Vedanta under Swami Satprakashananda in St Louis, Missouri, (under the influence of, and with a referral from Aldoux Huxley), after gradua ting from the University of Chicago, he visited India in the late 1950s. “When I read the Upanishads, which are part of Vedanta, I found a profundity of worldview that made my Christianity seem like third grade, he had said, after his encounters with the Vedanta gurus. Now, the real India blew him away .

“I remember my first visit as if it were yesterday...It was the smells that were the strangest, a blend rising from a half million cooking fires in the dusty evening air, he would recall later to Bill Moyers, who put him front and centre in the documentary “The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith, that captured the Smith religious adventures.

“What was it that made this place, these people, so different, while, at the same time making me think `I know them. I've always known them. A part of me seems to have been here from the beginning, Smith said of India.

Thus began an even more intense study of religions that became a journey to reconcile the best of all -Sarva Dharma Sama Bhava -underwritten by the belief in the goodness inherent in all human beings.

To Moyers, he recited a poem he wrote in India: “Who could have dreamed, gazing on this willful face That India touched him more than he touched her...

Indebted to Hinduism, though it wasn’t his ‘primary tradition’

Aravindan Neelakandan, Farewell Dr. Huston Smith… Jan 04, 2017, Swarajya

Farewell Dr. Huston Smith…

SNAPSHOT

He did the best he could. In his demise, Indic traditions lost a loyal friend in the West

When Huston Smith died aged 97 on 30 December 2016, Hindus world over lost a good friend in the academia of the Western world. An ordained Methodist minister, Huston Smith was the author of The Religions of Man (1958). Since then, it has been one of the standard textbooks in the West for comparative religion. Huston Smith, who set out to do for religion, what Chomsky did for language – finding the universal grammar, was born to missionary parents in China. As he walked as a boy to the Shanghai American High School in the French Concession, he would pass parks marked “No dogs and Chinamen allowed”. As he grew up, the missionary zest to ‘Christianize the world’ left him. When he chose an academic career studying comparative philosophy and religion, the memories of colonial prejudice made him vow ‘to do everything he could to try to deal fairly with the cultures he crossed over into.’

Though Hinduism was not his ‘primary tradition’ he found his ‘indebtedness to the Hindu tradition inestimable’. In fact it was his contact with the Vedanta of Sri Ramakrishna-Vivekananda tradition which helped him enter into this odyssey with his vow to ‘to overcome the gravitational pull of ethnocentrism’ as much as possible. His knowledge of Hinduism which became part of his spiritual-academic pilgrimage came from his interaction with such impeccable sources like Dr.T.M.P.Mahadevan, one of the best Tamil scholars of traditional Vedanta and Swami Satprakashananda of Sri Ramakrishna Vedanta center. His quest for wisdom through Vedanta also became a loadstone to seek the unity of the spiritual heritage of humanity without much of the usual fallacy of imposing uniformity. Thus he studied Sufism and Buddhist spiritual traditions too.

In writing the book The Religions of Man (later titled ‘The World Religions’) he immersed himself, as much as possible, in first hand subjective experience of the religion about which he was writing. When he was writing his chapter on Hinduism he ‘read and meditated on ten pages of ‘The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’ every day.’ The book became the definitive guide for the western academia to study world religions in a spirit of true respect and dialogue before ‘South Asian’ social sciences were converted into the personal fiefdom of some.

When the chapter on Hinduism in his book received widespread critical acclaim, Huston Smith credited it to those meditations he made on the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

He was also a part of a study of psychedelic dimensions of religious experiences conducted in Harvard University. At the 1962 Good Friday service, at Boston University, volunteers, including Huston Smith, participated, half of whom had received, double blind, a dose of psilocybin while the other half a placebo. The experiment he later recalled, ‘left a permanent mark on his experiential world view’ (emphasis not in the original). He tried to describe it in terms of his own religious tradition and also in the framework of Indic spiritual psychology:

… until the Good Friday Experiment, I had had no direct personal encounter with Him/Her/It of the sort that bhakti yogis, Pentecostals, and born-again Christians describe. … Jnanic by nature, I had had (as I have noted) a number of powerful transpersonal experiences of God, but I had not strongly experienced his personal side. The Good Friday Experiment changed that. Since that momentous afternoon, I know firsthand what bhaktis are talking about when they speak: of their personal, loving relationship with God. (Thomas B.Roberts & Robert N. Jesse, Recollections of the Good Friday Experiment: An interview with Huston Smith, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1997, Vol. 29, No.2)

The passage is important because here we have an interesting variant in Rajiv Malhotra’s U-turn theory. Unlike the intentional jettisoning of Hindu identity and contribution to one’s inner development /or academic career, or one’s own cult creation, as convincingly demonstrated by him in the case of Ken Wilbur, here we have a genuine U-turn: from the impersonal Upanishadic tradition to the personal experience of Godhead defined in the tradition in which the person was born. What he had done is to academically open the possibility of studying the Christian phenomena like the born-again experience, talking in tongues etc. from Indic spiritual / yogic psychological framework.

On February 7, 1984, NASA astronauts made their first untethered spacewalk. The same day Huston Smith was writing a preface to the book Vedanta Voice of Freedom, a compilation of the words of Swami Vivekananda made by Swami Chetanananda. Huston Smith made an interesting observation:

I happen to write these lines on the day in the history when human astronauts have achieved their first untethered walk in space. To float as they are floating, like birds with the whole sky to fly in , may seem at first like the ultimate freedom, but we know of course that their floating only tokens the spiritual freedom we truly seek. … Thus it is that Hinduism speaks of the final freedom that marks the end of the mystic path as liberation (moksha), for it is the state of union (yoga) with the Absolute, the Infinite, and the Eternal, and therefore of freedom from all bonds of relativity.

Another interesting dimension of Huston Smith is his approach to the problem of religious terrorism – particularly Islamist terrorism. While he was totally free of Islamophobia of the Christian Right, he never got into the overdoing the negation mode like the virulent left liberals of Chomskian kind. In the aftermath of 9/11, in a 2002 interview he said:

“I am not going to conclude by saying terrorism and the fury that backs it is entirely our fault. It takes two to tango, and Islam has a great deal to answer for in this conflict.”

He said that the fundamentalist Muslims, ‘fueled by the memory of Islam’s past glory, live in the hope of an eventual Islamicized world.’ And it was this that ‘sets off a chain of mistakes.’ One should remember that this was by a man who prayed five times a day in Islamic manner too. He belonged to the school of Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy.

In fact this is exactly the Hindutva stand which only opposes the expansionist tendencies of Islamist forces without falling prey to the Islamophobia which is only a competitive clash of the expansionist monocultures.

That Huston Smith always remained faithful to the vow he made to himself, can be seen in the foreword he gave to ‘Interpreting Ramakrishna’ (2010) – a scholarly in-depth rebuttal to Jeffery Kripal’s ‘Kali’s Child’. He saw Kripal’s work as the ‘case at hand’ of ‘political orthodoxy’ in the Western academia moving ‘across religious boundaries’. He pointed out to Kripal that ‘religions can learn from one another, but only when critics withhold their criticisms until they have made sure that the targets at which they are aimed are rightly positioned.’ And this right positioning he pointed out starts with ‘accurate translations of the documents the critic cites as well as the cultural sensitivity’. Kripal failed to meet these requirements he said.

It is said that his favorite prayer was a scribbling of a 9-year-old found by the child’s parent which simply said, “Dear God, I’m doing the best I can.” He did. And we are all richer.

Happy eternity Huston Smith, you are always loved.

Aravindan Neelakandan

Aravindan is a contributing editor at Swarajya.

John Blake: Huston Smith’s spiritual odyssey

John Blake, CNN, Huston Smith's painful spiritual odyssey, January 2, 2017

Story highlights

Huston Smith, known as the sage of world religion, died December 30 at 97

His book, "The World's Religions," is still widely used on college campuses

Huston Smith, a giant in the world of religion, died December 30 at age 97. His book, "The World's Religions," is still widely used on college campuses. The following is a 2009 profile of Smith that examined his rise to fame -- and how he called on his own faith to deal with the death of his daughter.

"I have no complaints," Karen Smith told her father. "I am at peace."

During their last moments together, Karen told her father that she was thinking of angels. She told him not to cry. She told him how much she loved the ocean.

"Religion," Smith once wrote, is "the call to confront reality; to master the self." Smith had strived to answer that call for much of his life.

He had trained with Zen masters in Japan, camped with aborigines in Australia and dropped peyote with Native American shamans. He didn't just study religions; he lived them.

In time, Smith became known as the sage of world religion. He introduced the Dalai Lama to the West, befriended mythologist Joseph Campbell and was the subject of a PBS series hosted by Bill Moyers called "The Wisdom of Faith."

But as Smith sat at his daughter's bedside, the wisdom of faith offered little consolation. "I would sob uncontrollably, crying in anguish," he said.

Smith had to confront a new reality: Who does the sage turn to when he needs help?

Smith's daily prayer

A hip has been replaced. He can no longer hear well. The man who has helped people find answers to their deepest spiritual yearnings now needs help just to get around. Smith, 90, recently moved into an assisted-living home after living with his wife, Kendra, for 66 years.

Yet he whispers the same prayer to himself several times a day: "God, you are so good to me."

That spirit of gratitude pervades Smith's recently released autobiography, "Tales of Wonder." In it, Smith talks about growing up as the child of missionaries in China, becoming enthralled by the faith of other cultures, and his global travels and friendships with everyone from folk singer Pete Seeger to author Aldous Huxley.

He reveals the story behind his signature achievement: the publication of "The World's Religions" in 1958.

The book, which has sold 3 million copies, helped change the American religious landscape. In vivid and poetic writing, Smith took readers on a tour of the world's major religions. The book helped make it OK for Americans to not only learn about but be dazzled by other religions.

Smith said he never stopped being a Christian ("God is defined by Jesus but not confined to Jesus"). But his faith has been deepened by his immersion in other religious traditions.

"Anyone who is only Japanese or American, only Oriental or Occidental, is but half human," Smith wrote at the beginning of "The World's Religions." "The other half that beats with the pulse of all humanity has yet to be awakened."

An unusual glimpse of Smith's private world

It is the pulse of Smith's humanity that breathes life into "Tales of Wonder."

Smith's public persona has long been established: He is the tall, thin, affable scholar who can distill the essence of the most esoteric religious subject in concrete language.

But it is those moments in "Tales of Wonder" when Smith doesn't have the answers that are the most riveting. Smith won't elaborate publicly on some of the more personal passages in the book. Nor will his wife. Only his youngest daughter, Kimberly, talked at length about those moments.

Smith nonetheless had plenty to say when he sat down to write.

He talked about the time when Kendra threatened to leave him.

"There are infidelities worst than sexual," he said.

He talked about the murder of his granddaughter, Serena, during a tragedy at sea that involved a famous NBA player and led to international headlines.

The most searing revelations, though, come just four pages into the book. That's where Smith talks about the loss of the oldest of his three daughters, Karen, in 1994.

Karen was born nine months after Smith married. He said her birth marked "my second love affair."

Karen grew up in a home full of music, learning and fun. The Smiths staged mini-operas in their home. They filled notebooks with their children's funniest sayings. One night, the family played a game in which every sentence uttered at the dinner table had to contain a cliche ("That was easier said than done," said Kendra, Karen's mother).

"We all grew up with a tremendous faith," said Kimberly, Smith's youngest daughter. "We all believed in an afterlife."

Karen, though, also grew up with a "fiery" sense of self, Smith said. When she was 7 years old, Smith overheard Karen telling her sister in their room: "They talk so much about God. I don't get it."

When Karen became a teenager, she informed her father that she would no longer attend church. He was aghast.

"If Karen gave up religion, I thought, morality will go next," Smith said.

Karen found a taste of her cherished freedom on the water. She loved being on the water; "it symbolized life to her," Smith said. Karen took sailing classes in high school and learned to windsurf.

Karen eventually found religion again, but it was not the Christian faith of her father. She converted to Judaism after she was married and gave birth to Smith's first grandchild, a son, Isaiah.

Smith wrestles with spiritual crisis

Then, after Karen reached her 50th birthday, she received a call from her doctor.

She had recently had a hysterectomy. After the surgery, the doctor told her that tests had revealed something: She had a rare form of sarcoma and had two months to live, possibly four.

Karen didn't accept the doctor's prognosis, said Kimberly, her youngest sister. She agreed to undergo chemotherapy. Her body shriveled, and her hair fell out, but Karen was defiant.

Kimberly said she still has a photo of her sister -- bald and weakened from chemotherapy -- happily windsurfing.

"She fought her hardest and pursued all the avenues of life she could," Kimberly said.

Still, the cancer spread. The sarcoma tumors grew so large and concentrated that a needle couldn't penetrate them, Smith said. Karen was eventually confined to her home in Santa Rosa, California.

Her sister Kimberly remembers visiting her.

"When I drove up to see her, I kept saying to myself, 'I'm not going to cry,' " Kimberly said. "The second I walked in, I started bawling."

Kimberly apologized to Karen, but Karen ended up consoling her and the rest of her family.

"We were crying, and she was saying, 'It's OK to cry,' Kimberly said.

Smith said his daughter battled "heroically." She once cheerfully told her father: "It's a red-letter day. I had a bowel movement."

As Karen's body weakened, other senses seemed to sharpen, Smith said. She told her parents that as her body suffered, she became more aware of the natural beauty that surrounded her. She talked about angels.

On one unforgettable day, the family took Karen on a drive through Napa Valley. The valley is wine country, full of creeks, wineries and fields of wildflowers. Smith called it a drive on "the last beautiful day in the world."

The drive gave Karen new energy. That night, she was talking with her mother and husband for so long that they told her she had to get her rest.

"But we're having such a good time," Karen said.

Smith, though, was struggling. He said his daughter's illness forced him to call upon the spiritual traditions he had studied for much of his life.

He thought about the "Five Remembrances" that some Buddhist monks chant each day: I will lose my youth, my health, my loved ones, everything I hold dear and, finally, life itself by the very nature of being human.

Smith said those remembrances told him that the transient nature of life does not mean people should love others less but more.

Smith then recalled a quote from the Buddha: "Suffering, if it does not diminish love, will transport you to the furthest shore."

Karen died one night as Smith sat beside her bed. Smith sobbed uncontrollably. He said that at the moment of his daughter's death, he had trouble believing in what he had long written about: God's "justice and perfection."

Yet even when he was doubled over in anguish beside his daughter's bed, she seemed to be reaching out to him. As he sat alone with Karen's body, in the moments after her death, he suddenly stopped crying.

He could somehow sense her presence in the room.

"The sensation was so palpable I almost turned around, expecting to see her," he said.

Smith said his daughter is still reaching out to him. He often thinks about her last days as he approaches his 91st birthday.

"Nobody wants to learn from a child how to die well, but I learned it from Karen," he said.

Smith traveled around the world to study under some of the most famous spiritual masters. But it was his daughter who became one of his greatest teachers.

"She taught me nobility of spirit," he said.

He said Karen's courage continues to "console" and "guide" him as he draws closer to his furthest shore.

He can still hear Karen's final words as she slipped away in her bed.

"I hear the ocean," she said. "I can smell the ocean now."