An interview with Huston Smith
by Liza Hetherington

After having spent your life professionally and personally exploring the major world religions, do you think there is a common thread that runs through all of these traditions ? Is there one Essence?

There is ultimately one Essence, the Absolute, the Ultimate, God, whatever name. But to unpack that a little bit and put it in to everyday language, I think that what this comes down to is the fact that we're in good hands, and in gratitude for that fact it would be well if we bore one another's burdens. I think this is what religion comes down to, and though the language, the idioms, the metaphors, the symbols are widely different within the different traditions, this essence is the bottom line, so to speak.

Each tradition has an experience of the divine?

Yes, transcendence, which--if we elucidate it a bit more beyond that word--there is an ultimate power from which all this has derived and it is benign. It is, you might say, on our side.

Would you say that many of the traditions see the divine as blissful or just neutral?

Oh, if you give me that alternative, it is blissful. It's not neutral at all. But I notice that you use the impersonal pronoun "it," is "it" blissful, and that's alright, but actually, all of our language about these matters, all of our language is necessarily symbolic. Because we are dealing here with a reality as much beyond our powers of total comprehension as our minds are beyond our comprehension of our two dogs--which I have prudently shut in the backyard so that they will not mar this interview. But we need to pause on that, circle that a little bit. If those two dogs were to enter into their barking conversation and try to figure out what the human mind is like and enter into it, you know they would be sharply limited. There is only a certain amount that can be put into barks and sniffs. Now the distance between this ultimate reality--God, transcendence, the Tao, Nirguna Brahman, whatever you want to call it, Allah--is greater than the distance of that reality from our minds and our minds capacity to comprehend, than the human mind is removed from a dog's mind. So we have to remember that we're just trying to put dribs and drabs and pieces together into comprehending what that majesty is like. Nevertheless, just as the dogs would give it their best shot, we give it our best shot, and this shakes down to the fact that it houses all the virtues we know--love, creativity, wisdom, compassion--all forged into an indivisible unity. But it is an absolute perfection from which everything in our everyday world, ourselves included, have derived. So we're of noble stock.

Would you say that mysticism in all of the traditions are very closely linked?

Well, yes, that is true. There is a saying that mystics speak the same language, and that is the case. If we think of their alternative--not to be denigrated or disparaged at all--as the sort of exoteric or more accessible aspects of religion, which are put into formulas and words and theologies and so on, those have very marked differences as well as communality. But if one passes to the esoteric, which designates a more inner [focus]--the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law--then those differences resolve themselves to--well I would say completely resolve themselves--in the end. So I can summarize this point. There's a little witticism of a the Irish tailor who described trousers as singular at the top and plural at the bottom. And we can say the same about religions: they're singular at the top and plural at the bottom.

What specifically are the mystical traditions that you in particular have studied or experienced?

Well, my bent is mystical. That is to say, it was the mystical dimension of these traditions which induced me to devote my life work to studying them. Not because, not simply because, they are wonderful, but because they are true, I believe. And, as the Indians say "There is no right greater than that of truth." So, I could see no more appealing, engrossing, life project than to steep oneself in these mystical traditions. And so, that was what drew me into it. So every tradition that I have gone into [has their] particulars: their differences, their histories, their rituals, and so on, their different ways of packaging it--that's a very crude phrase. [These particulars are] not irrelevant, and I have found very interesting also. But the pay dirt, I think, lies in the esoteric core of these traditions. So every one that I have studied, I have made my

way to the mystical dimension. One can just go around the world. In East Asia--I was born in China of missionary parents--why Taoism is the Tao Te Ching "Twansa" and so on is the mystical essence of the East Asian tradition: China, Japan, Korea, and the like. If we move to south Asia, India, why then Hinduism and Buddhism are very, very obviously, almost transparently, mystical religions: the Buddha's enlightenment under the Bo tree and the notion of Shinyata and emptiness that issued from that in Buddhism and Hinduism. In addition to God with attributes, Saguna Brahman, they also have the god beyond all attributes, and there is a mystical opening up there. And then if we go to the Abrahamic religions in Judaism, why it's the Kabbalah, and the Zohar. And it's in Christianity. I was just putting the finishing touches on an essay on Eckhart, one of the great mystics of the Christian tradition. And then Islam, the Sufis. And also in the Native American. So it's not as though I went towards one as over against others because it was more mystical, but rather it was searching out the mystical culmination and peak in every tradition.

Why do some religions endure and become a world religions and others do not?

It is a fact in the jargon of religious studies we speak of ethnic religions and world religions. Ethnic religions have their own distinctive place, land, their own language--which is very important to them--and genealogy, heredity plays a part. Judaism, Hinduism, Shinto are prime examples of ethnic religions--for a people. And then there are others that have a more global sweep. By the way, that way of putting it may suggest that the global are sometimes, some way superior, but that is not true at all. It is a different function, a different role, and both need to be in the picture to play out the spiritual possibilities in the human race.

And how do the indigenous or oral traditions fit into the scheme?

They would all be ethnic religions.

What is the boiling point where religion breaks out of an ethnic and isolated area and becomes global? Is there a process that happens?

Oh, there is a point and there is a process. Ah, the two best known ones are when Judaism phased into (while keeping its own identity for sure) Christianity. And in South Asia when Hinduism has its spin off into Buddhism. Now, we can see very clearly the steps by which that happened. I happen to believe that it was divinely orchestrated in both cases. To put it bluntly, what the Jews had discovered about God was so important it was head and shoulders above the nature religions of the area, but by virtue of (and I ultimately am comfortable with) Divine Providence--led them to this exalted view. And they needed to keep their identity, hence the ethnic religion, but what they had discovered was too important, too good, to be cooped up to a single people, so it had to be made available to the Near East and the Western World and eventually beyond that skipping to a new continent. So Christianity was the announcement to the world at large of these sublime, revealed insights which were too good [to be] the property of a single people only. And I would say the same thing exactly in India, that Hinduism, out of the sages and the Rishis and the Vedas and the Upanishads and so on. It was an ethnic religion and remains one. You can not be an orthodox Hindu without having a caste membership. So I couldn't be an orthodox Hindu, I could be a vedantan, but that's like the Unitarianism of Christianity. So it was an ethnic religion, but again, too important; and so therefore, Buddhism spun off from it as a universal religion and became the light of Asia.

Do you think it's possible to "shop" around for different religions or are there certain cultural barriers between say us and a religion of different culture?

The guiding line is that the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and so it would be a mistake to try to set up barriers and say you can only find meaning or religious inspiration or truth, life giving truth, this way rather than that way. There are innumerable ways--and particularly in our time when multiculturalism is coming into the picture so markedly--that it is, I think, impossible to state categorical rules. Now, one can make some observations about it, and we can begin with the fact that people, human beings, in their upbringing, some have a good experience with whatever tradition, religion has been in their home and their life. And for others, they've had

a poor experience. The traditional aspects of [their religion] have stood out have rubbed them the wrong way. So we can't generalize and say it's better if everybody continues in their tradition or goes to another one. It depends case by case. But now to pick up another aspect of what you said. It is not true that one cannot find a life giving meaning in another tradition, or conversion would be impossible (laugh), and the missionary enterprise--be it Islamic or Christian or whatever--would be misguided, which I do not think is the case. And of course we are seeing affinity to Asian religions right and left in our society, and you know that kind of phenomenon is going on all the time. So I think I just conclude: it has to be taken case by case and follow the light where it leads.

Would you call yourself a Christian or are you an adherent to all the traditions?

Well the first questions that Bill Moyers asked me when we began our interviews was quoting a line in my film on Tibetan Buddhism, which concludes with a question that traditionally the Tibetans would ask for visitors: "to what sublime tradition do you belong?" I said "Bill, I have a body and I have a soul. My body remains in the Church, the faith to which it was born, the Methodists, and I will be buried in the a Methodist Church funeral. But I also have a soul and no institution can contain completely my soul." And then I quoted Ibn Arabi who said 'my soul is a Mosque for Muslims, a Temple for Hindus, an alter for Zoroastrians, a Church for Christians, a synagogue for Jews, and,' he added--poet that he was--'a pasture for gazelles.' And so that's the way I identify myself.

You have said that the future of religion depends on how the two great historical forces in recent history--science and religion--settle into relationship with one another. How do you think religion and science will settle into relationship in the future?

Well, my hope is, and I think it's not an unfounded hope, is that in the third millennium they will settle down into a very friendly, comfortable, mutually supporting relationship. And since things seem to be speeding up, that may happen even in the first century of the third millennium. The story thus far is that there was no problem until the rise of modern science. I'm [not] talking about generic science, which is simply a careful observation of the natural world to see its laws, the cycling of the seasons, when to plant crops and things like that...all part of a single fabric. Science in that generic sense attended to the truth of the visible natural order. And then religion was involved because there would be ritual before the seeds were sown and so on. But then [religion] went on to all its own area which exceeds what can be reported by the senses, the sense of the physical world. So there was a smooth fabric, hardly a distinction between [religion and science]. With the rise of modern science, all that changed categorically because before then, for the final vision of the way things are, people turned to their sacred texts, their revealed texts, where it was told them. If they were tribal, oral people without language, they went to their myths which were the same thing, the big picture as the ancestors had revealed it, passed on to them. Well, when modern science came in, a different view finder came to the fore because modern science resulted from the discovery of a new way [to prove truth],...namely the controlled experiment. Now what that has led to in the way of a changed world and a changed world view is common knowledge and need not be belabored. But it has over four centuries gradually replaced the traditional world view. The reason it has displaced it is that science, through the laboratory controlled experiments, can prove its truth, and you can't prove [truth] in the Bible or in the area of the spirit. And so what we have had is an unhorsing of the religious outlook, religious world view, as a scientific world view has progressively displaced it. Now this has put religion very seriously on the defensive. And so for the last four

hundred years I would say, the relationship between these two most powerful forces has been, as the Spaniards and Latinos would say,"muy mal"--very bad. And I think it still continues to be very bad...because the scientific world view--actually there is no such thing: science cannot in principle produce a world view. It can produce a half a world view, namely of the empirical slice or half of reality. But the truths of the spirit, and even before we get to those, the essence of our humanity which resides in thoughts and feelings...are [the] invisible, immaterial things in life. Our lives really live by those, but they've been put on the defensive because in that area you cannot prove [truth]. So I think we now are seeing the reverse of the bad situation in the 16th and 17th century when the clerics and theologians had the power, and science forced [them] to break out of their hegemony. Now the shoe is on the different foot. And it's the scientists and the spokesmen for science who have the intellectual clout. And there's a huge spectrum among [scientists]. I certainly don't want to caste them in any way in the role of white-jacketed, bad guys. I mean I had prostate cancer. My PSA was off the chart five years ago. [The doctors] moved in with radiation and took care of it beautifully. I'm not going to castigate my oncologist or any in the medical profession. They're wonderful people, dedicated, the monks of our time in a way. So it's not any intentional thing, it's something we do not see as a culture--namely that this method for being nearly perfect in getting at the material aspects of our life, has a fixed cut off point and cannot speak to values, meanings, purposes, qualities, anything that might be superior to ourselves. And so, realizing that--as we are slowly coming to do--opens the way for a genuine rapprochement, a mutual respect, a mutual recognition of areas where [science and religion] each has the right and the competence to speak without either party trying to dominate the other.

What do you think about secular America?

Religion is a tremendous part of our life, so [America] is certainly not without religion. How much does this count in terms of the way life is lived? Because it is a secular society in many ways and we're right I think on the cusp of a

reversion, a change on this front. Stephen Carter in his book "The Culture of Disbelief" says in the last thirty years, he notices--he is himself a practicing Episcopalian--the marginalizing of religion more and more. And that's because our universities are secular to the core and they put the finishing touches on the minds of those who go out to rule America, including the media. And the media is very biased towards the secular outlook. And this leads Peter Berger, one of the two best sociologists of religion on the scene today, to say that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden is the least, America is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. That's very good. And it's also very bad for our society, our culture. It creates this polarization between the liberals and the conservatives, each of which have their virtues and their vices, but this kind of stand-off is very unhealthy. And yet the truth of the matter is that the door's wide open for a rapprochement, a moving into a more sane and reasonable middle ground that would be healthier for all of us.

Huston Smith is considered the leading expert on global religions, having authored several books on comparative religion, including the authoratative text, The World's Religions. He has taught religion and philosophy at such major universities as MIT and the University of California at Berkeley. He was recently featured in Bill Moyers' five-part PBS series called "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith." According to Moyers, "America's religious landscape is changing before our eyes, and no one has done more to prepare us for the new religious reality than Huston Smith."

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