Huston Smith, Author of ‘The World’s Religions,’ Dies at 97
Huston
Smith, a renowned scholar of religion who pursued his own enlightenment
in Methodist churches, Zen monasteries and even Timothy Leary’s living
room, died on Friday at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 97.
His wife, Kendra, confirmed his death.
Professor
Smith was best known for “The Religions of Man” (1958), which has been a
standard textbook in college-level comparative religion classes for
half a century. In 1991, it was abridged and given the gender-neutral
title “The World’s Religions.” The two versions together have sold more than three million copies.
The
book examines the world’s major faiths as well as those of indigenous
peoples, observing that all express the Absolute, which is
indescribable, and concluding with a kind of golden rule for mutual
understanding and coexistence: “If, then, we are to be true to our own
faith, we must attend to others when they speak, as deeply and as
alertly as we hope they will attend to us.”
“It is the most important book in comparative religious studies ever,” Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, said in an interview.
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Professor
Smith may have reached his widest audience in 1996, when Bill Moyers
put him at the center of a five-part PBS series, “The Wisdom of Faith With Huston Smith.”
(Each installment began with a Smith quotation: “If we take the world’s
enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of
the human race.”)
Richard D. Hecht,
a professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, called Professor Smith “one of the three greatest interpreters
of religion for general readers in the second half of the 20th
century,” the others being Joseph Campbell and, in Britain, Roderick Ninian Smart .
Professor
Smith, whose last teaching post was at the University of California,
Berkeley, had an interest in religion that transcended the academic. In
his joyful pursuit of enlightenment — to “turn our flashes of insight
into abiding light,” as he put it — he meditated with Tibetan Buddhist
monks, practiced yoga with Hindu holy men, whirled with ecstatic Sufi
Islamic dervishes, chewed peyote with Mexican Indians and celebrated the
Jewish Sabbath with a daughter who had converted to Judaism.
It was through psychedelic drugs in the early 1960s that Professor Smith believed he came closest to experiencing God.Leary,
a Harvard professor who championed mind-altering substances, recruited
Professor Smith to help in an investigation of psychedelic drugs. At the
time, Professor Smith was teaching philosophy nearby at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Leary
thought that he had had a profound religious experience in Mexico in
August 1960 when he first ate psilocybin mushrooms, which can produce
hallucinations. Accordingly, he wanted religious experts to be part of
his Harvard Psilocybin Project for the study of mind-altering drugs.
Richard Alpert, a colleague in Harvard’s psychology department, was a
critical figure in the initiative. (He later took the name Ram Dass.)
On
New Year’s Day in 1961, Leary’s team ingested mushrooms in his living
room. “Such a sense of awe,” Professor Smith said afterward. “It was
exactly what I was looking for.”
A
year later, the group gathered in a church basement as a Good Friday
service was being held upstairs and tried an experiment involving 20
volunteers in which half were given the psilocybin mushrooms and the
other half a placebo. Professor Smith received the drug, which was legal
at the time, and reported that he was certain he had had a personal
experience with God. He thought that the voice of a soprano singing
upstairs was surely that of an angel.
“From
that moment on, he knew that life is a miracle, every moment of it,”
Don Lattin wrote in “The Harvard Psychedelic Club,” a 2010 account of
the psychedelic research project, “and that the only appropriate way to
respond and be mindful of the gift of God’s love was to share it with
the rest of the world.”
Professor
Smith later became disenchanted with Leary’s “Tune in, turn on, drop
out” gospel, but he retained his belief that the briefest of insights
from a psychedelic trip could be mind-expanding.
Those
early drug experiments, however, were enough for him, he wrote in
“Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of
Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals” (2000). (The word entheogenic refers
to substances that produce an altered state of consciousness for
spiritual purposes — “God-enabling,” in Professor Smith’s words.)
“If
someone were to offer me today a substance that (with no risk of
producing a bummer) was guaranteed to carry me into the Clear Light of
the Void and within 15 minutes would return me to normal,” Professor
Smith wrote, “I would decline.”
Huston
Cummings Smith was born to Methodist missionaries on May 31, 1919, in
Suzhou, China. The family soon moved to the ancient walled city Zang
Zok, a “caldron of different faiths,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir, “Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine.”
“I could skip a few blocks from my house past half the world’s major religions,” he added. “Side by side they existed.”
He
decided to be a missionary, and his parents sent him to Central
Methodist University, a small Bible college in Fayette, Mo. He was
ordained a Methodist minister but soon realized that he had no desire to
“Christianize the world,” as he put it; he would rather teach than
preach.
Admitted to the University of Chicago Divinity School, he became intrigued by the scientific rationalism propounded by Henry Nelson Wieman,
an influential liberal theologian there. He also became attracted to
Professor Wieman’s daughter, Kendra, then an undergraduate. They married
in 1943.
Beside
his wife, he is survived by two daughters, Gael Rosewood and Kimberly
Smith; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Professor
Smith was working on his doctorate at Berkeley and leading Sunday
services at a Methodist church in 1944 when he encountered a book that
changed his life: “Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and
the Future of Man” (1939), by Gerald Heard. Mr. Heard advanced an expansive view of spirituality and came to be called “the grandfather of the New Age movement.”
Professor
Smith read all two dozen of Mr. Heard’s books and tracked him down at
Trabuco College, which Mr. Heard had founded in the Santa Ana Mountains.
After dinner, they retired to a large rock.
“They
just sat there in silence, gazing at the barren canyon walls,” Mr.
Lattin wrote in “The Harvard Psychedelic Club.” “Huston realized there
was nothing he needed to ask the man. It was enough just to sit with him
on the edge of the canyon.”
Mr.
Heard told Professor Smith how to get in touch with Aldous Huxley, the
novelist, mystic and psychedelic pioneer, and in summer 1948, Professor
Smith took a bus into the Mojave Desert to Huxley’s cabin. The two had a
deep conversation about boundless desert sand and Old Testament
prophets.
Professor
Smith received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1945, taught
for two years at the University of Denver and accepted a professorship
at Washington University, in St. Louis.
Huxley recommended he meet Swami Satprakashananda, a Hindu monk who founded the Vedanta Society of St. Louis
in 1938. Professor Smith soon became president of a Hindu society and
associate minister of a Methodist congregation in St. Louis.
In
1955, he turned his popular college lectures into a series of programs
on world religions for the National Educational Television network, the
precursor to PBS. On one program, he demonstrated the lotus position.
He
was hired by M.I.T. in 1958 and two years later joined other professors
in inviting Huxley to deliver seven lectures, which drew
standing-room-only crowds. In the decade since their last meeting,
Huxley had experimented with mescaline and written “The Doors of
Perception,” which became a counterculture classic. Professor Smith
confessed to him that he had never had a full-blown mystical experience
despite his studies of religious mysticism.
Huxley said Leary could probably supply what he wanted, and gave Professor Smith his phone number.
Professor
Smith joined campaigns for civil rights in the 1960s and for a more
tolerant understanding of Islam in the 2000s. He wrote more than a dozen
books and held professorships at Syracuse University and Berkeley. He
helped introduce the Dalai Lama to Americans.
Despite
his liberal views, Professor Smith argued that science might not
totally explain natural phenomena like evolution. He clung to his
Methodism while criticizing some of its dogma. He prayed to Mecca five
times a day in Arabic.
His favorite prayer was written by a 9-year-old 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.”
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