Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

237 Pages·2009·2.63 MB·English

by  Huston Smith

Tales of Wonder
Adventures Chasing the Divine
an autobiography
(cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1)
huston smith
with
jeffery paine
To Kendra
“I asked so much of you
in this brief lifetime,
Perhaps we’ll meet again
in the childhood of the next.”
from a love poem by the Sixth Dalai Lama
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

Robert Penn Warren
Look at this, you scornful souls, and lose yourselves in
wonder.
For in your day I do such deeds that, if men were to
tell you this
Story, you would not believe it.
St. Paul (speaking for God), Acts 12
Wonderful the Presence
One sees in the present.
Oh wonder-struck am I to see
Wonder on wonder.
the Adi Granth (the sacred book of Sikhism)

CONTENTS
Epigraph iii

Foreword No Wasted Journeys by Pico Iyer vii

Prologue Th e Explorer xi i i

part i the horizontal dimension
my life in historical time
1 Coming of Age in a Sacred Universe 3

2 An American Education 27

3 The Vocation Beneath the Career 41

4 Family: Th e Operetta 75

part ii the vertical dimension
living in sacred time
5 My Soul of Chris tian ity 97

6 My Three Other Religions 113

7 Three Final Frontiers 153

Epilogue Reflections upon Turning Ninety 177

Appendix A Universal Grammar of Worldviews 189

Acknowledgments 197

Credits 199

Index 201
About the Authors
Other Books by Huston Smith
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
No Wasted Journeys
“be not simply good—be good for something,” henry
David Thoreau wrote with typical force to a new friend,
Harrison Blake, who had just approached him by letter. “To
set about living a true life,” he had declared a few paragraphs
earlier, “is to go [on] a journey to a distant country, gradually to
find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men.” Th oreau’s
injunction was as much to the point as it was characteris-
tic. Many people can share a certain light with us, the fruits
of their explorations, and in that very transmission there is
a special beauty and value; but the ones who really move us
are sharing with us their lives, showing us how the principles
they elucidate play out in the here and now. Aldous Huxley,
lifelong experimenter, did not just write on the religions of
the world; he tried, as far as possible, to live them. Th e Four-
teenth Dalai Lama has not been merely a monk sitting in a
remote kingdom, offering a model of clarity and goodness to
his people; he has brought the values and ideas for which he
speaks right into the heart of hard-core Realpolitik in Wash-
ington and Beijing, into the urgency of trying to protect
six million p eople under occupation, into the center of our
mixed-up modern media circus.
[ vii ]
foreword

Long before I had ever met Huston Smith, I felt drawn to
this celebrated explorer of the great traditions because of my
sense that he was not just teaching but living and acting. I
went to hear him onstage and noticed how the lucidity and
purity for which he spoke were also how he spoke; this was
no mere scholar telling us what he read, but someone pass-
ing on, with an infectious sweetness and integrity, what he
had learned traveling to India, putting himself through the
rigors of Zen practice in Japan, hitchhiking across the Amer-
ican West to listen to Gerald Heard, becoming the one to re-
cord Tibetan multiphonic chanting in the Himalayas. When
I saw him speaking to Bill Moyers in a classic series of pub-
lic-television interviews about the exploration of the Real and
universal understanding, I realized these were far more than
words; here was the rare professor who does yogic headstands,
observes the Islamic rule, regularly reads scriptures from the
eight major traditions—and goes to his local church (as well,
of course, as seeing that even television can be a mass means to
the useful end of disseminating ideas). A little later I was not
surprised to learn that he had been a good friend of the Four-
teenth Dalai Lama for more than forty years—acknowledged
twice as a teacher by the Dalai Lama in his 2005 book on sci-
ence; had been the one to introduce Aldous Huxley properly
to Alan Watts; had, in fact, been not just a beloved profes-
sor for half a century, who did as much as anyone to bring
the world into the minds of Americans, but also a tireless ex-
plorer who really did meet Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin
Luther King and witnessed the founding of the United Na-
tions and the uprising at Tiananmen Square.
Th e first time I met him, I asked him if he had ever met
Thomas Merton, and he told me the beautiful story, herein
[ viii ]
No Wasted Journeys
alluded to, of how he found himself in Calcutta in 1968 and
went out into a garden where a man was sitting with a soft
drink, as if waiting for him. It just happened to be the man
he most wanted to meet in all the world (and who would be
dead, tragically, within a few weeks). Some would call this
characteristic luck; to me it sounded like a kind of grace.
Professor Smith has irreversibly changed and lightened
and broadened the lives of millions of students and believ-
ers (and, no less important, nonbelievers) through his clas-
sic books, and those books have changed as the times have
changed. He’s best remembered, no doubt, for the essential
introduction to the world’s great traditions, The World’s Reli-
gions, from 1964, which brought Buddhism, Hinduism, and
Islam into many American lives and households long before
karma and nirvana were common terms; what distinguishes
that work, even today, is how it sits inside every tradition that
it describes, blending the rigorous eye of the scholarly out-
sider with the beating heart of the initiate. Like a kind of
Method scholar, the author seems to report on each tradi-
tion from the inside out, as it might seem to one of its ad-
herents, and in the process what he manages to do, without
tendentiousness or strain, is to light up the places where reli-
gions converge without ever denying the ineff aceable diff er-
ences between them (and the danger of following a “salad
bar” technique in which, by combining the elements of many
faiths, one loses the depth of all).
In later times, though, he has pushed this exploratory spirit
further and deeper, defending religion against the reduc-
tions of “scientism” (a task for which his fifteen years teach-
ing at MIT well prepared him), fashioning, as Carl Gustav
Jung might have done, a universal grammar of religion, even
[ ix ]