Huston Smith (1919–2016) was an American scholar of religious studies, born in China to a family of Methodist missionaries. His best-known work, The World's Religions (originally The Religions of Man), is a comparative study of the great spiritual traditions that reached a very wide readership and made him one of the most influential popularizers of world religions.
He was educated in the United States, where he earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1945. He taught at Washington University in St. Louis, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Syracuse University, and after retiring he settled in Berkeley, where he remained associated with the University of California. Over the years he studied Vedanta, Zen Buddhism and Sufism, and he was drawn to the Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, whose idea of a shared perennial wisdom shaped much of his thinking.
His central claim is that the major religions share deep insights into a transcendent reality, even when they express them in very different ways, and that modern secular culture tends to impoverish spiritual life. Smith defended the value of religious experience against reductionist views and, from his own Christian faith read through a Vedantic lens, argued for dialogue between traditions. His legacy includes the teaching of comparative religion, his television programmes and his role in securing legal protection for Native American religious practice.
Key ideas
- Perennial wisdom: the great religious traditions share deep insights into the transcendent, though they express them in different ways.
- Religious experience: spiritual life is judged by the transformation of character rather than by extraordinary states.
- Critique of secular modernity: materialism and modern culture can empty out the spiritual dimension of human life.
- Interreligious dialogue: understanding other traditions from within is a condition for peace and social justice.
Curiosities
Tibetan monks and overtones
In 1964, on a trip to India, he heard monks at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery chanting and noticed that each voice produced a chord. MIT acoustic engineers confirmed the finding, an example of overtone singing.
A law for peyote
After a 1990 Supreme Court ruling denied constitutional protection for the religious use of peyote by Native Americans, Smith backed the cause, and with his help Congress amended the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1994.
Teachers and influences
Influenced by
- Frithjof Schuon 1907–1998
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.