Huston Smith
The World's Religions is Huston Smith's notable work, a title that has carried his name as a religious studies scholar, historian, and philosopher across decades of readers and classrooms.
Smith was born on May 31, 1919, in Suzhou, China, and later became a citizen of the United States. He was educated at Central Methodist University and then at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Those years of study fed into a career he built as a university teacher, working in the English language throughout. His roles as a religious studies scholar, historian, and philosopher overlapped throughout his professional life, each lens informing the others.
He died on December 30, 2016, in Berkeley, California, at the age of ninety-seven. The World's Religions stands as the concrete work by which his name is attached to the academic study of religion.
Quotes by Huston Smith
Huston Smith's insights on:
God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. It's the same in religion.
The word “my” always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this “I” that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent?
Built into human makeup is a longing for a ‘more’ that the world of everyday experience cannot requite.
No individual is solely reflective, emotional, active, or experimental, and different life situations call for different resources to be brought into play. Most people will, on the whole, find travel on one road more satisfactory than on others and will consequently tend to keep close to it; but Hinduism encourages people to test all four and combine them as best suits their needs.
We should witness all things non-reactively, especially our moods and emotions, neither condemning some nor holding on to others.
The point of the story is that the universe is one gigantic Wishing Tree, with branches that reach into every heart. The cosmic process decrees that sometime or other, in this life or another, each of these wishes will be granted – together, of course, with consequences.
To try to extinguish the drive for riches with money is like trying to quench a fire by pouring butter over it.
A nation can assume that the addition of the words “under God” to its pledge of allegiance gives evidence that its citizens actually believe in God whereas all it really proves is that they believe in “believing” in God.