Huston Smith

Huston Smith was the most influential populariser of comparative religion in the twentieth century — a scholar whose single most important book, The World’s Religions (1958), introduced more people to the major religious traditions of the world than any other work in any language. The book has sold over three million copies, has been translated into more than thirty languages, and has been a required text in university religion courses for over six decades. What made it extraordinary was not merely its comprehensiveness or its clarity but its approach: Smith wrote about each religion from the inside, attempting to convey not just its doctrines and practices but its experiential core — what it felt like to be a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew — with a sympathetic imagination that was simultaneously scholarly and devotional.

The Missionary’s Son

Huston Cummings Smith was born in 1919 in Suzhou, China, to Methodist missionary parents. He spent his first seventeen years in China, and the experience of growing up in a culture profoundly different from his parents’ Christianity gave him the cross-cultural sensibility that would define his life’s work. He learned Mandarin, absorbed Chinese customs, and understood from childhood that Christianity was not the only serious way of being religious.

He returned to the United States for college, attending Central Methodist College in Missouri and then the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he studied under the naturalist philosopher Henry Nelson Wieman. His early academic career took him to the University of Denver, Washington University in St. Louis, MIT, and Syracuse University, where he taught for decades.

The World’s Religions

The Religions of Man (1958) — retitled The World’s Religions in 1991 to reflect its non-gendered language — was written for Smith’s students at Washington University and became one of the most successful academic books ever published. The book devoted substantial chapters to Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, with shorter treatments of primal religions.

Smith’s method was distinctive. He did not approach religions as an outside observer cataloguing beliefs and practices; he attempted to present each tradition in its strongest and most attractive form, emphasising what its most thoughtful adherents considered its essential insights. This approach was sometimes criticised as uncritical — Smith was accused of ignoring the darker aspects of religious traditions and of presenting idealised versions of faiths whose actual practice was far messier — but it was precisely this sympathetic clarity that made the book so effective as an introduction.

The Perennial Philosophy

Smith’s intellectual orientation was shaped by the perennial philosophy — the idea, derived from Aldous Huxley and before him from Leibniz, that the world’s religions share a common core of metaphysical truth, expressed in different cultural vocabularies but pointing toward the same ultimate reality. Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World’s Religions (1976) was Smith’s most systematic statement of this position, arguing that all major religious traditions share a hierarchical understanding of reality — from the material world through the psychic and the spiritual to the Infinite — that has been “forgotten” by modern scientific materialism.

Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (1982) extended the argument, contending that the dominant worldview of modernity — scientific materialism — was not merely incomplete but actively impoverished, having excluded the transcendent dimensions of human experience that the world’s religions had always recognised.

The Later Works

Why Religion Matters (2001) was Smith’s response to what he saw as the marginalisation of religion in modern intellectual culture. The Soul of Christianity (2005) was a late return to the tradition of his upbringing. Tales of Wonder (2009) was a memoir that traced his spiritual journey from Methodist China through encounters with Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Native American religion.

Cleansing the Doors of Perception (2000) was Smith’s account of his experiments with psychedelic substances — he had been one of the subjects in Timothy Leary’s Good Friday Experiment at Harvard in 1962 — and his argument that psychedelics could facilitate genuine mystical experience.

Collecting Smith

The Religions of Man (Harper & Brothers, 1958) in first edition is the primary target — the title under which the book was originally published. Forgotten Truth (Harper & Row, 1976) and Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Crossroad, 1982) are collected. The World’s Religions (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), the revised and retitled edition, is far more common but is collected for its revised content. Smith was a generous signer; inscribed copies are available.