HUSTON SMITH: ROCK STAR OF RELIGIONS TURNS 90
By Heidi Benson
The San Francisco Chronicle
May 21, 2009

Original Link

A floor lamp with more arms than Shiva brightly illuminates a desk where the phone rings, a computer hums and messages fly from the fax machine. This is the command center of religious scholar Huston Smith, in the Berkeley assisted-living center he now calls home.

Outside, faded Tibetan prayer flags are strung along a balcony where potted bamboo sways in the sunshine. Inside, the Quran shares the bookshelf with the works of Plato, and Smith holds forth from a black leather recliner. He is abuzz, quick with jokes.

"I no longer stand on my head every morning," he says of his longtime yoga practice. "But if my osteoporosis gets any worse, I just might."

It is a busy time. This month, he celebrates his 90th birthday, as well as the 50th anniversary of his best-selling book, "The World's Religions," which inspired a popular PBS series. In addition, his autobiography, "Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine" has just been published by HarperOne. At just 200 pages, it is a dizzying tour of a singular life.

Smith was there when the 1945 U.N. charter was signed in San Francisco. He met Mother Teresa, interviewed Eleanor Roosevelt and invited the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at Washington University in 1956. Seeking enlightenment, he took mescaline with Timothy Leary and peyote with an Indian shaman. He counts Saul Bellow, Aldous Huxley, Pete Seeger and the Dalai Lama among his legion of friends.

Uncanny timing

Asked about his uncanny timing, he declares: "Don't overlook Tiananmen Square!" Late on the night before the 1989 uprising, he arrived unsuspectingly in Beijing for a conference on Chinese philosophy. "In the morning, we got word from BBC Radio, all the way from London, that Beijing was in chaos," he recalled.

He and his colleagues went down to the street, where "everyone was on the side of the students." And where everyone was headed to Tiananmen Square. They climbed in a car with a sign taped to the window: "Foreign Visitors Support Student Strike."

"We couldn't get closer than three blocks. It was like a funnel. But when the students saw the sign, they waved us through," he recalled. "One of our party was hoisted onto the top of the car. In Chinese he said, 'Democracy is not only for America. Democracy is not only for China. Democracy is for the entire world.' There was a tumult of cheers."

Looking back as a witness to history, he rebuffs the notion of divine intervention, but allows: "It almost seemed like it was masterminded for me to be in the right place at the right time."

Smith was born in 1919 in China, where his parents were Christian missionaries.

"In my town, I had only one adult American male role model: my father," he explained. "I grew up taking it for granted that missionaries were what American boys grew up to be."

He came to the States for college, expecting to earn his degree and return to China. "But I hadn't calculated on the dynamism of the West," he said.

Propelled by intellectual curiosity, he earned a doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he met Kendra, the woman who would be his wife for 65 years. Soon after, he took his first teaching post in St. Louis, and his parents were expelled from China after the 1949 Communist takeover. Now, there was no going back.

He went on to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Syracuse University and UC Berkeley, write 15 books, receive 12 honorary degrees and create television specials. He has been called the rock star of religious studies. As a kind of participatory scholar, he has applied to his life that which he's learned from the world's great faiths. And his inclusive approach has rhymed with the times.

"I happen to be a Christian. I was brought up and drenched in that," he said. "I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form."

But, he explained, "I'm not a chauvinist. I'm a universalist. I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations."

Today, on a sunny morning in Berkeley, he reiterates his belief in the power of human intention. "The Buddha is in me, the Buddha is in you," he says, with a dazzling smile and a bit of a challenge. "Live up to it."

Is he optimistic about the future?

'On the hook'

"I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. An optimist says, in effect, 'Don't worry, it's going to turn out all right.' A pessimist says, 'It's going down the drain, and there's nothing you can do about it,' " he said.

"Both get us off the hook. Our place is on the hook. Whether things turn out for the better depends on what we do. We ought not spend our time masterminding the future, but recognize our marching orders: to do the best we can for history and the planet.

"One of my favorite prayers was written by a 9-year-old. His mother found it scribbled on a note beside his bed: 'Dear God, I'm doing the best I can.' "

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"Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine"
Autobiography of Huston Smith