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Whither the World’s Religions: A Response & Dialogue Huston Smith & Henry Rosemont Jr. Following is a brief response and questions and answers to Henry Rosemont Jr.’s Ven. Hsuan Hua Memorial Lecture, “Whither the World’s Religions in the Twenty-first Century?” given on April 7, 2000, in the Memorial Chapel of the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley (see page 1).

Huston Smith: It is a very great honor, and speaking even more personally, a very great happiness for me to be able to share this evening (in unequal proportions, I’m very glad to say) with my dear friend Henry Rosemont. I’m very mindful that the announcement for this occasion said very clearly that my response was to be brief, and therefore I shall forego a more elaborate response. “Brief” is a very wise word, as I could easily turn this into a nostalgia trip and tell you about our lunches in Cambridge, where it was Henry and I against the other philosophers in the Bermuda triangle of Harvard, Princeton and Cornell who said there was no philosophy outside of the Western world. I could tell you about being in Henry’s own institution on the occasion when he was appointed the first university professor at that branch of the college system in Maryland, and so on. But enough of that.

We’ve had a very great and rich paper. What I will do is first distill what I take to be the essence of Henry’s message to us this evening, because if I’m wrong there, well then, commonly what follows will be off the mark.

I will then close by raising two questions for him.

He wants, and I’m sure that we’re all with him, to validate the great enduring wisdom traditions of the world’s religions, and to insist that they have not outlived their usefulness. Their usefulness is personal, helping us with directives for living meaningful lives, but also social, in their potential for creating a more just and more peaceful world. However, Henry goes on from that premise to say that we need to revision them, and the key to this revisioning is to distinguish between “direct” and “indirect” ways of readissue 1, june 2001

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ing sacred texts. By direct, I take it he means literal, and also pretty much what the texts say about the world. Those fall into the camp of the direct reading. He is proposing, moreover, that because those have lost their credibility, we move to the indirect reading. And there, he makes a distinction between the Abrahamic traditions in the West, and the traditions in South Asia and East Asia.

In the Abrahamic tradition, an indirect reading of the texts tells us we have a rational, intelligible world. That deliverance has led on into modern science, which has occurred in the West only, and not originally in the other traditions. Indirect reading in India and China has to do with, I take it, moral directives as to how we can live productive, satisfying, meaningful, and contributing lives. Starting with the West and having then made this detour to India and China, Henry proposes that we bring that indirect reading into the Abrahamic religions and look to them primarily for those sources. That, I take it, is the basic structure of his lecture.

Now, I want to proceed to two questions. I was looking for but did not find in the paper (which I was given the opportunity and courtesy to read in advance) any distinction, any mention of the word metaphysics, or perhaps even cosmology. The way I think of it, cosmology has to do with the nature, the furniture, of this physical universe and how it works. I agree that the traditional sects have been retired on the issue of cosmology. But there remains a matter of metaphysI wonder what status you ics, unless, Henry, you buy into the postmodern deconstruction of metaphysics, either in its early vergive to the metaphysical sion of saying “It’s all meaningless,” or in the later versions, where metanarratives are all oppressive. Unless dimensions of these texts. you buy into one of those, I wonder what status you give to the metaphysical dimensions of these texts. I remind you I am not speaking about this physical world externally, but to the possibility of other dimensions of reality. Let me just take a quick “quotes tour” around the world.

In China (although I am very reluctant to say anything about China in Henry’s presence), we have Earth, but then we also have heaven. There is one dictum by Confucius, “Of heaven and Earth, only heaven is great.”

Does that have any metaphysical meaning? When we turn to Taoism, we have the Tao of nature, but we also have the Tao that is “unspoken.” We all remember that wonderful quote in the forty-second chapter of the Tao Te Ching: “There is a being—wonderful, perfect—how quiet it is, how giving it is. . . . I do not know its name, so I call it the Tao, and I rejoice in its Way.” What are we to make of a text like this? Does it simply translate into moral directives for leading a meaningful life? Or does it point to some-

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thing that has ontological reality? And then, very quickly, what are we to make of the Zen Buddhist sunyata? And nirvana as contrasted with samsara in India? And in the Western tradition, what are we to make of “that in whose image—[rational, as you point out]—we are”? Are these all to be moralized and translated into directives for leading a meaningful and constructive life in this world? Or do they suggest that there may be regions of reality that slip through the “nets of science”? To lay my cards on the table, I happen to suspect—more than suspect, I happen to believe—that they do have that alert to that scientific society, and call our attention to domains of existence that the West has pretty much forgotten. Of course, in the philosophical tradition in my quotes tour, I would assuredly mention that paradigm of the allegory of Plato’s cave and the sun that lies outside it.

My second question relates to this. I really liked what you moved up to in the notion of the mystical, absolutely safe, and the notion of belonging. But again, are these simply psychological states that these traditions give us as directives to how we can come to these feelings? Or do they dig deeper into the nature of things to describe a reality, the ultimate reality which gives grounds for us to think that we were not just making it up when we had these sentiments of safety and belonging?

Henry Rosemont: As always, Huston gets right to the heart of the matter.

It’s the true heart. Having read most of what Huston has written over the years, and having enjoyed it deeply, I am not at all surprised he is looking for something transcendental—a reality that goes beyond the reality of this universe. It is true that in most non-Western traditions there is a metaphysics, an ontology. As I read them, they are concerned with the metaphysics and ontology of this universe—one that is, at least in principle, capable of our direct experience. I don’t want to deny that there might be a reality that slips through the net of science, to use Huston’s metaphor. Of course, I cannot say much to scientists about that. But I can argue to them about what I have just spoken about this evening. That it is possible this feeling of belonging is a feeling of union with something higher and transcendental. We don’t need that if you have psychological dimensions of being at one with the world, of leading an integrated life—aesthetically, morally and spiritually. It may not be the be-all or the end-all, but it is a damned good beginning. A lot of people would be very comfortable to settle for that.

A more important reason why I principally remain an agnostic about metaphysics that goes beyond is because if we were to truly profit from doing cross-cultural comparative work, continue to build on the monumental accomplishments of Huston and others from the past, in order to issue 1, june 2001

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generate sympathy for that cross-cultural work, we should have to work very hard at being extraordinarily attentive to our language. This is not simply the words we use but the underlying syntax and presuppositions.

For example, English, and indeed hearkening back to its Greek and IndoEuropean roots, is overwhelmingly a “thing” language. Chinese, on the other hand, is much more an “event” language. That doesn’t mean that English speakers don’t see events, and it doesn’t mean the Chinese don’t trip over substantial rocks. But there is a temptation, if you will, in each of the languages’ syntax, as well as in their semantics, to have more of an influence in the way that you look at them by the language you are taught to speak. I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to hypothesize that language determines that, but it certainly influences it. And, all the dialogue about what “there ultimately is” in this universe or some other, can’t take place crossculturally until people get a much better sense of how to work with disparate kinds of languages—one of which is more or less thing-oriented, the other which is more or less event-oriented.

You can see this not only in the classical language of Chinese but in the modern-day syntax as well, where Chinese unlike English is called “headfinal” for noun phrases. If I say, “The young woman who just came into this room is very beautiful,” a literal Chinese translation of this phrase would be: “Just now a room inside enter a young lady very beautiful.” Notice the “head-initial” English, “the young woman.” She is solid, substantial, our English young woman; the Chinese woman is more in flow, she’s moving.

There is more focus on the event—in other words, what is taking place now among a multiplicity of things around them—than the thing itself. So for that reason, I am going to bequeath later discussions of ultimate issues of metaphysics to my successors, probably a couple of generations of successors, until more is worked out on the intertranslatability that does not seem to beg all the questions in favor of one tradition or another.

There is, of course, a deeper and much more important point at the heart of Huston’s remarks. And that is, of course, that I expressed some skepticism, to understate the case, in literally believing what we are told in Genesis and many parts of the Gospels, or in the Qur’an. And yet it seems hard to believe, to accept those faiths, to act in accordance with them, to observe their holy days and attend to prayer and so on unless there is an acceptance that there is a transcendental universe. I admit that this is something I do not explicate in my talk, largely because I do not have a good answer for it. There is something paradoxical there.

But I do not believe it is necessary to literally believe in those things. It is a lesson I learned from the Confucians. Part of Confucius’s genius is attempting to hold onto, maintain and strengthen a set of rituals, customs

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and traditions inherited from a distant past which were originally based on strong beliefs in the supernatural, but which the much more rationally oriented scholars of Confucius’s own time were extremely skeptical about.

We see this consistently also in the message the master gives to one disciple who asks about death. “You know so little about life, yet, my puppy, why do you ask about death?” The sacrifice to the spirits exercises its arm on egos.

This is somewhat similar to what Marx said when he was asked by Engels why he was taking his family to Mass after they arrived in England. “Where else can you hear Bach for nothing?” replied Marx. One does not have to be a Christian to appreciate the beauty of a cathedral, nor Chinese to appreciate their opera, a beautifully designed pagoda, or a teahouse—those things are available to all who have the sense to attend. And so it is that we can come to accept from the rituals: to do the Seders, to attend midnight Mass, and to hold in abeyance what they originally were to signify.

But sometimes when we look at the other traditions, we can see our own in a different way. Someone from a culture alien to Catholicism, initially hearing communion described, might say, “You celebrate cannibalistic behavior?!” Of course, that person is not a likely prospect for conversion. But one could also look at that and, never mind all the horrors attendant on the Thirty-Years War about transubstantiation being literal or figurative, think again of the words, “This is my body,” and ask, what is he pointing to? Bread, growth from a seed, with hard human labor, a fruit of this good Earth which sustains our life. “This is my blood,” the fruit of the grape, also a product of this good Earth, which we nurture with our labor, and which sustains us. You can read that directly as a message of coming to see how we belong in this world. What else there is beyond this universe I am not sure. But what I have How could a Christian sense learned from Confucius is: I don’t need anything more.

of safety and belonging based

Huston Smith: I quite agree that there is something formally similar among all religions, namely the sense on Trinity be in dialogue of security, this sense of belonging. But how can we dialogue based on this sense of security we all might with a Buddhist’s based on share if we divorce that sense of security from the metaphysics that nurtures it in the different traditions? Or, of course, the positions against metaphysics, for ex- sunyata, or emptiness? ample, in some Buddhist traditions? So, we might have formally these similarities among all the traditions, but if we take out the content, what basis do we have for dialogue? For example, how could a Christian sense of safety and belonging based on Trinity be in dialogue with a Buddhist’s based on sunyata, or emptiness? issue 1, june 2001

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Henry Rosemont: That’s a splendid question. Let me first answer by throwing it back at you. If two traditions have incompatible metaphysics, then the possibility of a genuine dialogue and understanding between them is not going to happen. You will end up only with debate. If we start out on a lower level, we can come to appreciate, in a sense, that the worldview of Buddhists somehow helps them come to terms with their human lives.

And with that beginning, we can hope that Buddhists, as well as Hindus, Muslims and so on, can come to see how the basis of a Christian’s belief also contributes to the meaningfulness of life, and therefore, can come to have a sympathy for that way of looking at the world, if not an acceptance of it. That’s important. With that kind of beginning, then they can go on to share more deeply an appreciation of the moral traditions of each other, and come to see how each of them, as I hinted at briefly in my talk, has these virtuous resources within it to argue for a more universally agreed upon sense of justice, equality and nonviolence.

That is, when you start taking them seriously and see how much is in there that you can appreciate and sympathize with morally, then a lot of the sting of the notion of cultural imperialism on the part of the West, or chauvinism, goes away. Part of the sting will remain with us, though, because we will come to see, as we come to deeply appreciate those moral traditions, that we don’t have a monopoly on moral virtue either here in the West. That is the kind of thing I hope for that will generate both a greater cross-cultural dialogue on how to live in a more peaceful and just world; and how each of us, each tradition, might contribute to helping the others to live an authentic, integrated life—aesthetically, ethically and spiritually. That’s a beginning towards an answer to a splendid question, one I will worry about for the rest of my life. So will we all, perhaps.

Questioner: As the problems of the twenty-first century push us toward hopelessness and apathy, are the world’s religions becoming any more or less relevant in combating that apathy?

Henry Rosemont: They have greater relevance than ever before. I was appreciative of all the brave young people who refused to fight in an unjust war in Vietnam—those were my years at M.I.T. spent with Noam Chomsky, whom I hold as dear a friend as Huston over all these years. After a number of struggles and demonstrations, arrests, being maced, being electricprodded and so on, and not succeeding after a couple of years, a number of the young people dropped out, even went to Canada, or went into the mountains, where they were going to try to be Weatherpeople or something like

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that, or simply became apathetic politically. Overwhelmingly, the people who hung in there all of the time were deeply religious people, spiritual people who felt it their duty to do so, while the young people—I loved them dearly and still do—were obviously struggling to win. The religious people were struggling to win too, but they were there principally because they felt obliged to stand up against evil. And they found the war evil. It is the same with apartheid. Those who hung in there all the way along, even when it looked like apartheid might never end, felt obliged to stay in there because apartheid was evil. Just as the people in the camps in Latin America struggle against enormous odds obviously to better the lives of South and Central American peasants, quite simply because what their governments are doing to them is evil. And so yes, the world’s religious traditions have an enormous relevance and contribution to make in the fight against hopelessness.

Questioner: Our society is overbalanced with a view towards the rational, and subsequently towards self-centeredness. The result is overconsumption, lack of regard for the individual’s effects on the community. How can an Eastern religious perspective assist with balancing this perspective, in other words, in getting rid of greed and enhancing the view of the whole?

Henry Rosemont: Part of the answer is that reading the non-Western texts will help you read the texts of the Abrahamic traditions in a different way as well. It is very hard to quote scripture in favor of the televangelists, in favor of this overconsumption, in favor of all the things that are destructive of community, and the meaninglessness that is increasingly affecting all of our lives. It is very hard to quote from the Gospels, the Hebrew scriptures, the Qur’an—you really have to stretch in order to get that. “Not by bread alone” is fairly central. It is true that God helps those who help themselves, but we must love our neighbor as ourselves. “May the best man win” is more than offset by ample examples of the view that it is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game that counts. Every man’s home is his castle, the ad people tell us, yet we know we agree deeply with John Donne that “no man is an island.” We have the resources within our own tradition to combat rampant materialism and the destruction of the natural environment, the planet and everything else. Obviously, we can take these in different ways. There are particular insights in the Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) that I don’t think are found in Scripture. And if the Daodejing is complemented with its commentaries in English, such as that of my favorite “geologian,” Tom Berry, in his Dream of the Earth, we can come to see

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this planet as sacred in itself. That, too, I hope would get us out of this consumption kick, which is consuming us as we have to be consumers.

Questioner: Regarding security, which also includes the sense of belonging that you mentioned, Annie Dillard said, “We are most deeply asleep at the switches when we fancy we have any control at all.” Isn’t the idea of religion precisely to help us understand that there is no such thing as “security”?

Henry Rosemont: Annie Dillard is talking almost overwhelmingly about the “security” emerging from the Abrahamic religious heritage, in the sense that we are “secure in God’s hands,” which, when we look at nature, is exactly the opposite. It is there that we cannot control nature. I am not sure that the universe is ultimately intelligible, that it is capable of being explained intelligibly.

It is sheer hubris on the human part to think that if there were such a thing as the true scientific theory of the universe, that somehow with the particular kinds of minds and the particular sensory apparatus human beings have we could discover that pure theory. It takes a good deal of arrogance, and indeed that is found in the Abrahamic tradition in the affirmation. It is coming to be seen by some of the more profound scientists in a variety of disciplines as well. After celebrating the accomplishments of Einstein, Bohr and Max Planck, the The human brain may not British physicist J. B. S. Haldane said, “Ah, when all is said and done, it may be that the universe is not only queerer than we think; it might be queerer than we can be capable of fully underthink.” This may merely reinforce the conventions of neuroscience in which there is an explosion of knowlstanding how the human edge of which an increasing minority of neuroscientists is coming in humility to accept, that in the end brain functions. the human brain may not be capable of fully understanding how the human brain functions. This may not, of course, cause us to stop thinking, to stop doing science, but to appreciate that there might be limits. Human creativity is only possible within the limits of the human mind; and, the constraints, at least in our language, are what make it possible for us to be so creative when we use language.

As for the notion of “security,” then, yes, it would be arrogant to think we can fully understand the world; and there is something not quite right, at least for myself, to think that this is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, even though I dearly love Leibniz. Dillard is just flat wrong if she thinks we cannot find that sense of belonging. And it is quite clear in a number of passages that she herself gets that sense—she becomes com-

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pletely absorbed in much of what she sees, even though some things seem kind of gory. She is totally absorbed and has an affinity and affection, and a sense of belonging in nature that far surpasses her feeling of estrangement. Or at least that is the way I read her.

Questioner: The word metaphysics itself would suggest “beyond the physical,” the supposition of something beyond. Isn’t this an oxymoron, attempting to describe the metaphysical with the physical?

Henry Rosemont: No, I don’t believe so. It certainly works if we hearken back to the Greek, the notion of cosmos in the sense of the universe. And the Greeks certainly did cosmology, and they certainly did metaphysics, or what was called metaphysics. . . . But they did not have a sense of a transcendental plane. You do have Platonic forms as a way of accounting for truths of mathematics that do not seem to be of this world, but a transcendental world was not one that was there for the Greeks. Yet they certainly addressed what we would want to call ontology. “What is there in the universe?” Thales said everything is water. Heraclitus said it’s all fire.

Parmenides, it’s all one. Descartes, later on, got two substances, but they couldn’t interact. . . . Leibniz said there were a zillion of them called monads . . . but they all have to do with this world. We are doing something else when we start to talk about the transcendental world, and except in the period where we do philosophy, we call that theology.

So I don’t think it’s an oxymoron when the word “metaphysics” is used to answer the question, What is there in the universe—the universe that is available to our senses? That there may be a universe beyond that, or something else beyond that, is possible, but it isn’t necessary to talk about that in order to do metaphysics. If it were, then three-quarters of the human race has never done any metaphysics or ontology whatsoever. I am rather reluctant to accept that conclusion; I’d rather try to broaden the definition of metaphysics, as I tried to do this evening.

Questioner: The central message of your thesis has something to do with the idea that the power and most valuable message of all the world’s religions has to do with what you call “ego-reduction,” or “ego-shrinkage.”

And yet, the most central value in the world today, in both the United States and China, is “ego-expansion,” selfishness and so forth. What does that mean, then, for the world’s religions? What role are they to take? Are they to become more iconoclastic in going against the grain? How can they seriously be heard by populations that are moving more and more towards

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ego-enlargement and self-gratification? What stance do they assume then, whether in Asia or America, Eastern or Western?

Henry Rosemont: Revolutionary roles. I think that for too long, too much of the world’s religious heritage has been given over to the most reactionary and fanatical among their adherents. It’s time that stopped and progressive folk and true believers started heading for the barricades. That is a very short answer.

Yes, we are getting more egoistic all the time, and more and more people are finding meaninglessness in being able to own and consume more and more. And that is even more disgusting, because much of what they are consuming is, of course, at the expense of people who cannot think about metaphysics or religion at all, because they haven’t eaten in five days.

This is a significant part of the world’s population. So the struggle against this ego-expansion of “I, I, I,” “consume, consume, consume,” “eat, eat, eat,” “own, own, own,” has to be stopped. And certainly some of the richest resources for arresting and changing that direction are the world’s religious traditions. . . . There’s a wealth of resources—conceptual, psychological and psychic—in all the world’s religious traditions that can give us the strength to take up the needed struggle. It is a lesson I have learned from the Confucians: to combine the political, the ethical, the aesthetic, the spiritual. We do not have to be schizophrenic in these actions. We can lead lives of integrity. ❧ Huston Smith, UC Berkeley, Professor Emeritus, is author of Religions of Man (1958) and The World’s Religions (1989). Prof. Smith, a leading figure in the comparative philosophy of religion, is widely regarded as the most eloquent and accessible contemporary authority on the history of religions.

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