Biography in outline
Huston Cummings Smith was born in 1919 in Suzhou, China, to American Methodist missionary parents, and spent his first seventeen years inside the trilingual mission-school world of treaty-port China. He returned to the United States for university, completed a PhD in philosophy at the University of Chicago in 1945, and held teaching appointments at Washington University in St Louis (1947–58), MIT (1958–73), Syracuse (1973–83) and, finally, the University of California at Berkeley as visiting professor of religious studies. His five marriages of academic life — to Washington, MIT, Syracuse, Berkeley and the Bill Moyers PBS audience — were the institutional carriers of a single working programme: to read the historic religions sympathetically from inside their own self-understanding, and to translate that reading into English-language scholarship and broadcast for a non-specialist reader. The 1996 Bill Moyers five-part PBS series The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith — recorded when Smith was seventy-seven — was the single most widely-watched extended interview with a comparative-religion scholar in American broadcast history.
The argument of his work
*The World's Religions* — the 1991 expanded re-title of the 1958 Religions of Man — is the operative document, the volume that carried Smith's reading into four decades of undergraduate classrooms and into a non-academic American reading audience the parallel scholarly literature did not reach. The book treats Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and primal religion as separate chapters; the chapters are not exchangeable, and Smith is careful to distinguish what each tradition specifically claims from what its neighbours specifically claim. The synthesising move — and the one the constructivist critics have spent four decades disputing — is the framing essay that closes the book, in which Smith argues that beneath the visible differences the traditions are reaching, in their respective vocabularies, for a recognition that is recognisably one. The position is the perennial-philosophy reading the Aldous Huxley 1945 anthology had introduced to an English-language audience, extended into a sustained textbook treatment by a scholar with the philological and ethnographic equipment Huxley had lacked. Smith's positioning — perennialist in commitment, careful and chapter-by-chapter in execution — was the methodological contribution that gave the perennialist reading a working academic register at the moment Steven Katz's 1978 constructivist critique was about to make the field of religious-studies inhospitable to it.
Where he appears in the index
*The World's Religions* is the central document Smith leaves; the textbook is referenced across this lexicon's tradition entries — Christianity, the hesychasm and Philokalia entries, the Gregory Palamas entry, the Sufism entry — because Smith's chapter-by-chapter coverage of the contemplative literature is the working synthesis the other entries are independently checking themselves against. Smith's relationship to the perennialist lineage runs upstream through Huxley's *The Perennial Philosophy* — the 1945 anthology Smith inherited the term and the reading from — and through Huxley's *The Doors of Perception*, the 1954 mescaline essay Smith was reading sympathetically across the late 1950s and which he extended in his own 2000 Cleansing the Doors of Perception into a sustained reflection on the psychedelic-as-contemplative-instrument argument. Lateral to Smith — same generation, same broad perennialist orientation, different specific operations — are Idries Shah's *The Sufis*, whose framing of Sufism as a non-sectarian wisdom tradition Smith reviewed sympathetically, and Manly P. Hall's *The Secret Teachings of All Ages*, the earlier American esoteric synthesis the Huxleyan reception rendered respectable to a literary audience Smith would later reach.
The constructivist critique
Smith's perennialist commitment is the methodological feature of his work that the post-1978 religious-studies field has been most consistently sceptical of. The case against the perennialist reading, given its most influential formulation in Steven Katz's Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism and extended by Bernard McGinn in Christian mysticism and Robert Sharf in Zen, is that mystical experience is not a single cross-cultural recognition partially captured by different theological vocabularies — it is constituted by the doctrinal training of each tradition, such that the unio mystica of a Christian contemplative, the anattā recognition of a Theravāda meditator, and the fanāʾ of a Sufi murīd are not partial translations of one another but distinct experiential states shaped by distinct conceptual preparation. Smith's response, sustained across the second half of his career and most thoroughly worked out in Why Religion Matters (2001), is that the constructivist reading mistakes the vocabulary of the report for the recognition the vocabulary is reaching for. The dispute is unresolved, and is, on most current scholarly accounting, one of the load-bearing methodological choices a reader of the contemplative literature has to make before any particular tradition is engaged.
What he isn't
Smith is not a teacher of practice and does not represent himself as one — the corpus is descriptive and synthetic rather than instructional, and the reader who comes to The World's Religions expecting a contemplative manual will leave with a reading list and a comparative framework rather than with a discipline to take up. He is also not an unbroken sympathiser of every tradition he treats — the textbook's chapter on primal religion has been criticised for its romantic register, and the Confucianism chapter has been criticised for treating the tradition more philosophically than its lived ritual centre warrants. And the perennialist commitment that runs through the synthesising chapters is not a settled scholarly consensus the reader of Smith is being inducted into; it is a position Smith holds, that the contemporary academic field substantially does not, and that the reader is asked to weigh against the constructivist counter-argument before deciding whether the textbook's framing essay can be trusted to carry the chapter-by-chapter material it precedes.
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