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Tales of Wonder LP: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography

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Thursday afternoon I received Huston Smith's just-published autobiography, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, in the mail. Friday morning I'd finished reading it, and would have done so Thursday night were it not for the ordinary life necessities of sleep, a committee meeting and a dental appointment to go to first thing in the morning. I can't remember the last time I was so fascinated by a book that I read it at a single sitting: this is good!

Huston Smith has just turned 90, and has long been my model for what I'd like to be like when I grow up. He is a gentlemen, a scholar, and one of, if not the, world's greatest authorities on the religions of the world. His classic book The World's Religions has introduced millions of readers to what's good in the religions of the world. While he has the accuracy and objectivity we expect from a professor, though, he doesn't have the dryness or too common air of intellectual superiority, because he actually spent years practicing each of the religions he writes about, to gain direct experiential knowledge of what's good in them.

Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine is a series of intimate and inspiring glimpses of a wonderful man - and his wife Kendra, who is very much a part of the story, keeping him grounded in reality - as he pursues meaning and the good life in modern times. Raised by missionary parents in China, he feels he is basically a Christian, as well as a member of the world's other major religions. When you get to the bottom line, though, his religion, like that of his friend His Holiness the Dalai Lama, is kindness....I can't praise him or his book highly enough...

Dr. Huston Smith is a world treasure who rightly deserves high praise as one of the world's foremost religious scholars, teachers and adepts. This autobiographic, life-to-date, story reflects a passion for his calling which is inspiring, wistful and laced with religious and personal epiphanies and profundities.

A self-professed Methodist missionary family "favorite," the description of his early life in Dzang Zok, China, and his early academic life as a high-achiever at Central Methodist College in Missouri are particularly enjoyable. This story provides readers a compelling glimpse of the whole person (and family) and provides readers with insight as to why he does what he does. Dr. Smith reflects upon his own life story with the same enthusiasm, openness and critical thinking that pervade his academic endeavors.

Dr. Smith is quick to give credit where credit is due. Not only to his teachers - who comprise a veritable "who's who" of 20th century religious, social and philosophic leaders - but also to his wife and best friend Kendra and their three daughters who allowed him to follow his enthusiasms while keeping the home fires burning. Dr. Smith acknowledges the trade-offs between his personal and professional life and yet, with wisdom and reflection, lets us know that as he approaches his 90th birthday that he would probably do it all over again. As his own borrowed final words echo "Thanks for everything! Praise for it all!"

This is a delightful book, although one that is most likely to please those already familiar with Huston Smith. Smith divides this memoir into two sections. In the first section (dealing with the "horizontal" dimension of his life), Smith provides a broadly sketched outline of his eventful life, including chapters dealing with his childhood in China, his education in America, his life as an academic and his life as a husband and father. In the second section (dealing with life's "vertical" dimension) Smith seeks to illuminate the numerous influences that have shaped his characteristic take on life's spiritual and religious realities. Especially moving is the book's brief epilogue in which Smith reflects upon his "state of being" at the approach of his 90th birthday; many of the books outstanding insights (and most poignant passages) are packed into these final dozen or so pages. Be clear that Tales of Wonder is not at the level of, say, Augustine's Confessions; readers looking for that sort of autobiography are advised to look elsewhere. Nor are readers familiar with Smith's philosophy likely to find startlingly new insights in these pages. But for those who would like to catch a thoughtful /gently reflective "behind the scenes" glimpse of "the spiritual explorer who brought the world's religions to the west", Tales of Wonder comes highly recommended.

This is an autobiography of Huston Smith. Smith has written 14 books, most notably, The World's Religions. During his career, he taught at Washington University, Syracuse, MIT and U.C. Berkeley.

This is an extraordinarily well written book. Jeffrey Paine of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (formerly a judge on the Pulitzer Prize committee) writes this amazing story of Smith's life.

A fascinating read. Huston claims the soul of Christianity as his faith and became a practicing Muslim, Hindi and Buddhist during his lifetime. The metaphor Smith uses to provide a framework for understanding human existence is the cross:

"Our life in historical or chronological time, measuring and minding, cautious and comparing, forms the horizontal arm of the cross. Our experience of the unqualified, of inner, immeasurable time (or timelessnesss) is the cross's vertical pole. We live in two kinds of time or perspective simultaneously. The horizontal and the vertical are at once quite distinct and entirely overlapping, and to experience their incongruity and confluence is what it means to be human." (p.41).

Huston's life can be characterized by the following phrase:

"to think of how to think the way I do not think," (p.130)

His life explored the dilemma whereby "Once different religions knew about each other only enough to kill or convert one another." (p.51). Smith's life exemplified that the exploration of a varierty of faith persuasions allowed him to tap dimensions of the human experience that he was unaware of. His life illustrated the observation that, "The great changes in history occur, I believe, not through argument but through seeing things differently." (p.106).

This autobiography of Huston Smith provides tangible evidence that great changes in human beings occur, not through argument, but through seeing things differently.

This is truly a divine adventure. I recommend it.

Having not read any of Huston Smith's many books on comparative religion, I was concerned that his autobiography could be a ponderous and dense debate of arcane theological concepts. Fortunately, his book (written with Jeffrey Paine) turns out to be an accessible and remarkably personal tracing of the arc of his spiritual life.

Written as a valediction in his 90th year, Huston takes us from his birth in China to Christian missionaries, through his education at the University of Chicago (he earned a Ph.D. in Divinity), and on to his university teaching appointments, his writing, and his unique way of practicing the world's major religions.

Huston described his approach to learning world religion as quite different from detached scholarship. He described his three-pronged approach: (1) Read each new religion's scriptures (the Q'ur'an, The Torah, and so on), (2) Seek out its living authorities and learn from them, and (3) Do the ritual, the devotion and the practices. This allowed Huston to "inhabit" these religions and thus teach and write about them from experience. He was obviously quite successful, for one of his books, "The World's Religions" has sold over two million copies.

This account is also quite fascinating for all the religious and scholarly figures Huston knew and interacted with, including Thomas Merton, Aldous Huxley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Krishnamurti, and Timothy Leary. In fact, Huston participated in some of Leary's experiments with mescaline.

Huston's own life has not been without loss and tragedy. Married to his wife, Kendra, for sixty years, the couple had three daughters, the oldest of whom, Karen, died of cancer. Another daughter, Gael, lost her child, Serena, to a tragic murder in 2002. These were severe tests, but Huston clung to his Christian faith throughout these ordeals.

In the epilogue to his book, Huston has moved from his home in Berkeley, California to an assisted living facility. Now, when people ask him questions about various religions and practices, he confesses, "I have forgotten more about the various religions than I knew in the first place. All that is left of my study of them is ... me." A little later he adds, "Possibly I needed to go through ninety years of life to understand how life itself is the path."

Toward the very end, Huston bids us farewell: "And good-bye to you, dear reader. Writing was to me more than an academic obligation: it was my passion and my refuge. Although we never met in person, you were like a friend, the thought of whom spurred me to my best efforts."

Reading Huston's autobiography will leave you grateful for a religious life well-lived and well-told.

In hopes that this is not the last work of Huston Smith, I readily advise any follower of Smith's lifetime of adventures and learning to pick this up. The photos and stories of specific influential individuals is well worth the investment of time and money. A strong picture of his wife emerges, as does his stylish embrace of aging. I close the back cover admiring this man as much, or more, than ever. Charming, impish, fascinatingly brilliant and amazingly open, Smith is one of a kind. We are fortunate to still have him with us as he is a storehouse of knowledge, a friend to icons inaccessible in the new millennium.

Huston drops lots of well-known names in this book, and has written an interesting - altho brief - autobiography. I used his book, "The World's Religions" for a class called "Comparative Religions" at the local JC years ago and have kept it around as a reference since then. He's a fine writer on a fascinating subject and well worth the reading.

This book is lovely from start to finish. Huston Smith has had such an interesting, thoughtful life, and his life story reflects many of the changes in the study of religion in the 20th century. I cried at the hardships he has faced and my mind rejoiced at the intellectual adventures he expounded upon. Smith has grabbed life with both hands and has found meaning and joy in so much of what he has seen. This book is about a brilliant life, and well told.

Really, a lot hinges on a single question: was Huston Smith actually onto something, or was he just fooling himself and everyone else? In a skeptical mood, we need to recognize that our minds can play tricks on us and we have a tendency to believe what appeals to us; add a formidable intellect like that of Smith, and you can cook up all sorts of impressive rationalizations to defend a metaphysical belief system. But if we're to be truly open-minded, we also need to consider the possibility that, by virtue of his upbringing in China as the child of Christian missionaries, and his deep immersion in various world religions to gain an insider's perspective of them, Smith may well have tapped into alternative ways of knowing and synthesized a genuine unification and integration of diverse worldviews.

I don't know which way to go on this, and you can form your own opinion. But regardless, there's no denying that Smith's story reveals an adventurous, inquisitive, tolerant, sincere, kind, and humble man. I find him inspiring, and there's much to be learned just from his positive example of how to deal with loss of loved ones and one's own physical deterioration with age.

The little downside of Smith's humility is that he's fairly modest in telling his story, so the book is somewhat short (though well written) and he perhaps doesn't do adequate justice to his achievements. To fill the gap, I hope that someone will take the time to write a properly full biography of him, ideally taking advantage of the fact that he's still around to answer questions! Nevertheless, this is a heartwarming autobiography and I recommend it to anyone who looks at existence with wonder, regardless of whether you agree with the conclusions Smith reached as a result of his own explorations.

The author is a seeker and a doer. A grand combination that has resulted in a remarkable life. For anyone with a desire to learn and grow, this book is a must. Highly credible, informative, a joy to read.