Huston Smith Quotes

The sheer immensity of the human self as envisioned by the world's religions is awesome.

Traditionally, every Chinese was Confucian in ethics and public life, Taoist in private life and hygiene, and Buddhist at the time of death, with a healthy dash of shamanistic folk religion thrown in along the way. As someone has put the point: Every Chinese wears a Confucian hat, Taoist robes, and Buddhist sandals. In Japan Shinto was added to the mix.

No other civilization saw, appreciated, and classified so precisely the full spectrum of human personality types ... an achievement that has earned for India - the title of the world's introspective psychologist. The key to this psychological perceptiveness is her recognition to the extent to which people will differ and the degree to which these differences are to be respected.

Not only is the destiny of the individual bound up with the entire Church; it is responsible for helping to sanctify the entire world of nature and history.

Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.

When I read the Upanishads, I found a profundity of world view that made my Christianity seem like third grade.

[...] if we were to find ourselves with a single religion tomorrow, it is likely that there would be two the day after.

What is distinctive in Hinduism is the amount of attention it has devoted to identifying basic spiritual personality types and the disciplines that are most likely to work for each. The result is a recognition, pervading the entire religion, that there are multiple paths to God, each calling for its distinctive mode of travel.

Mystics of every faith report contacts with a world that startles and transforms them with its dazzling darkness. Zen stands squarely in this camp, its only uniqueness being that it makes breaking the language barrier its central concern.

While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of 6,000 years old universe - India was already envisioning ages and eons and galaxies as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The Universe so vast that modem astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple.

A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules, and threats. Love only takes root in children when it comes to them--initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response.

Philosophers tell us that the Indians were the first ones to conceive of a true infmite from which nothing is excluded. The West shied away from this notion. The West likes form, boundaries that distinguish and demarcate. The trouble is that boundaries also imprison - they restrict and confine.

Looking at the difference between pre- and post-Islamic Arabia, we are forced to ask whether history has ever witnessed a comparable moral advance among so many people in so short a time.

Signposts are not the destination, maps are not the terrain. Life is too rich and textured to be fitted into pigeonholes, let alone equated with them. No affirmation is more than a finger pointing to the moon. And, lest attention turn to the finger, Zen will point, only to withdraw its finger at once.

And it is here that India's mind boggling variety links up to her infinite soul... India includes so much because her soul being infinite excludes nothing. It goes without saying that the universe that India saw emerging from the infinite was stupendous.