The Huston Smith Reader. Huston Smith
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issue to the persons who are discussing it. “Two plus two equals four” isn't untrue because the person who said it was drunk at the time. That's a crude example of psychologizing, but Freud's critique of religion and those of Marx and Nietzsche as well have the same form.
This is not to say that psychological considerations are irrelevant. We should be wary of what drunks say, and if Freud had proved that religious beliefs derive only, or even primarily, from wishful thinking and father images, I would accept his reasoning and could live with it. But he didn't come close to doing that, so I see his theories as half-truths. There are textbook cases (I won't venture how many) in which they come close to being the full truth about beliefs. But to generalize from these and turn a half-truth into the full truth is a blatant case of disciplinary imperialism. Psychology—or, in the case of Marx's “opiate of the people,” sociology—colonizes religion and tailors it to fit its theories. You can see that I'm worked up on the point.
Furthermore, the psychologizing sword cuts both ways. If my beliefs simply reflect my character, yours reflect yours. If I believe because I am infantile, you disbelieve because you are counterdependent. You see why philosophers aren't fond of ad hominen arguments. They degenerate into trading insults. I come back to the idea of the world as a Rorschach blot. If you see it as consisting only of matter, then immaterial things that other people believe in will appear to you as projections. They, in turn, will see you as prey to tunnel vision and blind to half of what exists.
BENEKE Tell us about your experience with your Zen master in Kyoto.
SMITH I was drawn to Buddhism through D. T. Suzuki, whose writings held out the prospect of at least a taste of satori, the enlightenment experience, if one practiced Zen. I was in my mid-thirties, and at that stage I wanted that experience more than anything else in the world, so I entered Zen training, which led eventually to a monastery in Kyoto and koan training under a Zen master.
Rinzai Zen (the branch that I was in) uses koans [traditional Zen mental exercises] in its training. Koans are of different kinds, but the beginning ones are rather like shaggy-dog stories in that they involve questions—riddles, really—that make no rational sense. The one I was given was longer than most, so I won't repeat it in full, but it came down to this: How could one of the greatest Zen masters have said that dogs do not have Buddha-natures when the Buddha has said that even grass possesses it? For two months, I banged my head against that contradiction for eight hours a day. I was sitting in the cramped lotus position and reporting to my roshi, or Zen master, one-on-one at five o'clock each morning, what I had come up with. Precious little! It was the most frustrating assignment I had ever been given. I seemed to be getting absolutely nowhere, though I did discover as the weeks slipped by that the final word in the koan, mu (which translates into “no”), seemed to function more and more like the om mantra that I had worked with in Hinduism.
The climax came during the final eight days in the Myoshinji Monastery in the middle of a kind of final-exam period where everything else gets tabled so the monks can meditate almost around the clock. As a novice, I was permitted to sleep three and a half hours each night, but I found that grossly insufficient, and the sleep deprivation was the hardest ordeal I had ever faced. After the first night I was sleepy, after the second I was bushed, and it kept getting worse from there.
I still don't understand how Zen training works, but it seems clear that the initial koans force the rational mind to the end of its tether, and that sleep deprivation figures in somewhere along the line. If you can't get your mind into an altered state any other way, sleep deprivation will eventually do it for you, for deprived of dreams, the mind becomes psychotic.
Something like that happened to my mind two days before the monastic term ended. That afternoon I went storming into the roshi in a frenzy. Self-pity had long since become boring; that day I was in a rage. I was furious. What a way to treat human beings, I kept telling myself, and charged in to my roshi prepared, not just to throw in the towel, but to throw it straight at his face.
I entered the audience room with the required ritual, palms clasped together. Turning only straight corners because there are no diagonal shortcuts in Zen, I made my way to where he was sitting in his priestly robes. His short, heavy stick (for clobbering if need be) was lying in his lap. Sinking to my knees on the cushion before him, I touched my head to the floor and flexed my outstretched fingers upward, an Indian gesture that symbolizes lifting the dust from the Buddha's feet. Then I sat back on my heels, and our eyes met in a mutual glare. For some moments he said nothing, then, “How's it going?” He was one of the two roshis in the world then who could speak English. It sounded like a calculated taunt.
“Terrible!” I shouted.
“You think you are going to get sick, don't you?”
More taunting sarcasm, so I let him have it.
“Yes, I think I'm going to get sick!” I yelled. For several days my throat had been contracting to the point where I was having to labor to breathe.
Then something extraordinary happened. His face suddenly relaxed, its taunting, goading expression was gone, and with total matter-of-factness he said, “What is sickness? What is health? Both are distractions. Put both aside and go forward.”
What I despair of conveying to you is the impact those fifteen words had on me. Without reflecting for a moment, I found myself saying to myself, “By God, he's right!” How was he able to spin me around, defuse my rage, and return me to lucidity in a twinkling? I will never comprehend. Never have I felt so instantly reborn and energized. It was as if there was a pipe connecting his hara—his abdomen, where the Japanese locate the self's center—to mine. I exited in the prescribed manner, not only determined to stick out the two remaining days, but knowing that I could do so.
It didn't occur to me at the time that in that climactic moment I might have passed my koan, and I returned to the States assuming that I had not. But when I related my story to a dharma brother (someone with whom I'd undergone spiritual training) who had trained for twelve years under my roshi, he said he wasn't at all sure that I had not passed it. He reminded me that the answer to the early koans is not a rational proposition but an experience. That, at the climactic moment in my training, I was able not just to acknowledge the identity of life's opposites theoretically, but to experience their identity. In my case the identity of sickness and health struck him as a strong foretaste of the enlightenment experience.
BENEKE Therapists talk about interventions, which require a certain timing and art where the therapist picks just the right moment to say just the right thing that leads to insight. Your roshi intervened in just the right way.
SMITH Apparently so. It still seems to me like genius. He knew exactly where I was, and administered exactly the light tap—ping—that changed everything.
BENEKE Your early work focused on the historical religions, ones that have written texts and cumulative histories. At a certain point you came to appreciate oral traditions as well.
SMITH I now see that in addition to the three great families of historical religions—East Asian, South Asian, and Abrahamic, or Western—there is a fourth: the primal, tribal, and exclusively oral family which is not inferior to the other three. What enabled me to honor tribal peoples as our equals is that while writing adds, it also subtracts. We tend to think that because unlettered peoples only talk and we both talk and write, we have everything they have, and something in addition. I no longer think that it's true. Writing exacts a price, which is loss of the sense of what is important.
Visualize a tribe gathered around its campfire at the close of the day. Everything its ancestors learned the hard way, through generations of trial and error, from medicinal plants to the myths that empower their lives and give them meaning, is stored in their skulls, and there only. Obviously they are going to keep reviewing what is important for them, and let what is trivial fade into oblivion.
BENEKE Tell us about your encounter with the Masai warriors in Africa.
SMITH I was in Tanzania for a conference in the late 1960s and didn't want to leave without a glimpse of big game in its natural habitat. There were no tours, so