Quotes from Huston Smith

Some friends accused me of whoring after the Infinite. Well, what better whoredom is there?

What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.

We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master.

A great anatomist used to close his opening lecture to beginning medical students with words that apply equally to our own undertaking. "In this course," he would say, "we shall be dealing with flesh and bones and cells and sinews, and there are going to be times when it's all going to seem terribly cold-blooded. But never forget. It's alive!" II.

Sex is the divine in its most available epiphany.

We should witness all things non-reactively, especially our moods and emotions, neither condemning some nor holding on to others.

Weapons are the tools of violence; all decent men detest them. Weapons are the tools of fear; a decent man will avoid them except in the direst necessity and, if compelled, will use them only with the utmost restraint. Peace is the highest value.… He enters a battle gravely, with sorrow and with great compassion, as if he were attending a funeral. (ch. 31) That

Heaven and earth are my inner and outer coffins. The sun, moon, and stars are my drapery, and the whole creation my funeral procession. What more do I want?

Emerson argued that "the whole secret of the teacher's force lies in the conviction that men are convertible, and they are. They want awakening, [and for that purpose they need teachers] to get the soul out of bed, out of her deep habitual sleep." That

A nation can assume that the phrase "under God" in its Pledge of Allegiance shows that its citizens believe in God when all it really shows is that they believe in believing in God.

These are what people really want, and they want them infinitely. To state the full truth, then, we must say that what people really would like to have is infinite being, infinite knowledge, and infinite bliss. Moksha is the release from the finitude that restricts us from the limitless being, consciousness, and bliss we desire.

The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.

Renaissance men who knew something about everything that was to be known disappeared several centuries ago. Students now face a plethora of compartmentalized fields of knowledge. Uninstructed as to how they connect, students are given no sense of the whole, if indeed their instructors think a seamless fabric of knowledge exists.

All the basic principles of Bhakti yoga are richly exemplified in Christianity. From the Hindu point of view, Christianity is one great brilliantly lit highway toward God, not greater than other paths, but more clearly marked. On this path God is conceived differently than in jnana yoga, where the guiding image was of an infinite sea of being underlying the waves of our finite selves. This sea typified the all-pervading Self, which is a much within us as without.

Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.

The bhakta's approach include repeating God's name, as in praying without ceasing "keep the name of the Lord spinning in the midst of all your activities." Washing or weaving, planting or shopping, imperceptibly but indelibly these verbal droplets of aspiration soak down into the subconscious, loading it with the divine.

The Infinite discloses itself, as much of itself as our finite minds can comprehend, by building the universal grammars of language and religion into our brains. We did not create those grammars; they were bequeathed to us.

Raja yoga with asanas (poses and breathing) is a way of leading the inquirer to direct personal experience of the "beyond that is within." Its method is willed introversion, one of the classic implements of creative genius in any line of endeavor. Its intent is to drive the psychic energy of the self to its deepest part to activate the last continent of the true self

In samadhi, the mind continues to think, but of no thing. This does not mean that it is thinking of nothing, that it is a total blank. It has perfected the paradox of seeing the invisible. It is filled with that which is "separated from all qualities, neither this nor that, without form, without a name.

Symbolism is the science of understanding the relations between the multiple levels of reality.

Such power as I possess for working in the political field has derived from my experiments in the spiritual field.

In nature, the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.

The Transcendent was my morning meal, we had the Eternal at lunch, and I ate a slice of the Infinite at dinner.

Dismiss these post facto accounts as legends if we must; there is no question but that in his life as the Buddha the springs of tenderness gushed abundant. Wanting to draw the arrows of sorrow from everyone he met, he gave to each his sympathy, his enlightenment, and the strange power of soul, which, even when he barely spoke a word, gripped the hearts of his visitors and left them transformed.