The World's Religions

Huston Smith presents a survey of the major world religions organized not as a historical or sociological textbook but as an attempt to distill each tradition's deepest wisdom.

Smith opens by framing the book's purpose and deliberate limitations. He is not offering a balanced account of religion's full record but instead focusing on each tradition at its best, comparing his approach to a music appreciation course that emphasizes great compositions rather than cataloguing bad ones. He treats the religions as wisdom traditions housing the accumulated insights of the human race, aiming to take religion seriously as a living force and expose readers to traditions beyond their own.

The Hinduism chapter presents the tradition as affirming that people can have what they want, then traces what they actually desire. On the Path of Desire, they seek pleasure and worldly success, both eventually found wanting. The Path of Renunciation leads through duty to the community and arrives at moksha, or liberation: infinite being, knowledge, and bliss. Hinduism's central claim is that people already possess these in the Atman, the divine self identical with Brahman, the Godhead, but buried beneath distraction. Four yogas suited to different temperaments provide paths to realization: jnana (knowledge), bhakti (devotion), karma (selfless work), and raja (meditation). Smith also explores Hindu conceptions of God as both personal and transpersonal, the doctrines of karma (moral cause and effect governing reincarnation) and maya (the world's deceptive self-presentation), and the conviction that all religions lead to the same summit.

The Buddhism chapter opens with Siddhartha Gautama, born around 563 BCE into a royal family in what is now Nepal. Shielded from suffering, the prince encountered old age, sickness, death, and a wandering monk, prompting him to renounce privilege. After six years of seeking, he achieved enlightenment and spent 45 years teaching. Smith characterizes the Buddha as reacting against corruptions in the Hinduism of his day. The Four Noble Truths hold that life is dukkha (dislocated, out of joint), that the cause is tanha (the drive for private fulfillment), that the condition can be cured, and that the Eightfold Path is the cure. Key concepts include nirvana (not annihilation but the extinction of the finite self's boundaries) and anatta (denying a permanent soul while affirming continuity through reincarnation). Smith traces Buddhism's split into Theravada (emphasizing self-effort and monastic discipline) and Mahayana (emphasizing grace, compassion, and lay accessibility), then examines Zen Buddhism's insistence on direct experience over verbal understanding, and Tibetan Buddhism's Tantric approach, which uses ritual, visualization, and bodily energies to accelerate spiritual progress.

The Confucianism chapter presents its founder (c. 551–479 BCE) as a teacher who addressed the collapse of social cohesion during China's Period of the Warring States. Rejecting both the Realists' reliance on force and the Mohists' call for universal love, Confucius proposed deliberate tradition: conscious reinforcement of inherited best practices, adapted for a world of self-conscious individuals. His program centers on jen (human-heartedness), chun tzu (the mature person), li (propriety and ritual, including the five role-pairs governing relationships from parent and child to ruler and subject), te (the power of moral example), and wen (the civilizing arts). Smith argues Confucianism qualifies as a religion because its social focus rests on a transcendent foundation: the unity of humanity and Heaven.

Taoism appears as Confucianism's romantic counterpart. Its foundational text, the Tao Te Ching, is attributed to the possibly legendary Lao Tzu. The Tao denotes ultimate reality, the ordering principle of the universe, and the way of human life when aligned with the cosmic whole. Smith distinguishes Philosophical Taoism (conserving vital energy through wu wei, or action with minimum friction), yogic Taoism (augmenting energy through breathing and meditation), and Religious Taoism (channeling cosmic power through priestly ritual). Water serves as wu wei's prototype: adapting, seeking the lowest places, nourishing all things without striving, yet wearing away the hardest stone.

The Islam chapter notes that this religion, though closest to the West geographically and ideologically, is the most misunderstood. Islam means the peace that comes from surrendering one's life to God. Muhammad, born around 570 CE in Mecca, received his prophetic commission from the angel Gabriel on the Night of Power around 610. After hostile reception in Mecca, the Hijra (migration) to Medina in 622 allowed him to unite rival tribes; he returned to conquer Mecca in 630, forgiving his former persecutors. Smith presents the Koran as the earthly copy of an eternal heavenly original in which God speaks in the first person. He outlines the Five Pillars (creedal confession, daily prayers, charity, the Ramadan fast, and pilgrimage to Mecca) and surveys Islam's social teachings on economics, women's status, race, and the use of force. A section on Sufism, Islam's mystical dimension, describes love mysticism (exemplified by the poets Rabi'a and Rumi), ecstatic mysticism (modeled on Muhammad's visionary ascent through the heavens), and intuitive mysticism (perceiving the world as divine).

The Judaism chapter argues that the key to this people's outsized influence lies in their passion for meaning, traced through eight domains: God (a single righteous and loving will), Creation (the world pronounced good), human existence (frailty and grandeur held in tension), history (the arena of God's purposive activity, laying groundwork for social protest), morality (the Ten Commandments as minimum standards), justice (the prophetic denunciation of systemic corruption), suffering (Israel's defeats interpreted as pedagogy and vicarious sacrifice on behalf of all nations), and Messianism (a forward-looking hope that gave rise to the Western idea of progress). Smith discusses the Exodus (Israel's foundational deliverance from slavery) as the ground of revelation, the covenant, and the concept of a chosen people, which he argues means chosen to serve rather than for privilege. The chapter concludes with Israel's modern situation, including the founding of the state in 1948, the Holocaust's challenge to faith, and the tension between Israeli security and Palestinian rights.

The Christianity chapter identifies Jesus, born around 4 BCE in Palestine, as a charismatic, Spirit-filled figure. Smith situates Jesus among five responses to Roman occupation, closest to the Pharisees (a Jewish movement centered on Torah observance and purity) but differing in his emphasis on God's compassion over social barriers. The disciples' experience of Jesus and the resurrection, understood not as resuscitation but as entry into a new mode of being, generated a religion centered on divine love that released early believers from fear, guilt, and ego. Smith presents three central doctrines: the Incarnation (Christ as fully God and fully human), the Atonement (reconciliation through Christ's life and death), and the Trinity (God as Three-in-One, affirming that love has always been God's essence). He profiles Roman Catholicism (centered on teaching authority and sacramental life), Eastern Orthodoxy (marked by consensus-based authority and encouragement of mystical life), and Protestantism (organized around justification by faith and the warning against absolutizing any finite thing).

The chapter on primal religions addresses the oldest mode of human religiosity, found among oral, tribal societies. Smith rejects the assumption that later means better, arguing that everything flowering in historical religions is prefigured in primal ones. Using Australian Aboriginal peoples as his primary example, he introduces the Dreaming, a timeless realm of archetypal figures with whom Aboriginal religion seeks identification. Distinctive features include orality, embeddedness in place, and atemporal time. The primal worldview sees all material things as transparent to their divine source.

In a concluding chapter, Smith considers how to pattern the religions, proposing that they resemble sections of a stained glass window dividing a single light into different colors. Their convergent wisdom includes ethical minimum standards, the virtues of humility, charity, and veracity, and a shared vision that reality is more integrated, better, and more mysterious than it seems. He closes with a call to listen to one's own tradition and to the faith of others as the path toward understanding, respect, and love.