born in china in 1919, houston smith is the bay area treasurer who went onto help us understand the great religions of the world. here is a new year's present for you, a 1996 interview with dr. houston smith. welcome to mosaic with your host dr. howe burrows. we have a real treasure and treat for you this morning. dr. houston smith is with us this morning, author of the standard textbook on the world's religion. for three decades, students and people who have an interest in

religion have been reading dr. smith's book. he's revised it and come to talk to us about that. welcome. >> i appreciate that. >> welcome to mosaic. it is truly a joy to have you. let's begin by talking about the book you wrote nearly four decades ago. tell us about it. >> let me start just a little before that, mainly with my birth, in china, a missionary parent. in a way you can almost say that this book was in my genes because here i was, nurtured in a christian home, but we were the only westerners in the town and all of my contacts with

china and chinese and their indigos religions, so one can say that this might be seen as the blossoming of the way that i came into the world. >> what part of china? >> inland, worrel, 70 miles from shane high. >> what time period, if you don't mind me asking. >> not at all. being chinese, not in my genes, but in my formation we looked on age as honorific. i was born 76 years ago. i was born in 1919. >> and how long did you grow up in china? >> i was 17 when i came to this

country. >> let's talk about the impact on the modern world on the traditional chinese systems when you were growing up. did you see the challenges at that time or was it too early? >> it was too early but also we were too hill billy, too rural and therefore mcginty had made few end rules into china. when i came to this country with the traditional background then islammed into modernity because my longest teaching appointment was at mit because that's like the future in microcosm. so one way to understand this

book, and certainly myself, is as the rubbing together of these two major alternatives, a traditional outlook and all of them were religious and a modern outlook in which secularzation and humanism is the ruling out law. >> before we go to break, where did you land in america at 17? >> i landed in missourri from which my father that gone to china, central methodist college at missourri, a small college and small town, but compared with to dunk china it was the big apple, bright lights, big time. it turned me around. i had only one male american

role model, mainly my father, so i grew up thinking the missionarilies were what american boys grew up to be. so i thought i was coming to get my credentials and go back but i had not wreckenned with the dynamism of missourri. the west would be my home. >> you turned into the missionary of another type perhaps? >> very true, in darkest africa. >> we'll talk about that when we come back with dr. houston smith. stay with us.

we're talking with dr. houston smith author of the textbook world across great religions. we've got you up to about age 17, 18 in rural missourri. i went to the college at the influence of mississippi. >> very humid.

>> it may be bright lights but not the brightest in the country. talk to us about your personal journey of returning. >> i thought it would be going back has a missionary but the west swept me up and i wouldn't be going back so i knew i would be a minute sphere and not a missionary. in my jr. year of college something unexpected happened, namely, ideas jumped to life in my mind and it was so exciting and i knew that that's where i wanted to pour my life and energies into ideas, actually ideas connecting with my background and religion. then i realize tornado ministry was all great honor to minute

sphere, nevertheless the demands of an organization and promotional thing would leave two little room for where i wanted to put my energy so i moved over one door from being a missionary to a minister to now being a teacher of the world's great philosophy and religion. >> your choices were observed at that age. i see something opening there. >> oh, absolutely. really another world. i don't know whether to claim that that one night, and when i was convert today the life of the mind it was like a mystical experience like those ideas had a life of their own and they

were drawing me to understand them and enter more deeply into their mystery because this other world, other than the tangible material, had three characteristics about it. first of all it was more powerful, something like the big bang that this material world imminates from that. second thing is it is far better than all the great religions are like fingers pointing at the moon of that other reality from which we have come and to which we will return. we're in kind of anaxial here and it has ups and downs but our origin and destiny is anchored in a different world

which is the true world. >> all right. so the creation and moving to a new world, you said there were three. >> you're very astute. i have not forgotten but i know the time goes fast on television. the third is mystery because it is so real beyond our quasi world. it would be like dogs trying to understand what einstein's equation was all about by using their noses. our distance from the divine mind is greater than a dog compares to the einstein mind. i hope you get an experience of

one's life, trying to penetrate in so far as the human mind can into the mysteries and glory because that's the better part of that other world. >> i want to come back to that but we want to give the viewers an opportunity to get a brush through or overview of how you went into this work by looking at different religions. let's start with hinduism. >> that's the chechia which now virtually belongs to the world. it is the symbol of nature, grateful, dancing, sheva

dances in the twirling stars, rhythm of the human heart. contracted with modern city, we have a bigger university, 20 billion light years across but in way the stars are beautiful but on the other hand that's dead matter for us where this is imminently alive t.secret is the bottom leg which is planted on a dwarf, which incapsulates this, as long as we have ourself centeredness firmly under foot and we can rise above it then we can see the beauty and reality. >> formation of hinduism, what

years? >> hinduism really grew. it was the engine mouse tradition, half of it of the indian people, but when the arians came in the second my len numb bc the drank decision was the local drank individual yan tradition was the creationism of hinduism, 2000 bc. >> many gods? >> well, that's only half the truth. there are -- the standard number is 33 million gods but that's because at that time that was a population of india but now it's up to the 700 million but that's misleading because if we stop there it

looks like policyism but behind all of these, these are only the multiple faces. >> houston smith, we'll be back.

we're talking with dr. houston smith, author of the standard textbook, the would's great religions. you grew up in china and landed in missourri. you spent your life in academia. where did you go from that. >> i went to the university of chicago for my graduate work and did graduate work in contemporary philosophy. then it was only after i got sprung and had my degree in hand that i realized that in my

teaching, i loved teaching about the world's great religions and, in comparison, modern philosophy seemed pretty tame and almost like a cage because it had been infected by the scientific outlook and when i say infected i don't mean to say anything disrespectful toward science. i had prostate cancer five years ago and without radiation i wouldn't be here talking so i'm not going to bad mouth science but science deals only with facts. it cannot deal with value. human life is a mix of facts and values and so what i believe and what has been the exhilaration of my life is

trying to help my students see that we need a binocular vision to look at life in the world with the factual information that science gives us but not do it through one eye only but bring in the world of values and the world's great religious traditions or the wisdom tradition of the human race because when we come to values they're like the data banks. i like to spend my career more in soaks myself in the perspective of these religions rather than adding coals to new castle and dwelling on modern philosophy and science.

>> academia is not the most hospitable to someone in religion. >> that's a fair statement. >> so from the university of chicago, where to next. >> then a little time in colorado but then a long stint was washington university for 11 years and that's when i phased into pbs. when it went on the air i was asked to teach a course on world religion. this was in the first year of pbs. it was called a different name but the same animal. now that i've come full circle bill moyer said why don't you do a series, pbs series on world religion. it's been a happy homecoming.

>> we're taking photographs from your illustrated version of that with mr. moyers. let's take one from buddhism. >> this is my tray of buddha. this is a wooden image and it is an image of the coming buddha which is a counterpart to the second coming of coming of christ. >> let's go to dow women that.'s where you grew up. >> that's like this dancing

sheva. this dancing ying yang now belongs to the world. china says one can learn more from gazing at that image than from reading a thousand books. what it does is take the opposites of life, good and evil, light and dark, sickness and health and show there is no razor sharp division but note the way in which each sort of meanders into the other domain and takes up its citadel in the heart of its opposite. very quickly, let me tell you a story that goes to the heart of this. it's a farmer and his horse t.neighbor says who knows what's good or bad. the horse came back with a drove of wild horses. so the neighbor comes over to congratulate and the man says

again, who knows what's good or bad. true because his young teenage son got horsing around on the horses, fell off and broke his leg. the neighbor miss rates. the next day the soldiers came from chen deeing of the army and the son didn't have to go because of his leg. this is a symbol of life. the problem is to mold the two together into a single coherent quote. >> our problem is we have a break. we'll be right back.

>> we're back talking with dr. houston smith, author of the world's great religions. this book has been reduced by 50% in text and pictures added

to it. this is a companion to the show you do with mr. moyers? >> that's correct, yes. >> we've been looking at stills. how many photographs or images in this book? >> truth be told, i have not counted but on every page this is an average of one so 270 pages. >> it's talking about the world's great religions. >> the world's greet religious art folded into the pages. >> we're talking about dowism. since you grew up in china, do you think chinese is your logic -- do you still speak chinese? >> i speak my hill billy

dialect with a fluent native speaker's accent of a 12-year- old because when i was 13 i went to shangai to a boarding school and my vocabulary -- actually i studied a little bit so i can get around in chinese a little bit but most of them go a little crazy because of my hill billy accent. >> the yen and yang, talk about the black and white lines. >> let me give you another image. my father came from a farm and thought we should have some bees. when he went to rob the bees it would be like a side show.

he would have the brim hats and the net all over him. finally the cook said there is a bee professional in town, why don't you have him come in? he did. he came nfl long robes and scholar of hats. when he went to the bees he rolled back the long sleeve and moved in with his hands. it was like a dance the way he worked with those bees. they were all over him and he came out with never a sting and he got his honey. i have that -- that image has remained with me as the yen yang and the dowism. look at the way he looked

together and he comes out with no sting. i advise you, in your next confrontation, to go at it that way. >> houston smith, thank you. you're going to stay with us and do another conversation. thank you for being with us on mosaic. i'm howe howe burrows.

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welcome to bay sunday everyone. four exciting guests for you today. we are getting musical in the east bay. we will meet a man that will tell you how to manage a profiting world. if you'd like to pitch us a show idea just go to our website kpix.com click on connect and scroll down to bay sunday. show time now his passion is music and dedicated his life to the arts. piano player turned conductor. he's worked with all the greats including leonard and he's now sharing his passion with young people