arles davis and we'll see you next time. (lively theme music) (lively theme music continues) (lively theme music continues) (uplifting music) born in china in 1919 of missionary parents, houston smith is a bay area treasure who went on in his lifetime to help us all understand the

great religions of the world. here a new year's present for you, 1996 interview with dr. houston smith. >> welcome to mosaic. >> welcome to mosaic. we have a real treasure and treat for you. dr. houston smith is with us, a resident of berkeley, long time scholar, author of the standard textbook on the world's religions. for three decades students and people who have an interest in religion have been reading dr. smith's book. he has revised it and has come to talk about it. welcome. >> thank you. >> it's truly, truly a joy to have you. let's begin by talking about the book you

wrote three and a half, nearly four decades ago. tell us about it. >> well, let me start a little before that namely with my birth which was in china of 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 were indigenous religion of confucianism, folkism. one can say this might be seen as blossoming of the way that i came into the world. >> what part of china? >> inland rural, 70 miles from

shanghai. >> what time period are we talking about if you don't mind my asking. >> not at all. being chinese, not in my genes but in my formation, we looked on age as honor. so i am proud to say i was born 76 years ago in 1919. >> how long did you grow up in china? how old were you? >> i was 17 when i came to this country. >> formative. let's talk about the impact of the modern world on the traditional chinese religious systems when you were growing up. did you see challenges to those religious systems at that time or was it too early? >> it was too early but also we were too hill billy. we were

too rural and therefore modernity made few inroads into my china. then of course when i came to this country with this traditional background, then i slammed into modernity and slammed into it hard because my longest teaching appointment was at m.i.t. which is almost like modernity and future in micro chasm. one way to understand this book and certainly myself is as the rubbing together of these two major alternative. a traditional outlook and all of them were religious. and a modern outlook in which secularization and humanism and so on is the ruling.

>> before break, where did you land in america at 17? >> i landed in missouri from which my father had gone to china, central methodist college, fayette, missouri. a small college, small town. but compared with china, it was the big apple with bright lights and big time. it turned me around. i had had only one male american role model, adult role model, namely my father. i grew up thinking missionaries were what american boys grew up to be. i thought i was coming here only to get my credentials and go back. but i hadn't reckoned with the dynamism of even fayette, missouri, and i wasn't going to squander my life in the back waters of

rural china, so i made the west, knew that the west would be my home. >> turned into a 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 are talking with dr. houston smith author of the

textbook the world's great religion. you have taken us from your birth in rural china and we have gotten to about 17 or 18 in rural missouri. i went to high school at the confluence of the illinois, mississippi river. >> very humid. >> it may be bright lights but not the brightest in the country. talk to us then about your personal journey from returning. >> i was saying i come thinking i would be going back as a missionary. but when dynamism of the west swept me up, i knew i wouldn't go back. so i moved next door. rather than being a missionary, i would be a minister. that held in place for the first two years in college. in my junior here, 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 my energy into ideas, actually ideas connecting with my background in religion. then i realized that the ministry with all great honor to ministers, nevertheless, demands of an organization and promotional thing would leave too little room for where i really wanted to put my energy. so again i moved over one door from being a missionary to being a minister and now to being a teacher of the world's great philosophies and religions. >> your choice was astutely observed at that young age. what ideas leaped out? 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 converted to the light 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 and enter more deeply into the mystery. because this other world other than tangible material had three characteristics about it. first of all it was the more powerful that something like the big bang that this material world emanates from that. the second was it is far better. 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 are in a kind of exile here and it has its ups and down, mix of joys and sorrow. our destiny, our origin and destiny is anchored in a different world which is the true world. >> so the creation and then moving to a new world. you said there were three. was there a third? >> you are very astute. i hadn't forgotten but i know time goes fast on television. third is mystery. mystery. because it is so real beyond our quasi real and quasi phoney world that our minds in this day are incapable of comprehending it in its thoroughness. it would be like dogs trying to understand what einstein's equations were all

about by using their noses. now, our distance from the divine mind is greater than a dog's distance, distance of a dog's mind to einstein. i hope it can give a sense to the excitement of giving one's light, not going through the motions of the world of shadows and so on but trying to penetrate insofar as the human mind can into the mysteries and glories, because that's the better part of that other world. >> i want to come back to that. 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. then i want to ask how you distill those through. let's start with hinduism. i think we have a graphic. talk to us a little

bit about this. >> oh that's the dancing sheba which now virtually belongs to the world. it is a symbol of nature, graceful, dancing, dances in the twirling stars in the circling seasons, rhythms of the human heart and how beautiful now contrasted with modernity, we have a bigger universe, 20 billion light years across. but as far as, stars are beautiful but on the other hand that's dead matter for us whereas this is eminently alive. the secret is that bottom leg planted on a dwarf which simulates skin

encapsulated eagle, noisy, as long as we have self centerness firmly under foot and can rise above it, then we can see reality in this beauty and gracefulness. >> give us a ballpark, formation of hinduism, what years? >> hinduism really grew like topsy. it was indigenous tradition, half of it, of the indian people. then when arians came in in second millennium bc the tradition with the local indigenous tradition was creation of hinduism so we should say about 2000 bc. >> mini gods. is that fair? >> that's only half of the

truth. there are the standard number of 33 million gods but that's because at that time that was the population of india. now it's up to the 700 million but that's misleading. because if we stop there, it looks like polytheism. these are only the multiple faces. the absolutely single one. >> houston smith. we'll be back.

we are talking with dr. houston smith, author of the standard text the world's great religions. you have led us through growing up in rural china and you landed in missouri, made an intellectual mystical decision in some way influenced by that and then you spent your life in academia. from central missouri, where did you go? >> i went to the university of chicago for graduate work and did my graduate work in contemporary philosophy. but then it was only after i got sprung, had my degree in hand that i realized that in my teaching, i loved teaching

about these world's great religion and in comparison modern philosophy seemed pretty tame and almost like a cage because it had been infected by the scientific outlook. when i say infected, i don't mean anything disrespectful towards science. i had prostate cancer five years ago and without radiation, we wouldn't be here talking. so i am not going to bad mouth science as such. but science can deal, to put it simply, only with facts. it cannot deal with values. and 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 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. then bring in the world of values and there the world's great religious traditions or what i call the wisdom tradition of the human race. when we come to values, they are like the data banks. that's why i love my career, spending my career more in soaking myself in the great enduring perspectives of religion rather than adding codes to new castle and dwelling on modern fill onfee and science. >> academia is not the most

hospitable to someone who has religious interest. >> that is a fair statement. >> let's take you from the university of chicago. where to next? >> a couple years in colorado teaching. but then the first long stent was washington university in st. louis. that's where i phased into pds because when it went on the air, i was asked to teach a course on world religion. this was the first year of pbs. it was then called by a different name but the same animal. now as my career comes full circle, bill comes forward and says do a course or series pbs special, five programs, on world religion. it's been a happy homecoming. >> we are taking some photographs from your

illustrated version with that show with mr. moyers. let's put one on buddhism taken from the illustrated world religion. >> this is a wooden image in a little nunnery near kits and it is an image of coming buddha which would be counterpart to the second coming of christ. at the end of history the buddha will return and this is an artist's depiction of what the buddha will look like. >> let's go to the next one, dowism. it is rooted where you grew up. >> that is like the dancing sheva. this image of the yinyong in the center there now virtually belongs to the world. chinese say one can learn more

from gazing at that image than from reading 1,000 books. what it does is detect opposites, good, evil, light and dark, sickness, health and show there is no razor sharp division but note the way in which each sort of meanders into the other's domain and takes up at citadel in the very heart of its opposite. very quickly, let me tell you a story i think goes to the heart of this. it's of a farmer and his horse ran away. the neighbor comes hopping over to commiserate. he says who knows what's good or bad? the next day 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 and true? because his young teen-age son got horsing around on those horses, fell off, and broke his leg. neighbor comes over to commiserate. the man says who knows what's good or bad? sure enough, the next day the soldiers came through common deeing for the army and his son didn't have to go because of his broken leg. as i said, they say this is a symbol of life. we take it as though these are opposite but the problem is to mold them together into a single coherent hole. >> our problem is we have a break. we'll be right back.

we are back talking with dr. houston smith, author of the world's great religions. this book has been condensed, reduced by 50% in text and pictures added. world's great religions is on your screen. this is a companion to the show you did with mr. moyers. >> that's correct. >> we have been looking at some stills. how many photographs or images in the book? >> truth to tell, i haven't counted but on every page, there would be an average of one so 270 pages. >> so it's talking about the world's great religions and

then illustrations. >> the world's great religious art folded into the pages. >> great. >> we were talking about dowism. i was interested, since you grew up -- maybe we can get that image back on the screen. since you grew up in china, do you think chinese? do you still speak? >> i speak my hill billy dialect with the fluent native speaker's accent of a 12-year-old because when i was 13 i went to shanghai to an american boarding school. i studied a little bit. so i can get around in chinese all right but most chinese go into hysterics because it's like i am speaking with a deep

appalachian hill billy chinese accent. >> that intersection of east and west of yin 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. but when he went to rob those bees, it would be like a side show. he would have one of these straw hats with a brim and mosquito netting all over him. he always got stung. finally our cook said you know there is a bee professional in the town. why don't you have him come in? so he did. he came in in long robe, scholar's hat. a man of dignity. when he went to the bees he rolled back his long sleeve and just moved in with his hand. it was like a

dance, the way he worked with the bees. they were all over him, and he came out with never a sting and he got his honey. i have that image that's remained with me. here are antagonists. you've got a thief coming. but look at the way they work together and look how it comes out with no sting. it's a parable for life. i advise you in your next confrontation to go at it that way. >> houston smith, thank you. we'll be back and you will stay with us and do another conversation. thanks for being with us on mosaic.

strike from cbs news bay area, this is the morning edition. this is the morning edition. siri has fallen after a fast-moving rebel offensive