Huston Smith

Perennialismo · Member

Vedanta · Commentator

«I have written over thirty-five forewords to books, but none with the urgency with which I write this one» — abre su Foreword a la edición del aniversario del Bhagavad Gita declarando cuántos prólogos lleva escritos y con qué urgencia escribe este.

«There are some books that will never have definitive editions, and I am not confining myself to translations; I am thinking of the vernacular in which the substance of the texts are cast—idioms, metaphors, analogies, innuendos and their likes. The reason for this is that in a way, these classics are living creatures in at least the sense that they seek out apertures through which to move. It is as if they were intelligent, looking for ingenious ways to get their point across to their readers» — declara por qué a su juicio hay libros sin edición definitiva: los tiene por criaturas vivas que buscan aberturas por donde pasar.

«The Bhagavad G¯ıt¯a is the summation of the Ved¯anta, and among explicit doctrines the Ved¯anta stands out as one of the most direct formulations possible of what constitutes the very essence of our spirituality. Truth being one, the G¯ıt¯a’s teachings find their parallels in the other revealed scriptures, but nowhere else are its teachings so succinctly stated» — tiene el Gita por sumario del Vedanta y por una de las formulaciones más directas de lo que llama la esencia de nuestra espiritualidad; los diacríticos partidos son de la capa de texto y van dentro.

«As I would myself raise his estimate to the superlative. one wonders why the book is not better known. The subtlety of its arguments cannot be the sole reason~ there appears to be something about Schuon's entire approach to the relation between religions that. being foreign to the contemporary theological scene-a way of saying .. original"-renders it peculiarly difficult of access» — abre su Introduction al libro de Schuon elevando al superlativo el juicio de T. S. Eliot, y explica por qué cree que el libro no se conoce más. El escaneo imprime puntos donde el original lleva comas y una virgulilla por el punto y coma.

«Instead of locking into the ongoing dialogue on the subject-names like Schleiermacher. Troeltsch. Barth. Brunner. Tillich. Hans Kung and Wilfred Smith never appear on his pages-he approaches it from a different angle. a distinctive bent» — sitúa el método de Schuon fuera del diálogo teológico contemporáneo, y nombra a los autores que dice que nunca aparecen en sus páginas.

«I was myself baffled by the book on first round with the consequence that it sat half-read on my shelves for a decade until a curious sequence of events opened me to its thesis» — cuenta de sí mismo que el libro le resultó desconcertante y se le quedó diez años a medio leer en la estantería.

«It was the autumn ofl969, and I was embarking on an academic year around the world. Of the decisions as to what to include in my forty-four-pound luggage limit. the final one concerned a book that had just crossed my desk: In the Tracks of Buddhism, by Frithjof Schuon. My indifference to his earlier book made it seem clearly expendable, but its middle section, entitled ""Buddhism's Ally in Japan: Shinto or the Way of the Gods," caught my eye. Two weeks hence, at our first stop, Japan, I would have to lecture on Shinto and I had little feel for its outlook. I badly needed an entree, and more in desperation than in hope, I wedged the book into my bulging flight bag» — data en el otoño de 1969 el viaje académico y el libro que decidió llevarse; el escaneo pega el año a la preposición (ofl969, sic).

«Two allegories frame Western civilization like majestic bookends – Plato’s Allegory of the Cave at its start, and for now, Nietzsche’s madman charging through the streets announcing that God is dead» — abre su prefacio a la segunda edición de The Road to Eleusis con las dos alegorías que dice que enmarcan la civilización occidental.

«The content of those Mysteries is, together with the identity of India’s sacred Soma plant, one of the two best kept secrets in history, and this book is the most successful attempt I know to unlock it» — declara qué tiene el libro por delante: uno de los dos secretos mejor guardados de la historia, junto con la identidad del Soma de la India.

«Triangulating the resources of an eminent Classics scholar, the most creative mycologist of our time, and the discoverer of LSD, it is a historical tour de force while being more than that. For by direct implication it raises contemporary questions which our cultural establishment has thus far deemed too hot to face» — llama al libro tour de force histórico por triangular a un clasicista, un micólogo y el descubridor del LSD, y le adjudica levantar por implicación preguntas que el medio cultural tiene, dice, por demasiado ardientes.

«Can humanity survive godlessness, which is to say, the absence of an ennobling vision – a convincing, elevating view of the nature of things and life’s place within it» — formula la primera de las cuatro preguntas que dice que el libro levanta, y se la atribuye a Nietzsche.

«have modern secularism, scientism, materialism, and consumerism conspired to form a carapace that Transcendence now has difficulty piercing» — la segunda: si el secularismo, el cientificismo, el materialismo y el consumismo han formado un caparazón que la Trascendencia ya no atraviesa.

«Is there need, perhaps an urgent need, to devise something like the Eleusinian Mysteries to get us out of Plato’s cave and into the light» — la tercera: si hace falta idear algo parecido a los misterios eleusinos para salir de la caverna de Platón.

«can a way be found to legitimize, as the Greeks did, the creative, constructive use of entheogenic heaven and hell drugs without aggravating our serious drug problem» — y la cuarta: si cabe legitimar el uso creativo de las drogas enteogénicas sin agravar el problema de las drogas.

«This book does not answer these important, possibly fateful, questions. What it does do is to raise them by clear implication, elegantly and responsibly» — cierra el prefacio acotando qué hace el libro y qué no: levantar las preguntas, no contestarlas. La firma va al pie, en Berkeley, California, mayo de 1998.

«I do believe that beings greater than ourselves exist. I likewise believe that some of these may be in touch with us in ways we are not normally aware of» — en entrevista privada con Jon Klimo declara qué cree: que existen seres mayores que nosotros y que algunos pueden estar en contacto con nosotros de maneras que no advertimos.

«Regarding information that derives from them, I distinguish what has come to be called channeling from Revelation. Revelation proceeds directly from God, as to Moses on Mount Sinai. Even when Revelation includes an intermediary, as in the case of the angel Gabriel who transmitted the Koran from Allah to Muhammad, the intermediary neither adds nor detracts, so for all practical purposes the message still proceeds from God directly» — y en la misma entrevista separa la canalización de la Revelación: la segunda procede de Dios, aun cuando haya intermediario, como el ángel Gabriel con el Corán.

«In channeling as I would use the word, the source of the message is not God but a lesser spirit of some sort a demigod, an angel, a departed soul, whatever» — y define la canalización por contraste: ahí la fuente del mensaje no es Dios sino un espíritu menor, un semidiós, un ángel o un alma que partió.

«I don’t think we even know how we see the tree outside our own window. What hope, then, that we can understand modes of communication that proceed from intelligences quite unlike ourselves» — Klimo lo pone como epígrafe de su capítulo de explicaciones psicológicas, junto a una línea de T. S. Eliot.

«I had had no direct personal encounter with God» — Michael Pollan cita lo que dijo a un entrevistador en 1996 sobre el experimento del Viernes Santo de 1962, en el que participó como voluntario: hasta entonces, dice, no había tenido encuentro personal directo con Dios.

«The Johns Hopkins experiment shows—proves—that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. It uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity’s secularism. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism. And it does so in the very teeth of the unscientific prejudices built into our current drug laws» — Pollan lee en voz alta a Roland Griffiths la carta que él escribió a Bob Jesse tras el artículo de 2006.

«of religion Huston Smith (1919-)» — Andy Letcher es la única obra del corpus que imprime su año de nacimiento; el escaneo pierde el arranque del renglón, donde iba la palabra que antecede a of religion, y el verbatim va tal cual.

«Huston Smith — Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University» — la lista del consejo editorial de la serie Classics of Western Spirituality imprime su cátedra.

«Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions and Forgotten Truth» — la contratapa del libro de Peter Kingsley lo acredita así al pie de un elogio suyo; es solapa, no cuerpo.

«Foreword by Huston Smith Editor’s Preface by Christopher Key Chapple» — la portada de la edición del aniversario del Bhagavad Gita le adjudica el prólogo.

«translated by Winthrop Sargeant ; edited and with a preface by Christopher Key Chapple ; foreword by Huston Smith» — y la ficha de catalogación de esa misma tirada lo repite.

«The Transcendent Unity of Religions By Frithjof Schuon Introduction by Huston Smith» — la portada de la edición revisada de Quest Books le adjudica la Introduction.

«Thirtieth Anniversary Edition Edited by Robert Forte Preface by Huston Smith» — la portada de la edición del trigésimo aniversario de The Road to Eleusis le adjudica el prefacio.

«the Native American Church succeeded in attaining the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, an act of Congress to protect their right to their peyote religion» — Robert Forte, que edita ese volumen, le adjudica haber registrado el hecho en One Nation Under God; el año que Forte le pone al libro, 1996, queda fuera del recorte por la guarda anticosido.

«Huston Smith, the scholar of comparative religion, whose mind had been opened to the spiritual potential of psychedelics when, as an instructor/lecturer at MIT in 1962, he served as a volunteer in the Good Friday Experiment, from which he came away convinced that a mystical experience occasioned by a drug was no different from any other kind» — Michael Pollan lo llama estudioso de la religión comparada, data en 1962 su participación como voluntario siendo profesor en el MIT, y le adjudica haber salido de ahí con esa convicción.

«Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.”» — Pollan le atribuye, citando Cleansing the Doors of Perception, esa descripción del ser realizado.

«Philosopher Huston Smith prefers to use the term psychic centers, rather than entities, to cover a variety of kinds of possible living, individual beings that could function as communicators by way of the channeling process» — Jon Klimo lo llama filósofo y le adjudica preferir el término centros psíquicos al de entidades.

«Theologian Huston Smith considers the same questions but from what he calls a religious perspective» — John Mack lo llama teólogo y dice que trata las mismas cuestiones que la cosmología, desde lo que él llama una perspectiva religiosa.

«What religious historian Huston Smith called history’s “best-kept secret” was a secret no more» — Brian Muraresku lo llama historiador de las religiones y le atribuye la fórmula del secreto mejor guardado, aplicada a los misterios de Eleusis.

«Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions and perhaps the preeminent religious scholar of the twentieth century» — Muraresku lo llama acaso el estudioso de la religión preeminente del siglo XX.

«For Schuon, the perennial wisdom is the key to understanding the “transcendent unity of religions”, and in this he has been followed notably by the influential contemporary historian of religions Huston Smith» — el Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism lo pone como seguidor notable de Schuon.

«Among the more reputable and renowned scholars in the United States who have written about and to some extent have been influenced by Guénon are Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith» — la entrada sobre Guénon del mismo diccionario lo cuenta, con Eliade, entre los estudiosos norteamericanos que escribieron sobre Guénon y en alguna medida recibieron su influencia.

«The perennialist perspective in religious studies goes back to the work of the perennialist "triumvirate" of Ananda Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon and Rene Guenon (Sharpe, Comparative Religion, 262-266). It took on new impetus under the impact of transpersonalism and has been adopted by well-known scholars like Huston Smith» — Wouter Hanegraaff, en nota, hace venir la perspectiva perennialista de ese triunvirato y lo cuenta entre los estudiosos que la adoptaron; el verbatim se corta en el cambio de plana, donde sigue el nombre de Dick Anthony.

«Besides Guénon and Schuon, devolutionaries would be Seyyed H. Nasr, Marco Pallis, Titus Burckhardt, and Huston Smith» — Antoine Faivre, recogiendo una división de Sheldon R. Isenberg y Gene R. Thursby, lo pone del lado devolutivo de la philosophia perennis contemporánea.

«In the United States, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (Knowledge and the Sacred, 1981), Huston Smith (The Religions of Man, 1958» — Faivre lo enumera entre los continuadores de Guénon en Estados Unidos y data en 1958 The Religions of Man; el verbatim se corta antes del año partido de Forgotten Truth.

«still widely used and pedagogically influential works like the Religions of Man by Huston Smith or the Sources of Chinese Tradition anthology» — Norman J. Girardot, en su prólogo a la edición inglesa de Isabelle Robinet, objeta que ese libro siga usándose como exposición del daoísmo pese a la revolución de los estudios especializados.

«Smith, Huston. 1972. Wasson’s Soma. A Review Article» — la bibliografía de Andy Letcher registra su reseña de 1972 al Soma de R. Gordon Wasson; entrada bibliográfica, citada como tal.