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Huston Smith, The World's Religions, Part One
Although the individuals that I name are now only memories for me, I
begin this second edition of this book with the four paragraphs that
launched the first edition.
I write these opening lines on a day widely celebrated throughout
Christendom as World-Wide Communion Sunday. The sermon in the service I
attended this morning dwelt on Christianity as a world phenomenon. From
mud huts in Africa to the Canadian tundra, Christians are kneeling today
to receive the elements of the Holy Eucharist. It is an impressive
picture.
Still, as I listened with half my mind, the other half wandered to the
wider company of God-seekers. I thought of the Yemenite Jews I watched six
months ago in their synagogues in Jerusalem: dark-skinned men sitting
shoeless and cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in the prayer shawls their
ancestors wore in the desert. They are there today, at least a quorum of
ten, morning and evening, swaying backwards and forwards like camel riders
as they recite their Torah, following a form they inherit unconsciously
from the centuries when their fathers were forbidden to ride the desert
horse and developed this pretense in compensation. Yalcin, the Muslim
architect who guided me through the blue Mosque in Istanbul, has completed
his month’s Ramadan fast, which was beginning while we were together;
but he too is praying today, five times as he prostrates himself toward
Mecca. Swami Ramakrishna, in his tiny house by the Ganges at the foot of
the Himalayas, will not speak today. He will continue the devotional
silence that, with the exception of three days each year, he has kept for
five years. By this hour U Nu is probably facing the delegations, crises,
and cabinet meetings that are the lot of a prime minister, but from four
to six this morning, before the world broke over him, he too was alone
with the eternal in the privacy of the Buddhist shrine that adjoins his
home in Rangoon. Dai Jo and Lai San, Zen monks in Kyoto, were ahead of him
by an hour. They have been up since three this morning, and until eleven
tonight will spend most of the day sitting immovable in the lotus position
as they seek with intense absorption to plumb the Buddha-nature that lies
at the center of their being.
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