I recently began and soon stopped reading The World’s Religions by Huston Smith. I’ve had this book lying around for a while and I thought I’d consult it to learn more about Hinduism. Unfortunately, Mr. Smith is more concerned about stroking his considerable store of useless knowledge rather than writing anything coherent about the religion. In the first dozen pages, there are references to Plato, Aldous Huxley, Leo Tolstoy and Justice Holmes (had to look that one up). I remember doing similar things when I was writing research papers in school. I never had any appropriate references so I’d write things like: as implied by Leonard v. Pepsico Inc. [1], any reasonable person would conclude that genes lead to proteins. Mr. Smith does the same thing. Here’s an example. Talking about the human ability to consider the infinite, Smith states: “This capacity affects all human life, as de Chirico’s painting ‘Nostalgia of the Infinite‘ poignantly suggests.” Absolutely nothing to do with Hinduism.
Still, the book did have a few things that were interesting.
1. What was Oppenheimer thinking?
Mr. Smith begins the chapter on Hinduism by relating a story about Robert Oppenheimer. Apparently, Oppenheimer later recalled that during the first successful atomic bomb test, the following words from the Bhagavad-Gita ran through his mind:
I am become death, the shatterer of worlds;
Waiting that hour that ripens to their doom.
Yeah, right. My guess is he was thinking, “That was a big fucking explosion.” I hope that I have some major accomplishment in my life so that when someone asks me later what I was thinking, I can say something mind-blowing. But I’m hoping that accomplishment isn’t something that levels cities and shatters worlds.
2. 1.5 million copies sold
The cover of The World’s Religions states that it has sold over 1.5 million copies. That’s a pretty hefty figure so I did a little digging. The first printing of the book was in 1968 and the copy I have was printed in 1991. That means on average Smith only pushed about 50, 000 units a year. That’s still a good figure – even though most were probably sold to unwilling university students or consigned to dusty bookshelves – but far from what 1.5 millions implies. John Allen Paulos wrote an interesting book on innumeracy that talks about how people have weak intuition about numbers.
4. The meaning of my
There is one interesting and thought-provoking passage in the pages I read. I’ll just quote it directly and you can chew on it next time Farmer MacDonald says it’s grazing time.
The word ‘my’ always implies a distinction between the possessor and what is possessed; when I speak of my book or my jacket, I do not suppose that I am those things. But I also speak of my body, my mind, or my personality, giving evidence thereby that in some sense I consider myself as distinct from them as well. What is this ‘I’ that possesses my body and mind, but is not their equivalent?
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