Smart, Ninian (1927–2001)

One of the most influential figures in the field of religious studies in the latter half of the 20th century, Ninian Smart's life was thrown off course by the changing fate of history. Born into a relatively privileged family, groomed for an Oxford or Cambridge education by his Cambridge mathematician father and well-born mother, Smart had been set on a path leading to a conventional academic career in the British university system like his two brothers, Alastair, an art historian, and John Jamieson, the philosopher. But World War II intervened, and Smart was pressed into military service, first to study Chinese at London's School of Oriental and African Studies and then to be removed to a remote tropical island, Ceylon, later known as Sri Lanka. Smart's encounter with the classics of China stood in stark contrast with his previous training in the Western classics; his face-to-face meeting with the Buddhism of Ceylon and with Ceylonese Buddhist intellectuals, such as the formidable philosopher K. N. Jayatilleke (who became a lifelong friend), introduced him to a religiosity quite different from his own Anglican piety and the theological establishment of the Church of England. These occasions made for intellectual reflection about the reality of global life outside the United Kingdom, which soon received deeper affirmation through Smart's marriage to his Italian Catholic wife, Libushka Barrufaldi. Ninian Smart was a committed comparativist of the world's religions and ideologies, a sophisticated proponent of developing the tools of transnational comparative analysis, Doktorvater for a generation of postgraduate students from every continent, recipient of international honors and prestigious lectureships, tireless world traveler in the interests of academic internationalism, and veritable citizen of the world. He set a high bar for people seeking to think of themselves as global scholars. This entry will focus on the global features of his work. First, Smart was a global scholar in that he thought about his subjects in a cross-cultural comparative way. This is reflected in his major publications in the comparative study of religion: World Religions: A Dialogue, World Philosophies, The World's Religions, Reasons and Faiths, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's Religions, World Views: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs, The Religious Experience of Mankind, Religion and the Western Mind, Religion and Nationalism: The Urgency of Transnational Spirituality and Toleration, and Buddhism and Christianity: Rivals and Allies. Even where the titles of Smart's books do not signal a work of transnational comparison, the substance does. Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy, for instance, is written expressly to put Western philosophy of religion into play with Indian; The Philosophy of Religion sets out to treat some of the perennial problems of philosophy in intentionally comparative ways; and The Phenomenon of Religion offers a model for doing the comparative study of religion along the lines developed by the phenomenology of religion.

For Smart, doing comparative work did not mean matching up one religion against another to assert that all religions were really one and the same. Though Smart thought globally, he thought pluralistically. For Smart, global thinking always meant thinking about religions in which distinctiveness was taken with the utmost seriousness. For Smart, comparison did mean seeking and positing analogies between and among religions, but to explain how and why things happen in religions. Take the idea of lord and how this notion is conceived by different religions. How might the presence of “the lord” configure with ritual acts of devotion, prayer, sacrifice, meditation, worship, and so on in one religion as compared with another? What intricate analogies might there then be between one religion and another? What if, for example, the lord in question was also incarnate and human, like Attis, Jesus, or Krishna, rather than more heavenly, like the Amitābha Buddha or the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara? What if the lord were fully transcendent, like Allah or Yahweh? How would these different conceptions of lord be reflected in a religion's mythology or the style of religious experience and emotion, for example? Would we not perhaps expect kinds of religious experience to vary as the conception of lord does? Can we likewise expect religions that emphasize the lordly qualities of their focus to express that in certain forms of concrete religious materiality, such as in architecture or sculpture? Given the generality of the terms, this same series of questions can be submitted to any particular religious [Page 1187]context in which lordliness figures, whether that be the religious world of Lord Krishna or Lord Jesus.

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