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Howard Thurman (1899–1981): Universalist Approaches to Buddhism and Quakerism

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Quakers and Mysticism

Part of the book series: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism ((INTERMYST))

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Abstract

Angell examines African-American educator and theologian Howard Thurman’s encounters with, and appeals to, Quakerism and Buddhism, in light of Thurman’s intense emphasis on human experience. Thurman first encountered a Buddhist, possibly Chinese teacher Jia Linbin, while preaching in Oberlin, Ohio. Thurman’s relationship with Quaker theologian Rufus Jones and his mid-1930 encounters with Asian religions in South Asia are considered, as well as Thurman’s sermons on Buddhism delivered in 1950 and 1953. Angell argues that Thurman’s encounters with Buddhists were an important factor in the origin and development of Thurman’s distinctive religious philosophy focused on finding common ground and transcending divisive aspects of creeds and racial and cultural identities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Walter E. Fluker et al., The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), I, xcvii.

  2. 2.

    Fluker et al., Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, I, lxiv.

  3. 3.

    Fluker et al., Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, lxvii, xcviii.

  4. 4.

    Fluker et al., Papers of Howard Washington Thurman, I, 111.

  5. 5.

    Ken Grossi and Carol Jacobson, “Oberlin in Asia: A digital collection documenting the sharing of the ideals of learning and labor,” Shansi: Oberlin and Asia (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Archives, 2011), http://www.oberlin.edu/library/digital/shansi/intro.html (Accessed Aug. 30, 2018).

  6. 6.

    Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: the Autobiography of Howard Thurman (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 73–74; Howard Thurman, Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 21–2.

  7. 7.

    Rufus M. Jones, Finding the Trail of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1926).

  8. 8.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 3–22 (quotation from page 8).

  9. 9.

    Thurman knew Quakers prior to Jones, and in fact consulted with one about how to implement this plan. Thurman, With Head and Heart, 74.

  10. 10.

    A black Jamaican student had in fact graduated from Haverford in 1926, prior to Jones’ arrival, but Haverford would not graduate its first black student born in the United States until 1951. Christina Szi, “Throughout the years: race at Haverford College.” http://wrprchristinaszi.weebly.com/early-years.html (Accessed Aug. 30, 2018).

  11. 11.

    Thomas D. Hamm, The Transformation of American Quakerism: Orthodox Friends, 1800–1907 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 147–167; Hugh Barbour et al., Quaker Crosscurrents (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 223–6.

  12. 12.

    Howard Thurman, Mysticism and the Experience of Love. Pendle Hill Pamphlet 115 (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1961), 3.

  13. 13.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 77.

  14. 14.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 103–36; Elizabeth Gray Vining, Friend of Life: A Biography of Rufus M. Jones (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, 1981 [1958]), 217–22.

  15. 15.

    Thurman had been reluctant to take part in the Youth Pilgrimage, because he felt that he would be unable to speak his mind about Christianity, but a YWCA national secretary, Winifred Wygall, convinced Thurman that “he would have opportunities to engage in dialogues with people from different cultures and religious traditions,” and in so doing the would learn much about the Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim religions. George K. Makechnie, Howard Thurman: His Enduring Dream (Boston: Howard Thurman Center at Boston University, 1988), 28.

  16. 16.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 132.

  17. 17.

    Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 102.

  18. 18.

    Vining, Friend of Life, 217.

  19. 19.

    Rufus M. Jones, Mysticism and Democracy in the English Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), 11.

  20. 20.

    Stephen W. Angell, “Rufus Jones and the Laymen’s Foreign Mission Inquiry: How a Quaker Helped to Shape Modern Ecumenism,” Quaker Theology 2:2 (Autumn 2000): 167–209.

  21. 21.

    Vining, Friend of Life, 228–33.

  22. 22.

    Stephen W. Angell, “Howard Thurman and Quakers,” Quaker Theology 9:1 (Fall-Winter 2009): 28–54. Jones had written that “the response of the youth [to Re-Thinking Missions] has been striking and enthusiastic.” Surely Thurman, and many of his colleagues in the YMCA, would have been among the enthusiastic youth to whom Jones referred. Rufus Jones to W. O. Carver, March 11, 1933, Rufus Jones Papers, Haverford College.

  23. 23.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 114–15.

  24. 24.

    Sarah Azaransky This Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 39.

  25. 25.

    Howard Thurman, The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1972), 21–22. See also Thurman, With Head and Heart, 129; Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World, 93–95.

  26. 26.

    Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World, 95.

  27. 27.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 120–1.

  28. 28.

    Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World, 117–49.

  29. 29.

    Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World, 165.

  30. 30.

    Compare Thurman, “The Historical Perspective,” The Fellowship Church of All Peoples (n.p., n.d. [1947?]), cited in Dixie and Eisenstadt 2011, 165, with Thurman, “The Fellowship Church of All Peoples,” Common Ground (Spring 1945): 29–31, in Walter E. Fluker and Catherine Tumber, A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998), 221.

  31. 31.

    For information on the Joint Committee on Race Relations of the two Philadelphia Yearly Meetings, see http://trilogy.brynmawr.edu/speccoll/sw/pymrareln.htm (Accessed Aug. 30, 2018); for the AFSC’s race relations work, see Allan Austin, Quaker Brotherhood: Interracial Activism and the American Friends Service Committee (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012).

  32. 32.

    Fluker and Tumber, A Strange Freedom, 221; Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World, 165–166.

  33. 33.

    Angell, “Howard Thurman and Quakers,” 31–5.

  34. 34.

    Austin, Quaker Brotherhood, 106.

  35. 35.

    Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans and the Myth of Racial Justice (Philadelphia, PA: Quaker Press of FGC, 2009), 262.

  36. 36.

    McDaniel and Julye, Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship, 319–345. Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, where Malia and Sasha Obama would later attend, would not graduate its first African-American until 1967: James Zug “The Color of Our Skin: Quakerism and Integration at Sidwell Friends School.” Quaker History 98 (Spring 2009): 35–47 at 45.

  37. 37.

    Thurman, Footprints of a Dream; Thurman, With Head and Heart, 137–162; Dixie and Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World, 164–81.

  38. 38.

    Fluker and Tumber, A Strange Freedom, 225–6.

  39. 39.

    Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 112. Thurman did not supply the name of his informant.

  40. 40.

    The first general history of Quakerism to apply the term “equality” to Quaker witness on behalf of the rights of both women and African-Americans was Howard Brinton, Friends for 300 Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1952), 131–134. General histories of Quakerism published in the first half of the twentieth century used the term “equality” to characterize Quaker advocacy for women’s rights in all its phases, but tended to use the term “freedom” to characterize Quaker advocacy for African-Americans, without commenting as to whether equality was the sought-for endpoint of freedom advocacy: See, for example, Allen C. and Richard H. Thomas, A History of Friends in America (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1919), 16, 60, 112–15, 172–5.

  41. 41.

    Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 56.

  42. 42.

    Howard Thurman, The Growing Edge, April 1949, quoted in Alton Pollard, Mysticism and Social Change: The Social Witness of Howard Thurman. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Studies in Religion, Culture, and Social Development (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 87.

  43. 43.

    Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 77.

  44. 44.

    “Men Who Walked with God: Buddha,” typescript, May 7, 1950, Box 195; “Men Who Walked with God: Buddha,” audiotape, May 3, 1953, Box 203; Howard Thurman Papers, Boston University. Except as indicated, remarks by Thurman on the Buddha are drawn from these two sources. These were part of a sermon series modeled after a book by Sheldon Cheney, Men Who Have Walked with God: Being the Story of Mysticism through the Ages Told in the Biographies of Representative Seers and Saints (New York: Knopf, 1945).

  45. 45.

    His treatment of the subject of karma was closer to Rufus Jones’ treatment of the issue than to Sheldon Cheney’s. Cheney had chosen the saying that “you shall reap what you sow” to illustrate karma. Jones wrote in his journal in a 1926 entry that “the doctrine of Karma expressed through transmigration is a view that blights everything that it touches. It counts the universe to be just, but it makes life in a world of pitiless justice a dark and hopeless affair.” Cheney, Men Who Have Walked with God, 79; Vining, Friend of Life, 222.

  46. 46.

    In a study group, probably at the Fellowship Church, Thurman described the Buddhist view of desire thus: “Desire is the clothes line on which evil hangs its garments.” Buddhism, Study Group #3, n.d., Box 195, Howard Thurman Papers, Boston University.

  47. 47.

    Sermon, Sept. 21, 1964, Howard Thurman Papers, Boston University.

  48. 48.

    See, for example, Vining, Friend of Life, 251–6.

  49. 49.

    Sermon, “Violence and Non-Violence,” July 14, 1963, Howard Thurman Papers, Boston University. The Buddhist emphasis on compassion was a religious feature which he always affirmed. In an earlier sermon that included quotations from all the world’s major religions, Thurman read this passage from the Buddhist scriptures: “By ourselves is evil done, by ourselves we cease from wrong, by ourselves become we pure. No one saves us but ourselves, no one can and no one may. We ourselves must tread the path, others only show the way. May I be a balm to the sick, their healer and servitor ‘til sickness come never again. May I quench with rains of food and drink the anguish of hunger and thirst.…. May I become an unfailing store for the poor and serve them with manifold things for their need. My own being and my pleasures, all my righteousness in the past, present, and future, I surrender indifferently that all creatures may win through in the end.” This is a mashup of Paul Carus’ very free translation of Dhammapada 165, in Karma: A Story of Buddhist Ethics (Chicago: Open Court, 1942 [1894]), 39–40, with an excerpt from Shantideva, Bodhicaryavatara (The Path of Light), Chapter 3. These are quoted or paraphrased by Thurman in his sermon, “An Imperative to Understanding,” Oct. 23, 1960, Howard Thurman Papers, Boston University. An alternative translation, more faithful to the original, may be found at Drops of Nectar: Khenpo Kunpal’s Commentary on Shantideva’s Entering the Conduct of the Bodhisattvas, III, 7–9, http://www.kunpal.com/bca3comm.pdf. (Accessed Aug. 30, 2018).

  50. 50.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 167–70.

  51. 51.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 187–92; Zachary Williams, “Thurman, Howard W.” American National Biography Online. www.anb.org/articles/15/15-01316.html (Accessed Aug. 30, 2018).

  52. 52.

    Howard Thurman, “The Blind Man.” Friends Journal Nov. 5, 1955, 297.

  53. 53.

    Angell, “Howard Thurman and Quakers,” 42.

  54. 54.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 183.

  55. 55.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 183.

  56. 56.

    Thurman, With Head and Heart, 183–186. Quotation is on page 186.

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  1. Earlham School of Religion, Richmond, IN, USA

    Stephen W. Angell

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  1. Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA

    Jon R. Kershner

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Angell, S.W. (2019). Howard Thurman (1899–1981): Universalist Approaches to Buddhism and Quakerism. In: Kershner, J. (eds) Quakers and Mysticism. Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Mysticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21653-5_10

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