CHAPTER 2. WHAT IS TRADITION?

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identical with it, although of course the worlds or civilizations created by Hinduism,
Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or for that matter any other authen-
tic religion, is a traditional world. Each of these religions is also the heart or origin
of the tradition which extends the priciples of the religion to different domains. Nor
does tradition mean exactly traditio as this term is used in Catholicism, although it
does embrace the idea of transmission of a doctrine and practices of an inspired and
ultimately revealed nature implied by traditio. In fact, the word tradition is related
etymologically to transmission and contains within the scope of its meaning the idea
of the transmission of knowledge, practice, techniques, laws, forms, and many other
elements of both an oral and written nature. Tradition is like a living presence which
leaves its imprint but is not reducible to that imprint. What it transmits might ap-
pear as words written upon parchment but it may also be truths engraved upon the
souls of men, and as subtle as the breath or even the glance of the eye through which
certain teachings are transmitted.
Tradition as used in its technical sense in this work, as in all our other writings, means
truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind and, in fact,
a whole cosmic sector through various figures envisaged as messengers, prophets,
avatāras, the Logos or other transmitting agencies, along with all the ramifications
and applications of these principles in different realms including law and social struc-
ture, art, symbolism, the sciences, and embracing of course Supreme Knowledge
along with the means for its attainment.
In its more universal sense tradition can be considered to include the principles which
bind man to Heaven, and therefore religion, while from another point of view reli-
gion can be considered in its essential sense as those principles which are revealed by
Heaven and which bind man to his Origin. In this case, tradition can be considered
in a more restricted sense as the application of these principles. Tradition implies
truths of a supraindividual character rooted in the nature of reality as such for as it
has been said, “Tradition is not a childish and outmoded mythology but a science that
is terribly real.”5 Tradition, like religion, is at once truth and presence. It concerns
the subject which knows and the object which is known. It comes from the Source
from which everything originates and to which everything returns. It thus embraces
all things like the “Breath of the Compassionate” which, according to the Sufis, is
the very root of existence itself. Tradition is inextricably related to revelation and
religion, to the sacred, to the notion of orthodoxy, to authority, to the continuity
and regularity of transmission of the truth, to the exoteric and the esoteric as well
as to the spiritual life, science and the arts. The colors and nuances of its meaning
become in fact clearer once its relation to each of these and other pertinent concepts
and categories is elucidated.
During the past few decades for many attracted to the call of tradition, the meaning
of tradition has become related more than anything else to that perennial wisdom
which lies at the heart of every religion and which is none other than the Sophia
whose possession the sapiential perspective in the West as well as the Orient has
considered as the crowning achievement of human life. This eternal wisdom from
which the idea of tradition cannot be divorced and which constitutes one of the main
components of the concept of tradition is none other than the sophia perennis of the
Western tradition, which the Hindus call the sanatāna dharma6 and the Muslims al-