Antiquity Medieval Early modern Modern Iran India East-Asia In perennial philosophy, tradition means divinely ordained truths or principles that have been communicated to humanity as well as an entire cosmic sector through various figures such as messengers, prophets, avataras, the Logos, or other transmitting agencies.
The purpose of these sacred truths or principles is to continuously remind human beings of the existence of a "Divine Center" and an "Ultimate Origin."
"[1] Etymologically, the term tradition refers to the transmission of knowledge, practice, skills, laws, forms, and a variety of other oral and written aspects.
Nasr considers the Arabic din and Sanskrit dharma to be roughly similar in meaning 'tradition,' while he recognizes that they do not correspond with the Latin root, which indicates the concept of transmission.
This resembles to a Platonic form whose appearance in the universe is only a shadow of its "true reality", but Nasr has spoken of something "living" and "present", which is a recurring theme in his works.
[4] The term "tradition" as used by Nasr and other "traditionists" such as René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, does not refer to custom, habit, or inherited patterns of life and thought.
[6] For Nasr, "tradition": ...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, avataras, the Logos or other transmitting agencies, along with all the ramifications and applications of these principles in different realms including law and social structure, art, symbolism, the sciences, and embracing of course Supreme Knowledge along with the means for its attainment.
As a result, tradition is perfectly in harmony with the prophetic revelations, which represent the "highest order of reality", capable of elevating man to "higher altitudes of personality".
[8] The traditionalist thinkers use the word to refer to "both the Sacred as revealed to man through revelation and the unfolding and development of the sacred message in the history of the particular humanity for which it was destined", in a way that represents both horizontal and vertical continuity with "the Origin", tying every moment of the concerned tradition's life "to the meta-historical Transcendental Reality".
[11] According to Damian Howard, one of the major challenges of Traditionalist philosophy was defining the term "tradition" in order to claim an underlying unity while explaining away the wide variety of all those civilizations and forms.
[14] Rene Guénon, the founder of the traditionalist school, believed in the existence of a "Primordial Tradition", which "was revealed to humanity at the beginning of the present cycle of time, but was partially lost".
[16] Frithjof Schuon understood tradition "as being the semidivine and semihuman reality that provides mankind with a general climate conducive to the consciousness of the Absolute".
[14] According to Howard, Tradition was finally to be defined by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, whose writings provided a comprehensive framework.
The revelation's guiding principles gave rise to a number of subsidiary sciences and arts, which were creatively enlarged to incorporate different elements of social, political, and cultural life.
He believes that the contemporary usage of the term and references to the concept of tradition are, in some ways, an aberration necessitated by the anomaly that is the modern world as a whole.