anticipate the attainment of a glorious future age, which they
portray in prophecies. And sacred traditions often address
past and future together. In all three cases, a view of time as
something that can be recapitulated, or at least held in syn-
optic vision long enough to lend perspective on the present,
underlies the concept of sacred tradition. The work of seizing
time through myth or prophecy explains the critical impor-
tance of memory in religious traditions. Memory defies time
and change. “Remember!” is the first commandment of tra-
dition.
The second commandment is “Trust!” which in practice
means “Obey!” Obedience to authorities who are deemed
trustworthy is indispensable to the working of tradition be-
cause tradition is by definition something received from oth-
ers. Within the community of tradition, obedience is validat-
ed by the benefits a person derives, or expects to derive, from
following the tradition. From the outside, however, and es-
pecially from a modern critical perspective, the obedience
tradition requires (and inspires) may appear to be confining,
even oppressive. The discussion of tradition in the modern
study of religion has been much affected by this clash of per-
spectives.
The concept of tradition in religion may be applied to
the means by which norms of belief and practice are handed
down (e.g., bards, books, chains of teachers, institutions) or
to the norms themselves. This article is concerned with the
norms, whereas the word transmission refers to the means by
which traditional norms are handed down. The distinction
between tradition and transmission is not absolute, however.
Religions typically resist it, especially if it is used to justify
attempts to abstract the supposed essence of a religion from
its historic vehicles and forms of expression. Because tradi-
tion is by definition an indirect source of knowledge, the
forms in which traditional knowledge is transmitted cannot
be cast away without risking loss of content, because the con-
tent is not accessible or verifiable from contemporary
sources. To the extent that it is immediately accessible, it
ceases to be traditional in the strict sense of the word.
A sense of tradition as normative is a basic element in
all religious systems, whether or not formal concepts of tradi-
tion exist. When formal concepts appear, they may be broad
or specialized, depending on their function in the system and
the degree of differentiation among the sources of religious
belief and practice. Often the sense of tradition as normative
is expressed by a broad collective reference to authoritative
teachers or compendia: “the fathers,” “the elders,” “the
sages,” “the poets.” An evolution from broad to specialized
concepts can sometimes be discerned. In early Catholic
Christianity, for example, the concept of tradition embraced
all the formal sources of belief and practice handed down by
the church, including the Holy Scriptures. Only much later,
and only in the Western as distinct from the Eastern church,
did “tradition” come to signify the extrabiblical (ecclesiasti-
cal) sources in particular, at which point the “problem” of
scripture and tradition could arise. In Sunn ̄ı Islam, by con-
trast, the formal concept of tradition, the sunnah (custom,
example) of the Prophet, became more specialized as a result
of the formation of a closed collection of traditions—the six
books of h:ad ̄ıths, or stories of the Prophet, compiled in the
third and fourth centuries AH (ninth and tenth centuries CE)
and eventually accepted as authoritative throughout Sunn ̄ı
Islam.
Even more specialized cases are presented by two words
meaning “tradition” in Judaism, Masora and Qabbalah,
which come from verbs meaning “hand down” and “re-
ceive,” respectively. The verbs are used at the beginning of
the early rabbinic Ethics of the Fathers (Avot 1.1) with refer-
ence to the handing down of the Torah from God to Moses,
Moses to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and so on. However,
the nouns Masora and Qabbalah eventually came to be used
not for tradition in the comprehensive sense but for special-
ized traditions: Masora for the exegetical traditions govern-
ing the transmission of the Hebrew text of the Holy Scrip-
tures (hence “Masoretic text” for the canonical version of the
Hebrew Bible), Qabbalah for the mystical and esoteric tradi-
tions of Judaism. The function of specialized concepts is to
sharpen the definition of tradition in selected areas, not to
diminish the scope of tradition as a comprehensive norm. In
religions with highly specialized concepts of tradition, much
that is traditional falls outside the formal concepts without
being any less traditional for that reason.
In addition to occurring in the practice of religion, the
concept of tradition appears also in the modern study of reli-
gion, where it is used descriptively rather than normatively
and often rather loosely. Sometimes the word is little more
than a synonym for the name of a religion, as when “Islamic
tradition” simply denotes “Islam.” This way of speaking may
be questioned to the extent that it singles out traditionality
as the most basic characteristic of a religion.
More problematic in relation to normative concepts of
tradition is the pluralism reflected in some uses of the de-
scriptive concept, as when “Chinese tradition” is applied col-
lectively to the several religious systems of China or “Chris-
tian tradition” is used to group together conflicting
normative versions of Christianity (Orthodox, Catholic, Lu-
theran, and so on). In some cases the modern descriptive
concept of tradition fosters research into what might be
called “deep tradition”—cultural patterns and values so basic
to a civilization that they are not formally stated in the classi-
cal tradition and may not even be clearly recognized by the
bearers of the tradition. The concern of some modern schol-
ars of India with the problem of defining the “Indianness”
of India—the deposit of culture underlying the many differ-
ent normative traditions of India—is a case in point. In this
case the notion of “Indian tradition” hypothesizes a unity
that remains to be found and described. Such unities are dif-
ficult to define and are rejected by many scholars as mystifi-
cations meriting no more credence than “the Russian soul,”
“the Oriental mind,” or other cultural stereotypes. Neverthe-
less, the presentiment of continuity in the world’s great civili-9268 TRADITION