by Ven. Dr Handupelpola Mahinda Nayaka Thera
The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Edited by John Bowker) says that the tradition has a meaning connected with religions.
“The tradition is the formal transmission of information, (both verbal and non verbal) in religions. In non-text religions, the process of tradition is all the more vital since there is no independent repository of information in written form, whether designated as scripture or not, hence the foundational importance of myth and ritual in all religions. In text-related religions, scripture may (theoretically) precede tradition, as in the case of the Vedas among Hindus or of the Bible among Christians, but even their tradition is instrumental in delivering the texts which become recognised or designated as ‘scripture’. In Judaism, tradition became the authoritative interpretation and application of Torah, handed down, initially in oral form, from teacher (rabbi) to pupil.
This tradition became of such importance that it was designated ‘second Torah’. Torah she be ‘alpeh (“torah transmitted by word of mouth”, -see Halakhah) More widely, tradition in Judaism is referred to as masoret, which in the Talmud includes custom, law, history, and folklore. Tradition (see Hadith) is equally formal in Islam, since Muhammad and his companions were the first living commentators on Qur’an. In Christianity, the status of tradition is more complex (and controversial), since one part of the Church (the Roman Catholic) has given to tradition (as the unfolding of scripture) a defining role in some matters of salvation: that which is at best dimly alluded to in scripture, or only to be inferred (eg: purgatory the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary) can be defined by the pope ex cathedra: such definitions are infallible and irreformable - i.e. tradition has become equivalent to scripture. The formality of transmission in other religions can be seen in the importance of the sampradayas among Hindus, and the succession lists and transmission procedures and rituals among some Buddhists.”
The Culture is “A many layered concept, with at least three dimensions; the cultivation of human natural capacities, the intellectual and imaginative products of such cultivation, and the whole way of life of a group or a society. All three dimensions are present in contemporary usage, but each also has a varied development of its own. ‘Culture’ was used in Roman times principally in the sense of tending the land (as in the Eng. ‘agriculture’), a meaning extended by Cicero who described philosophy as the training or cultivation of the mind (cultura animi).”
Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (edited by Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer) thus describes the ‘Culture’.
“The word ‘culture’ is probably the single most central concept in twentieth-century anthropology. It has an especially complex history, of which anthropological usage is only one small part. Etymologically it is linked to words like ‘cultivate’ and ‘cultivation’, ‘agriculture’ and ‘horticulture’. What these different words have in common is the sense of a medium for growth, a meaning quite transparent in modern biological usage where a mould or bacterium may be grown in a laboratory in an appropriate ‘culture’. In English in the seventeenth century it became common to apply this meaning metaphorically to human development, and in the eighteenth century this metaphorical meaning developed into a more general term (Williams 1983). In German (where the word was spelt first ‘cultur’, and then ‘kultur’), the term was used in works of speculative history from the second half of the eighteenth century and, crucially, started to be used in the plural in the sense of humanity being divided into a number of separate, distinct cultures.
Sense of culture
What emerged from this history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a complex of overlapping, but potentially different meanings. On the one hand, there is what has become known as the ‘humanistic’ sense of culture, which is singular and evaluative: culture is what a person aught to acquire in order to become fully worthwhile moral agent. Some people have more culture than others - they are more cultured - and some human products are more cultural than others - the visual arts, music and literature. Then there is what has become known as the ‘anthropological’ sense, which is plural and relativistic. The world is divided into different cultures, each worthwhile in its way. Any particular person is a product of the particular culture in which he or she has lived, and differences between human beings are to be explained (but not judged) by differences in their culture (rather than their race).”
“Much ink has been expended-especially in American anthropology in the 1940s and 1950s - on a supposedly ‘true’ or ‘correct’ definition of culture, one which would isolate and clarify just what is we study as anthropologists, while marking off ‘our’ word and its meaning from other, non-anthropological usage. In this article, we will not attempt any such definition. What makes a word like culture to so important for anthropologists is precisely the arguments it generates about disciplinary identity; what makes those arguments important is the way in which the concerns of the non-anthropological world keep leaking into our own private disciplinary disputes, despite all our best attempts to establish boundaries around what we see as our intellectual property. Instead of a definition, we offer an ethnographic history in three phases; the prehistory of the pluralistic concept of culture from its roots in German Romantics like Herder to its anthropological working out in the writings of Franz Boas; the competing definitions of mid-century American anthropology, in the context of European suspicion of the term; and the rise and demise of one particular version-culture-as-symbols-and -meanings in the second half of the twentieth century.”
These scholarly descriptions give us an idea that both tradition and culture have similar features. In both it denotes activities came down the age. Culture has certain religious ideas or feelings behind, but in connection with tradition, it is not necessary. There are religious and cultural traditions also.
When we think about Buddhist tradition it is very necessary to note that there are two traditions, namely Mahayana and Theravada. Between the first century B.C. and the first century A.D., the two terms Mahayana and Hinayana appeared in the Saddhamma Pundarika Sutra or the Sutra of the Lotus of the Good Law. About 2nd century A.D., Mahayana became clearly defined.
Nagarjuna in his work Madhyamika-karika, described philosophy of sunyata to prove that “everything is void” Asanga and Vasubandhu, in about 4th century wrote many books about Mahayana. Any way after the 1st century A.D., the Mahayanists took a definite stand and then only came the terms Mahayana and Hinayana into existence.
In this way we must not confuse Hinayana with Theravada. According to the Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, the word Mahayana gives the meaning of ‘great vehicle’ and the word Hinayana gives the meaning of ‘inferior vehicle’. Some scholars are of opinion that Hinayanists and Theravadins expect to become Arahant though Mahayanists expect to become Buddha while they attain Nibbana. Ven. Prof. W. Rahula denies that categorically. (See, Gems of Buddhist Wisdom, p. 461) The terms Hinayana and Mahayana are not mentioned in the Theravada Pali Literature. In 1950 the World Fellowship of Buddhists inaugurated in Colombo, unanimously decided that the term Hinayana should be dropped when referring to Buddhism existing today in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, etc.
Since the meaning of the word ‘tradition’ is wide, we cannot touch each and every fact here. But, we will try to discuss some of them.
To be continued Part 02
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