What tradition criticizes in the modern world is the total world view, the premises, the foundations which, from its point of view, are false so that any good which appears in this world is accidental rather than essential.

What tradition criticizes in the modern world is the total world view, the premises, the foundations which, from its point of view, are false so that any good which appears in this world is accidental rather than essential. One could say that the traditional worlds were essentially good and accidentally evil, and the modern world essentially evil and accidentally good. Tradition is therefore opposed in principle to modernism. It wishes to slay the modern world in order to create a normal one. Its goal is not to destroy what is positive but to remove that veil of ignorance which allows the illusory to appear as real, the negative as positive and the false as true. Tradition is not opposed to all that exists in the world today and, in fact, refuses to equate all that exists today with modernism. After all, although this age is given such epithets as the space age or the atomic age because man has traveled to the moon or split the atom, through the same logic it could just as well have been called the age of monks, because monks do still exist along with astronauts. The fact that this age is not called the age of monasticism but of space is itself the fruit of the modernistic point of view which equates modernism with the contemporary world, whereas tradition distinguishes sharply between the two, seeking to destroy modernism not in order to destroy contemporary man but to save him from continuing upon a path whose end could not but be perdition and destruction. From this point of view the history of Western man during the past five centuries is an anomaly in the long history of the human race in both East and West. In opposing modernism in principle and in a categorical manner, those who follow the traditional point of view wish only to enableWestern man to join the rest of the human race.

 

As the tragic history of these decades unfolds, however, it becomes more and more necessary to identify tradition with that East or Orient which belongs to sacred geography and which is symbolic rather than literal. The Orient is the source of light, the point where dawn breaks and where the sun rises casting its light upon the horizons, removing darkness and bringing forth the warmth which vivifies. The Orient is the Origin as well as the point toward which we turn in our journey in life, the point without which there would be no orientation, without which life would become disarray and chaos and our journey a meandering in the labyrinth of what the Buddhists call samsaric existence. Tradition is identified with this Orient. It, too, issues from the Origin and provides orientation for human life. It provides a knowledge which is at once Oriental and illuminating, a knowledge which is combined with love as the light of the sun is combined with heat, a knowledge which issues from the Precinct of the Sacred and which leads to the Sacred.

 

To the extent that the shadows of the land of the setting sun cover the living space of the human species and the geographical Orient becomes ravaged by various forms of modernism, to that extent the Orient becomes a pole carried within the heart and soul of human beings wherever they might be. To the extent that the physical Orient ceases to be, at least outwardly, the land of tradition as it has been over the millennia, to that extent tradition spreads once again into the Occident and even into the “Far West” preparing the ground symbolically for that day when “the Sun shall rise in the West.” To identify tradition with the Orient today is to identify it with that Orient which is the place of the rising Sun of our own being, the point which is at once the center and origin of man, the center which both illuminates and sanctifies and without which human existence on both the individual and collective levels becomes like a circle without center, a world deprived of the enlightening and vivifying luminosity of the rising Sun.

Done