ABSTRACT
Having dealt with Oriental and traditional civilizations in confrontation with Western science, which they are now adopting rapidly as their own, it is now necessary to delve more deeply into the meaning of traditional science which these very civilizations cultivated over the ages and which still survives here and there despite the onslaught of modern secular science. For those whose understanding of the word ‘science’ is limited to its current English usage,1 the phrase ‘traditional science’ might appear as a contradiction in terms. Science is understood as an ever-changing knowledge of the physical world based on ratiocination and empiricism, whereas tradition, as understood by contemporary masters of the exposition of traditional doctrines who have been mentioned already in this work, implies immutability, permanence and knowledge of a principial and metaphysical order. It is, however, meaningful to speak of traditional science as a knowledge which, while not pure metaphysics, is traditional, that is, related to metaphysical principles, and though a science in the sense of organized knowledge of a particular domain of reality, it is not divorced from the immutability which characterizes the principial order. In all traditional civilizations, especially sedentary ones, many forms of traditional sciences have been cultivated ranging from the study of the heavens to that of the anatomy of an ant. These sciences are distinct from metaphysics, or gnosis, the supreme science which, as already mentioned, is the ultimate scientia sacra. Yet they are related to metaphysical principles through various cosmological schemes of a strictly traditional character and are none other than ‘sacred sciences’ understood as knowledge pertaining to the manifested and created order.
