A Sufi Fable: Shah Dā‘ī I Shirazi’s
“Tale of the Fish”

by

Nasrollah Pourjavady and Peter Lamborn Wilson

Source: Studies in Comparative Religion, Vol. 10, No. 2. (Spring, 1976). © World Wisdom, Inc.
www.studiesincomparativereligion.com

NIZAM AL-DIN MAHMUD DA‘I SHIRAZI, known as Shāh Dā‘ī, deserves more attention as a Sufi poet than he has received so far either in the West (where neither Browne nor Arberry mentioned him) or in the East. Although his Dīwān[1] was published in Tehran not long ago, Dā‘ī is remembered, if at all, as a minor disciple of Shāh Nī‘matullāh Walī Kirmānī.[2]

Born 810/1406-7, died 870/1464-5 and buried in Shiraz, he was first initiated into Sufism by Abū Ishāq Bahrāmī (or Bahrānī), known as “The Shaykh of Four Books”, a khalīfah or representative of both Shāh Ni‘matullāh and Qāsim al-Anwār.[3] When he had advanced as far on the path as Bahrāmī could take him, the Master told him, “Before the two great men (Shāh Ni‘matullāh and Anwār) pass away, you should go and meet one of them.”[4]

Soon afterwards, Dā‘ī dreamt of a majlis, a Sufi meeting, where an old man sat before a flowing fountain, busy sewing. Dā‘ī realized that the old man was Bāyazīd al-Bastāmī; Bāyazīd told him: “This job of sewing first belonged to Ibrahīm ibn Adham, and in his hand he had wool.[5] Then the task passed to me, and in my hand there was thread. Now it is Shāh Ni‘matullāh’s turn, and in his hand it has become silk!”

Next day, when Dā‘ī reported the dream to Bahrāmī, the Master declared, “It is decreed: you will go to Kirman, to the King of Māhān.” Although it was winter, Shāh Dā‘ī set out at once for Māhān (the village near Kirman where Shāh Ni‘matullāh lived and is buried) with his brother and a few companions. The way was beset with many difficulties, and as many miracles and visions. When they finally reached the goal, Shāh Ni‘matullāh received Dā‘ī and initiated him at once. Dā‘ī wrote:

I reached Māhān and my soul awoke;
Shāh Ni‘matullāh has become the master of my heart.[6]

Dā‘ī returned to Shiraz. When Shāh Ni‘matullāh died in 834/1431, he was twenty-four years old. When Bahrāmī died in 841, he became the khalīfah of the Order in Shiraz, and it was about then that he began to compose his poetry and essays, which were later to be collected and copied by his son.[7]

Our author’s takhallus (pen name), Dā‘ī, means “he who prays”; it did not belong to him exclusively, but rather to his family, which traced its descent from Dā‘ī al-Saghīr, the last ‘Alewī king of Tabaristān and Gilān, who was killed in 316/928.[8] Although Dā‘ī himself was a member of several Sufi orders, including the Ahmadīyyah Qādirīs of Asia Minor, and the Safavids, there is no doubt that his first allegiance was to Shāh Ni‘matullāh, whom he praised in a number of poems:

Come spread your arms to heaven O Dā‘ī
if like us you are one of the beggars of God’s Bounty

(Ni‘mat Allah).[9]

He was a close friend of another of Shāh Ni‘matullāh’s disciples in Shiraz, the famous satirist, parodist and eulogist of food, Bushāq (Abū Ishāq Shīrāzī) At‘ima (“The Gastronomer”),[10] on whose death he composed an elegy.[11] Among Dā‘ī’s other works are a number of risālas[12] a commentary on the Gulshan-i Rāz of Mahmūd Shabistārī, called Nasā’im-i Gulshan (“Breezes from the Rose Garden”),[13] and a commentary on the first three books of Rūmī’s Mathnawī.[14]

From Dā‘ī’s Dīwān[15] we have chosen to translate a selection in mathnawī metre, which we have called “The Tale of the Fish”; we confess to not having made a strictly literal translation, in the interest of introducing Dā‘ī to Western readers in a form more nearly approximating his spirit of combined profundity and good humor, than a dry word-for-word rendition could have achieved. We do think it necessary, however, to say a few words about the philosophical back-ground of “The Tale”.

The thought of Shāh Dā‘ī, like that of his master Shāh Ni‘matullāh, was based root and branch in that of the great Andalusian Shaykh Muhyī al-Dīn Ibn ‘Arabī. In some ways it might even be called a popularization of Ibn ‘Arabī, for although Dā‘ī is perfectly capable of pure metaphysical exposition, he ties it as often as not to examples couched in lyrical or narrative verse.

Before the emergence of consciousness (shuhud, “witness”), God was a Hidden Treasure, Dā‘ī explains in his preface to the tale (referring to the hadith-i qudsi, “I was a Hidden Treasure and I desired to be known, so I created the world that I might be known”). As the philosophers have said, being or existence cannot be defined, even though it is far more clear than anything else. The mind can never reach Essence (or the Absolute) because Being is without definition or limitation of description of any sort. There is no plurality in His Essence: He is neither composite nor simple, neither substance nor accident. He is the Essence of all created beings because He Himself is stripped from the chains of creation.

Ibn ‘Arabī’s position is identical: “The Absolute in such an absoluteness... (God in Himself as He really is), is absolutely inconceivable and inapproachable”, that is, transcends every definition man can think of. Thus He is “the Mystery of mysteries,...the most indeterminate of indeterminates, the abysmal darkness,...something that lies at the very source of all...existents and makes them exist. It is Existence as the ultimate ground of everything”.[16]

And yet, Dā‘ī points out, since He is the Essence of the created world, He is not totally removed from conditionality. If He is the unconditioned, He is also the conditioned—if He is the worshipped, He is at the same time the worshipper. “At this stage, there exists between the two (God and the world) a relation of reciprocal need (iftiqār, lit. “poverty”). As Al-Qāshānī (a well-known commentator on Ibn ‘Arabī’s Fusūs al-hikām) says, ‘The world is in need of the Reality for its existence, while the Reality is in need of the world for its self-manifestation’”.[17]

Our definition and His Unity are one and the same, Dā‘ī asserts. His Transcendence (tanzīh) and His Immanence (tashbīh) are one and the same. Seeing Reality as Transcendence is “merely half of the (perfect) knowledge of God”, according to Ibn ‘Arabī. The pure intellect...which has freed itself completely from anything physical and material...cannot by nature see God except in His Transcendence. The other half of knowledge, however, deals with Immanence, “because God is Transcendent and Immanent at the same time”.[18]

Although there is but one ocean and countless waves, Dā‘ī explains, all these waves are water in the same ocean. Determinations (the waves) are simply a mental construct, and if this mentality is put aside, all the waves will again appear as water: no determination will remain. According to Ibn ‘Arabī, “the most appropriate symbol of Life (or existence) is afforded by ‘water’.... ‘The secret of Life is in the act of flowing peculiar to water’. And everything in existence has a watery element in its very constitution, because water is the most basic of all elements. Everything is alive because of the ‘water’ it contains. And this ‘Watery’ element...corresponds to the He-ness of the Absolute.

“Each single thing is in itself a unique existence (like a wave), and yet is immersed in the limitless ocean of Life.... In the first aspect, everything is unique and single, but in the second aspect everything loses its identity in the midst of the ‘Water’ that flows through all”.[19]

THE TALE OF THE FISH

Now once upon a time a school of fish
had met in council to discuss the tale
(familiar to all) that fish had life
and breathed and took existence from one source:
The Water. Furthermore, that all which lives
from Water gains its living, finds its life
in Water. Water’s fame fills all the world,
and Water fills the oyster’s ear with pearl,
the eyes of heavy clouds with mercy, mouth
of dust with flowing bounty. All the earth
has pledged its soul as mortgage to this source,
this element which with one drop renews
the world—which with such light abounds, it seems
that Heaven’s very eye is fixed upon it.
Man (so says the tale) appeared from but
a single drop of it, and from it sprang
the vasty ocean of all heart and soul.

The school of fish were puzzled by all this,
and thus began to argue what it meant:
one of them said, “Beware! What right have we
to sully with our words the bright-faced one,
His Majesty the Water?” Then a fish
(more optimistic) spoke and said, “But wait!
Such disappointment must be a mistake,
for what if the whole tale were true, what then?”
“There must be proof!” a third demanded, “for
without some hard facts, who knows what is true?”
A fourth burst out: “Ah! Now I see it all!
All is unveiled through intuition, for
on such a Path, mere thought has far less chance!”
“That would be fine, my friend”, the fifth
fish said, “if everyone possessed, like you,
the eye of intuition; but, in truth,
they simply don’t—and there’s an end to that.”
“The Inner State! That’s the real thing, not words”,
another shouted. “Only Water pure
will satisfy the thirsty ones.”

“No, wait”,
then spoke another delegate. “I think
that only Love can guide us now, and if
you do not have His Love, give up and call
the conference off.” Thus spoke the fish, and thus
they wrangled, flinging forth opinions till
the sea grew warm with all their hot debate,
when from the circle of contention, one
of the companions stepped, and cleared his throat.
“I am the humblest and most ignorant
of fish, yet hear me, and if what I say
meets with approval, then abide by it
and put an end to strife”; thus was his speech.
“I know that in a distant quarter of
our sea, there lives an ancient fish, who more
than any here possesses wisdom, Truth,
sagacity. On all horizons of
our sea, in science there is none like he,
but listen: all his knowledge and degree
of wisdom does nor spring from written page
or dusty book, for in his school (they say)
such seas of ink are but a vagrant stream,
and knowledge such as he possesses, from
the inmost level of the heart springs forth.
In deepest trenches of our unplumbed sea
he roams, and shuns the shallows and the shores.
Come, let us to him with our questions swim,
let all the drops return unto their source.
Perhaps our puzzle will be solved by him
and thereby all our hearts gain rest at last.”
This sound advice at once infused the fish
with new enthusiasm, and as one
they clamoured their acclaim and new-found hope
that promised a solution to their quest.
So, one by one they swam, set out towards him;
anxiety suffused their hearts with blood,
their eyes with tears, their journey with dispatch.
Boundless hardship plagued their path—success
came only after infinite distress.
But finally they found the ancient one
who of all fish in that age was the Pole,
and to his august presence bowed themselves
in deep humility and courtesy
as well they might. Their spokesman rose and said,
“O Shaykh, O thou who sought and found
the secrets of the universe, now peer
into our hearts, for God’s sake, hear our plea.
We have been told that Water is the source
and origin of all, the ferment of
all union and all separation; but
how strange this seems to us, how hard to grasp,
since we have never seen this Water, not
a one of us, not once in all our lives!
Towards thee we have been swimming day and night
yet from this ocean of perplexity
have found no exit. Not a trace of Him,
this fabled Water, not a single drop
before our eyes has fallen—and obsessed
by questing, tossed in raging floods of doubt
and torrents of dismay, we come to thee
as our last hope. Now could it be that thou,
for love of God and in thy grace, might feel
some pity for our plight, illuminate
the darkened minds of fish and demonstrate
this Water to us like a noble sun
in such a way that clouds might never veil
its face nor hide its brilliance from our sight.”

The ancient fish was silent. On his breast
he sank the chin of meditation, till
at last from his communion with the world
of the Unseen, he raised his countenance
and spoke. “Ah, fish! If you could bring to me
from all existence one thing, and one thing
alone that is not Water, then I might
reveal to you the Essence which you seek.
But mark this well, that there is naught but He!
This endless ocean which surrounds us, that
is He, and so are we. We each came forth
from Water, and unto the Water shall
return.” Upon the fishes’ minds these words
worked miracles. Their hearts and eyes became
a veritable sea of lights. They cried
“So He it is who all this while hath sought
Himself; and He and I and we and thou
are but a pretext, subterfuge and trick!
Our doubts and questions rose from this one fact,
that Water’s veil is Water—nothing more.
Thank God our troubling doubts are put to flight,
imagination and warped fantasies
dispelled at last and laid to rest. Now we
have learned that all our voyaging is but
an inward voyage, and in all our sea
none swim beside us. All, all, all is He!”

MORAL

The less, the more—the good, the bad—the sweet
and bitter: If we wish to pry within
the secrets of a thing, we must perforce
have recourse to its opposite, its twin.
But know that our Creation’s eyes are blind
because HE has no opposite, no like,
comparison nor similitude; and in
His Essence, all such opposites are one.
How faint, how small our knowledge of this truth,
for knowledge is distinction, nor can we
distinguish aught except between two things.
The portals of Distinction have been closed
by Unity, and if you should attain
to gnosis in the One, then recognize
that though He be possessed of attributes,
His Essence is but one—“Say: He is One”!

---

NOTES

[1] Dīwān-i Shāh Dā‘ī ed. Muhammad Dabir Sīāqī, introduction by ‘Alī Asghar Hikmat (Tehran, 1339), two volumes.

[2] The famous mystic and poet. See Jean Aubin (editor), Materiaux pour la bibliographie de Shāh Nī‘matullāh Walī Kirmānī (Paris, 1956); E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge, 1969), Vol. III, pp. 463-73; Nasrollah Pourjavady and Peter L. Wilson, “The Descendents of Shāh Ni‘matullāh Walī Kirmānī”, Islamic Culture (Hyderabad) Jan. 1973.

[3] See Browne, op. cit., III, pp. 173-86.

[4] ‘Abd al-Razzāq Kirmānī, Risālah, in Aubin, op. cit., p. 82.

[5] Bāyāzīd and Ibn Adham were two of the most famous Sufis of the 3rd/9th century. See ‘Attar’s Muslim Saints and Mystics (Episodes from the Tadhkirat a1-Auliya’) Trans. by A. J. Arberry (Chicago, 1966) pp. 100-123, 62-79.

[6] Dīwān-i Shāh Dā‘ī, Vol. II, p. 87.

[7] Ibid., p. “LB”. At the time the Dīwān was first collected, Dā‘ī was 55 years old. (Herman Ethé, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office: Oxford, 1903; Sl099.)

[8] Dā’īrat al-ma‘ārif-i Fārsī, ed. Gh. Musāhib (Tehran 1345 a.h.s.), Vol. 1, p. 943.

[9] Dīwān-i Shāh Dā‘ī, Vol. II, p. 755.

[10] See Browne, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 344-51.

[11] Dīwān-i Shāh Dā‘ī, Vol. II, pp. 312-15. Here he gives the date of Bushāq’s death as 850/1445-6, which we consider correct, rather than Browne’s 814/1416 (op. cit., Vol. III, p. 211) or Arberry’s 828/1424—1427 (See Classical Persian Literature; London 1967; p. 140.)

[12] The Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindūstanī and Pushtū Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1889) mentions, under 883, “eleven risālas on Sufic matters” from a manuscript dated 897/1474. The Verzeichniss der Persichen Handschriften der Koniglchen Bibliothek zu Berlin, (Berlin 1888) mentions, under S774, a “Fragmente des Commentars des Nizām al-Dīn Dā‘ī.”

[13] Manuscript in the Central Library of Tehran University, S3286.

[14] The Hāshiya-i Dā‘ī. Ethe (Loc cit), mentions an edition lithographed in Lucknow in 1282 a.h.

[15] From the Mathnawi Ganj-i Rawān (Treasure of Soul—with a pun on “running water”) Vol. 1, pp. 42-44. Dā‘ī’s Dīwān contains, in the first volume, a “Sextet of Mathnawis” (mathnawīat- Sittah) of which the Ganj-i Rawān is the second. Volume II, the Dīwān proper, contains the ghazals, qasidahs, rubaiyat, etc., and has been divided into three sections by the editor.

[16] T. Izutsu, A Comparative Study of the Key Philosophical Concepts in Sufism and Taoism; Part I: Ibn ‘Arabī (Tokyo, 1966), p. 19.

[17] Ibid., p. 23.

[18] Ibid., p. 11.

[19] Ibid., pp. 141-142.

apocatastasis
“Restitution, restoration”; among certain Christian theologians, including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, the doctrine that all creatures will finally be saved at the end of time.

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Brahma
God in the aspect of Creator, the first divine "person" of the Trimūrti; to be distinguished from Brahma, the Supreme Reality.

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dharma
Truth, Reality, cosmic law, righteousness, virtue.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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jinn
Subtle beings belonging to the world of forms.

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nirguna
impersonal aspect of God (in Hinduism)

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quod absit
literally, "which is absent from, opposed to, or inconsistent with"; a phrase commonly used by the medieval scholastics to call attention to an idea that is absurdly inconsistent with accepted principles. (It is sometimes used in the sense of "Heaven forfend…" or "God forbid…")

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saguna
personal God; God with attributes

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secularism
The worldview that seeks to maintain religion and the sacred in the private domain; the predominant view in the West since the time of the French Revolution of 1789 C. E.

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shakti
God’s power

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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Hallaj
Crucified by the sharī‘at authority for having said Ana-l-Ḥaqq, “I am the Truth.”

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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rationalism
The philosophical position that sees reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Its origin lies in Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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humanism
The intellectual viewpoint increasingly prevalent in the West since the time of the Renaissance; it replaced the traditional Christian view of God as the center of all things by a belief in man as the measure of all things.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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dhikr
"remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word Allāh.

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murshid
Literally, “he who leads straight.”

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Shadhili
A renowned Sufi master. Founder of the north African Shādhiliyah spiritual order.

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shaikh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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ananda
"bliss, beatitude, joy"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and chit, "consciousness."

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bali
This is also one of the "panca-mahāyajnas" and vaiśvadeva or bhūtayajna rite to be performed by the householder. In this rite food is offered with the chanting of mantras to birds and beasts and outcastes. Bali is what is directly offered while "āhuti" is what is offered in the fire.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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mani
"jewel," often in the shape of a tear-drop; in Eastern traditions, understood to be powerful in removing evil and the causes of sorrow; see Om mani padme hum.

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purusha
Literally, "man;" the informing or shaping principle of creation; the "masculine" demiurge or fashioner of the universe; see "Prakriti (Prakṛti)."

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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Brahman
Brahma considered as transcending all "qualities," attributes, or predicates; God as He is in Himself; also called Para-Brahma.

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darshana
Literally, “seeing” or “perceiving.” In Hinduism darshan refers to the perception of the ultimate Truth perhaps through one’s own experience or perhaps through such secondary means as seeing (thus experiencing the spiritual essence of) a guru, a saint , a holy site, or a sacred effigy. For example, Hindus speak of "having a darshan" when they are in the presence of a holy person and experience a state of interiorizing contemplation brought about by the presence of that person. Another meaning involves the various “points of view” or philosophical systems represented by the six main orthodox or classical schools of Hindu philosophy: (1) Nyāya (logic); (2) Vaisheshika (natural philosophy, or science); (3) Sānkhya (cosmology); (4) Yoga (science of union); (5) Pûrva-Mîmāmsā (meditation); and (6) Uttara-Mîmāmsā (Vedānta, or metaphysics); also the blessing derived from beholding a saint.

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ex cathedra
literally, "from the throne"; in Roman Catholicism, authoritative teaching issued by the pope and regarded as infallible.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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hypostases
literally, "substances" (singular, hypostasis); in Eastern Christian theology, a technical term for the three "Persons" of the Trinity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct hypostases sharing a single ousia, or essence.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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in divinis
literally, "in or among divine things"; within the divine Principle; the plural form is used insofar as the Principle comprises both Para-Brahma, Beyond-Being or the Absolute, and Apara-Brahma, Being or the relative Absolute.

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kshatriya
a member of the second highest of the four Hindu castes; a warrior or prince. (Also includes politicians, officers, and civil authorities.) The distinctive quality of the kshatriya is a combative and noble nature that tends toward glory and heroism.

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latria
literally, "servitude, service"; the worshipful obedience owed only to God; to be distinguished from dulia, the respect shown to saints, and hyperdulia, the reverence paid to the Blessed Virgin. latria is the Latinized form of the Greek latreia.

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Ramanuja
Founder of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta (qualified non-dualism) was born in Śrīperumbudūr, Tamil Nadu, in 1027.

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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humanism
The intellectual viewpoint increasingly prevalent in the West since the time of the Renaissance; it replaced the traditional Christian view of God as the center of all things by a belief in man as the measure of all things.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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religio
"religion," often in reference to its exoteric dimension. (The term is usually considered to be from the Latin re + ligare, meaning to "to re–bind," or to bind back [to God] .)

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sophia
(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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dhikr
"remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word Allāh.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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Umar
Author of the famous Sufi poem the Khamriyah (“Wine Ode”).

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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yogi
a practitioner of yoga (in Hinduism)

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Avalokitesvara
The Bodhisattva of Compassion, companion of Amida Buddha, as personification of his virtue of compassion, along with Mahāsthāmaprāpta (Seishi), the personification of wisdom.

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avatara
the earthly "descent," incarnation, or manifestation of God, especially of Vishnu in the Hindu tradition.

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batin
The “inner learning” (al-‘ilm al-bāṭin), which means esoteric or Sufic learning, is distinguished from the “outer learning” (al-‘ilm aẓ-ẓāhir) of the Doctors of the Law. Al-Bāṭin, “The Inner,” is one of the Names of God in the Qur’ān.

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bhakti
the spiritual "path" (mārga) of "love" (bhakti) and devotion.

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chela
in Hinduism, a disciple, a pupil or student

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chela
in Hinduism, a disciple, a pupil or student

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dhikr
"remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word Allāh.

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guru
spiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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japa
"repetition" of a mantra or sacred formula, often containing one of the Names of God; see buddhānusmriti, dhikr.

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jiriki
(A)Self power; the consciousness that one achieves Enlightenment through one’s own effort. In Pure Land Buddhism it is considered a delusory understanding of the true nature of practice and faith, which are supported and enabled through Amida’s compassion. (B) One who is "liberated" while still in this "life"; a person who has attained to a state of spiritual perfection or self-realization before death; in contrast to videha-muktav, one who is liberated at the moment of death..

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Jodo
(A) Japanese term for "Pure Land." Though all Buddhas have their Pure Lands, the Land of Amida Buddha became the most well-known and desired in China and Japan because of its comprehensive nature, its popular propagation, and its ease of entry through recitation of his Name. (B) "pure land"; the untainted, transcendent realm created by the Buddha Amida (Amitabha in Sanskrit), into which his devotees aspire to be born in their next life.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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koan
a Japanese word used to describe a phrase or a statement that cannot be solved by the intellect. In Rinzai Zen tradition, koans are used to awaken the intuitive mind.

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krama-mukti
gradual, or deferred, liberation; a state of partial deliverance obtained after death, corresponding to the Heaven of the Judeo-Christian tradition; total liberation is deferred to the pralaya (dissolution) at the end of a kalpa (world-cycle); to be distinguished from jîvan-mukti, the state of total and immediate liberation attained during this lifetime, and videha-mukti, the state of total liberation attained at the moment of death.

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mantram
literally, "instrument of thought"; a word or phrase of divine origin, often including a Name of God, repeated by those initiated into its proper use as a means of salvation or liberation; see japa.

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nembutsu
(A) "The practice of reciting Namu-Amida-Butsu (the Name of Amida) is known as recitative nembutsu. There is also meditative nembutsu, which is a method of contemplation. Nembutsu is used synonymously with myogo, or the Name." (Unno) (B) "remembrance or mindfulness of the Buddha," based upon the repeated invocation of his Name; same as buddhānusmriti in Sanskrit and nien-fo in Chinese.

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nirvana
In Buddhism (and Hinduism), ultimate liberation from samsara (the cycles of rebirths or the flow of cosmic manifestation), resulting in absorption in the Absolute; the extinction of the fires of passion and the resulting, supremely blissful state of liberation from attachment and egoism.

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Pure Land
"Translation from the Chinese ching-t’u (jodo in Japanese). The term as such is not found in Sanskrit, the closest being the phrase ‘purification of the Buddha Land.’ Shinran describes it as the ‘Land of Immeasurable Light,’ referring not to a place that emanates light, but a realization whenever one is illumined by the light of compassion." (Unno)

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samsara
Literally, "wandering;" in Hinduism and Buddhism, transmigration or the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; also, the world of apparent flux and change.

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sannyasin
monk; one who has renounced worldly ties for realizing God

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sannyasin
A Renunciate; one who has renounced all formal ties to social life. See "sannyasa (saṃnyāsa)."

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secularism
The worldview that seeks to maintain religion and the sacred in the private domain; the predominant view in the West since the time of the French Revolution of 1789 C. E.

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shariah
Every divine Messenger (rasūl) brings a new sharī‘ah, according with the cyclic and human conditions. Sharī‘ah is opposed to Ḥaqīqah, i.e. the sacred Law to the divine Truth or Reality. The sacred Laws are different one from another, but their Divine Reality is always the same.

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sheikh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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Shinran
Shinran (1173-1262): attributed founder of the Jodo Shin school of Buddhism.

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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tariki
(A) literally, "power of the other"; a Buddhist term for forms of spirituality that emphasize the importance of grace or celestial assistance, especially that of the Buddha Amida, as in the Pure Land schools; in contrast to jiriki. (B) Other Power; "The working of the boundless compassion of Amida Buddha, which nullifies all dualistic notions, including constructs of self and other. According to Shinran, ‘Other Power means to be free of any form of calculations (hakarai).’" (Unno)

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Tasawwuf
Designates the whole of the contemplative ways founded on the sacred forms of Islam. By transposition an Arab might speak of “Christian taṣawwuf” or “Jewish taṣawwuf” to indicate the esotericism of the respective traditions.

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Tendai
A major sect of Buddhism initated by Chih-I (538-597) in China on Mt. T’ien-t’ai and introduced to Japan by Saichō (767-822). It is centered on Mount Hiei from which it exerted great spiritual and social influence in Medieval Japan. Kamakura era (1185-1332) teachers such as Hōnen, Shinran, Dōgen and Nichiren came from Mount Hiei and had studied Tendai teaching based on the Lotus Sutra and the wholistic philosophy grounded in the Kegon teaching.

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theoria
contemplation, theory; the contemplative virtue is called theoretike; like the beholding of festivals of the gods and their epiphanies, philosophy introduces the beholding of the well ordered cosmos, still called by the same word, theoria; in Neoplatonism, the creative power of the cosmos is contemplation ( theoria) and intellection (noesis), therefore divine praxis is theoria; for Plotinus, on every level of reality creation is the result of the energy produced by contemplation (Enn.8.3-4); every intellect contemplates directly itself; contemplation may be compared to the mystery-rites (teletai).

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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zahir
Opposite of bāṭin (inner, hidden). Aẓ-Ẓāhir : the External, or the Apparent, is one of the Names of God in the Qur’ān.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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ananda
"bliss, beatitude, joy"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and chit, "consciousness."

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Isa
(A) literally, "possessing power," hence master; God understood as a personal being, as Creator and Lord; manifest in the Trimūrti as Brahmā, Vishnu, and Shiva. (B) lit. "the Lord of the Universe"; the personal God who manifests in the triple form of Brahmā (the Creator), Vishnu (the Sustainer), and Shiva (the Transformer); identical with saguna Brahman.

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Rama
In Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

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Rama
The seventh incarnation (avatāra) of Vishnu and the hero of the epic tale, Rāmāyaṇa.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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yuga
Age; Hindu cosmology distinguishes four ages: Kṛta (or Satya) Yuga, Tretā Yuga, Dvāpara Yuga, and Kali Yuga, which correspond approximately to the Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages of Greco-Roman mythology; according to Hindu cosmology humanity is presently situated in the Kali Yuga, the "dark age" of strife.

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aqil
In metaphysic the triad al-‘āqil (the knower), al-ma‘qūl (the known) and al-‘aql (the intellect, knowledge) play an important part.

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Aql
Al-‘Aql al-awwal : the first Intellect, analogue of the Supreme Pen (al-Qalam), and of ar-Rūḥ. Corresponds to the Nous of Plotinus.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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ātmā
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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barakah
Sheikh al-barakah is a phrase also used of a master who bears the spiritual influence of the Prophet or who has realized that spiritual presence which is only a virtuality in the case of most initiates.

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bhakti
the spiritual "path" (mārga) of "love" (bhakti) and devotion.

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Brahma
God in the aspect of Creator, the first divine "person" of the Trimūrti; to be distinguished from Brahma, the Supreme Reality.

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chit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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chit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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Chit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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dhikr
"remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word Allāh.

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distinguo
literally, “I mark or set off, differentiate”, often used in the dialectic of the medieval scholastics; any philosophical distinction.

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faqr


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Filioque
"and (from) the Son"; a term added to the Nicene Creed by the Western Church to express the "double procession" of the Holy Spirit from the Father "and the Son"; rejected by the Eastern Orthodox Church.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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Ibn Arabi
Ash-Shaikh al-Akbar (“The greatest master”). Wrote numerous Sufi treatises of which the most famous is his Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam and the most rich in content his Futūḥāt al-Makkiyah.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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in divinis
literally, "in or among divine things"; within the divine Principle; the plural form is used insofar as the Principle comprises both Para-Brahma, Beyond-Being or the Absolute, and Apara-Brahma, Being or the relative Absolute.

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increatum et increabile
Latin. “Uncreated and uncreatable”; transcending the domain of time and relativity, as the Absolute or its prolongations.

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Ishvara
(A) literally, "possessing power," hence master; God understood as a personal being, as Creator and Lord; manifest in the Trimūrti as Brahmā, Vishnu, and Shiva. (B) lit. "the Lord of the Universe"; the personal God who manifests in the triple form of Brahmā (the Creator), Vishnu (the Sustainer), and Shiva (the Transformer); identical with saguna Brahman.

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Ishvara
(A) literally, "possessing power," hence master; God understood as a personal being, as Creator and Lord; manifest in the Trimūrti as Brahmā, Vishnu, and Shiva. (B) lit. "the Lord of the Universe"; the personal God who manifests in the triple form of Brahmā (the Creator), Vishnu (the Sustainer), and Shiva (the Transformer); identical with saguna Brahman.

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jiriki
(A)Self power; the consciousness that one achieves Enlightenment through one’s own effort. In Pure Land Buddhism it is considered a delusory understanding of the true nature of practice and faith, which are supported and enabled through Amida’s compassion. (B) One who is "liberated" while still in this "life"; a person who has attained to a state of spiritual perfection or self-realization before death; in contrast to videha-muktav, one who is liberated at the moment of death..

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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modernism
The predominant post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment worldview of Western civilization marked by rationalism, scientism, and humanism. In the Muslim world, it refers to those individuals and movements who have sought to adopt Western ideas and values from the nineteenth century onwards in response to Western domination and imperialism.

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nirguna
impersonal aspect of God (in Hinduism)

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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rationalism
The philosophical position that sees reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Its origin lies in Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."

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religio
"religion," often in reference to its exoteric dimension. (The term is usually considered to be from the Latin re + ligare, meaning to "to re–bind," or to bind back [to God] .)

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saguna
personal God; God with attributes

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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shakti
God’s power

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sunnah
(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

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tariki
(A) literally, "power of the other"; a Buddhist term for forms of spirituality that emphasize the importance of grace or celestial assistance, especially that of the Buddha Amida, as in the Pure Land schools; in contrast to jiriki. (B) Other Power; "The working of the boundless compassion of Amida Buddha, which nullifies all dualistic notions, including constructs of self and other. According to Shinran, ‘Other Power means to be free of any form of calculations (hakarai).’" (Unno)

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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mantra
literally, "instrument of thought"; a word or phrase of divine origin, often including a Name of God, repeated by those initiated into its proper use as a means of salvation or liberation; see japa.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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yin-yang
in Chinese tradition, two opposite but complementary forces or qualities, from whose interpenetration the universe and all its diverse forms emerge; yin corresponds to the feminine, the yielding, the moon, and liquidity; yang corresponds to the masculine, the resisting, the sun, and solidity.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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barakah
Sheikh al-barakah is a phrase also used of a master who bears the spiritual influence of the Prophet or who has realized that spiritual presence which is only a virtuality in the case of most initiates.

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Bodhisattva
Literally, "enlightenment-being;" in Mahāyāna Buddhism, one who postpones his own final enlightenment and entry into Nirvāṇa in order to aid all other sentient beings in their quest for Buddhahood.

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Ghazzali
Author of the famous Iḥyā’ ‘Ulūm ad-Dīn (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”); ardent defender of Sufi mysticism as the true heart of Islam.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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guru
spiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

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Ibn Arabi
Ash-Shaikh al-Akbar (“The greatest master”). Wrote numerous Sufi treatises of which the most famous is his Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam and the most rich in content his Futūḥāt al-Makkiyah.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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imam
In relation to ritual: he who presides when a number pray together; head of a religious community.

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Jilani
One of the greatest saints in Islam (i.e. Sufism) and the founder of the Qādiriyah order.

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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mahabbah


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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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pneuma
"wind, breath, spirit"; in Christian theology, either the third Person of the Trinity or the highest of the three parts or aspects of the human self (cf. 1 Thess. 5:23); see rūh.

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Rahmah
The same root RHM is to be found in both the Divine names ar-Raḥmān (the Compassionate, He whose Mercy envelops all things) and ar-Raḥīm (the Merciful, He who saves by His Grace). The simplest word from this same root is raḥīm (matrix), whence the maternal aspect of these Divine Names.

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Rumi
Founder of the Mevlevī (Arabic: Mawlawīyyah) order of “whirling dervishes”; author of the famous mystical poem the Mathnawī, composed in Persian and which contains his whole doctrine.

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Shadhili
A renowned Sufi master. Founder of the north African Shādhiliyah spiritual order.

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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sunnah
(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

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surah
a chapter or division of the Koran, the holy book of Islam. There are 114 sūar (plural) in the Koran.

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tawbah
In Islam, “repentance” from sin. Also "penitence." It is also the title of Surah 9, taken from verse 104: “Know they not that Allah is He who accepteth repentance from His bondsmen and taketh the alms, and that Allah is He who is Relenting, the Merciful.”

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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yin-yang
in Chinese tradition, two opposite but complementary forces or qualities, from whose interpenetration the universe and all its diverse forms emerge; yin corresponds to the feminine, the yielding, the moon, and liquidity; yang corresponds to the masculine, the resisting, the sun, and solidity.

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yogin
Literally, "one who is yoked or joined;" a practitioner of yoga, especially a form of yoga involving meditative and ascetic techniques designed to bring the soul and body into a state of concentration or meditative focus.

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basmalah
traditional Muslim formula of blessing, found at the beginning of all but one of the sūrahs of the Koran, the full form being Bismi ’Llāhi ’r-Rahmāni ’r-Rahîm (Arabic: بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم), “In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful”.

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Brahman
Brahma considered as transcending all "qualities," attributes, or predicates; God as He is in Himself; also called Para-Brahma.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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imam
In relation to ritual: he who presides when a number pray together; head of a religious community.

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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madhhab
A school of jurisprudence. There are four in Sunnī Islam: the Hanafī, Hanbalī, Malakī, and Shāfi‘ī schools of law. The majority of Shī‘i Muslims follow the Jaḥfarī school of law.

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Maya
"artifice, illusion"; in Advaita Vedānta, the beguiling concealment of Brahma in the form or under the appearance of a lower reality.

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Mutatis mutandis
more or less literally, "with necessary changes being made" or "with necessary changes being taken into consideration". This adverbial phrase is used in philosophy and logic to point out that although two conditions or statements may seem to be very analagous or similar, the reader should not lose sight of the differences between the two. Perhaps an even more easily understood translation might be "with obvious differences taken into consideration…"

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Umar
Author of the famous Sufi poem the Khamriyah (“Wine Ode”).

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Pax Romana
“Roman peace”; the law and order imposed by ancient Rome on its territories.

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Quraysh
The dominant tribal group in Mecca. The Prophet of Islam was a member of this tribe, as were most of his early followers.

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Qutb
In Sufism: the pole of a spiritual hierarchy. The “pole of a period” is also spoken of. This pole is often unknown to most spiritual men.

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Rama
In Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

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Rama
The seventh incarnation (avatāra) of Vishnu and the hero of the epic tale, Rāmāyaṇa.

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rishi
in Hinduism, a seer, saint, inspired poet; the Vedas are ascribed to the seven great seers of antiquity.

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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sunnah
(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

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Sunnism
(Derived from the Arabic word sunna.) The larger of the two main branches of Islam, comprising about eighty-five percent of Muslims, as contrasted with Shī’ism.

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Tasawwuf
Designates the whole of the contemplative ways founded on the sacred forms of Islam. By transposition an Arab might speak of “Christian taṣawwuf” or “Jewish taṣawwuf” to indicate the esotericism of the respective traditions.

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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Torah
"instruction, teaching"; in Judaism, the law of God, as revealed to Moses on Sinai and embodied in the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy).

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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humanism
The intellectual viewpoint increasingly prevalent in the West since the time of the Renaissance; it replaced the traditional Christian view of God as the center of all things by a belief in man as the measure of all things.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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secularism
The worldview that seeks to maintain religion and the sacred in the private domain; the predominant view in the West since the time of the French Revolution of 1789 C. E.

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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avatar
the earthly "descent," incarnation, or manifestation of God, especially of Vishnu in the Hindu tradition.

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guru
spiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

(more..)

idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

(more..)

logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

(more..)

philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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psyche
(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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sheikh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

(more..)

Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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Vedanta
"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara (ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja (ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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yogi
a practitioner of yoga (in Hinduism)

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ananda
"bliss, beatitude, joy"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and chit, "consciousness."

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Bhagavad Gita
lit. "the Song of the Lord"; a text of primary rank dealing with the converse of Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu) and the warrior Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

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Brahman
Brahma considered as transcending all "qualities," attributes, or predicates; God as He is in Himself; also called Para-Brahma.

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Chitta
The consciousness, the mind

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dharma
Truth, Reality, cosmic law, righteousness, virtue.

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Gayatri
Mantra held in great esteem and regarded as the essence of the Vedas; it is imparted to the brahmacārin during his investiture with the sacred thread. Also a Vedic metre of 24 syllable.

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guna
A cosmic quality, of which there are three: sattva (purity, harmony, essence), rajas (passion, energy), and tamas (obscurity, inertia) of which all of manifestation is constituted. The guṇas are the dynamic forces of prakriti (cosmic manifestation).

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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Kama
Desire; one of the purusārthas ; god of love

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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mantram
literally, "instrument of thought"; a word or phrase of divine origin, often including a Name of God, repeated by those initiated into its proper use as a means of salvation or liberation; see japa.

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Mara
a Sanskrit term that literally means "death"; the personification of evil in Buddhist mythology. He is said to have tempted the Buddha as he meditated under the bodhi tree. Māra is an epithet of Kāma

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Maya
"artifice, illusion"; in Advaita Vedānta, the beguiling concealment of Brahma in the form or under the appearance of a lower reality.

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nirvana
In Buddhism (and Hinduism), ultimate liberation from samsara (the cycles of rebirths or the flow of cosmic manifestation), resulting in absorption in the Absolute; the extinction of the fires of passion and the resulting, supremely blissful state of liberation from attachment and egoism.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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rajas
In Hinduism, the second of the three gunas, or cosmic forces that result from creation. Rajas literally refers to "colored" or "dim" spaces, and is the guna whose energy is characterized by passion, emotion, variability, urgency, and activity. In the Vedas, the word is also used to designate the division of the world which encompasses the vapors and mists of the atmosphere, and which is below "the ethereal spaces."

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sama
Also designates sessions of spiritual music.

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Sariputra
A leading disciple of Śākyamuni Buddha

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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sattva
the quality of harmony, purity, serenity

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sruti
Literally, "what is heard;" in Hindu tradition, a category of sacred writings understood to be the direct revelation of eternal Truth, including the Vedas, the Saṃhitās, the Brāhmaṇas, the Āraṇyakas and the Upanishads (Upaniṣads); in contrast to smriti (smṛti).

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tamas
In Hinduism and Buddhism, the lowest of the three cosmic qualities (gunas) that are a result of the creation of matter; tamas literally means "darkness" and this cosmic quality or energy is characterized by error, ignorance, heaviness, inertia, etc. Its darkness is related to the gloom of hell. In the Samkhya system of Hindu philosophy, tamas is seen as a form of ignorance (avidya) that lulls the spiritual being away from its true nature.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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Veda
The sacred scriptures of Hinduism; regarded by the orthodox (āstika) as divine revelation (śruti) and comprising: (1) the Ṛg, Sāma, Yajur, and Atharva Saṃhitās (collections of hymns); (2) the Brāhmanas (priestly treatises); (3) the Āranyakas (forest treatises); and (4) the Upaniṣāds (philosophical and mystical treatises); they are divided into a karma-kāṇḍa portion dealing with ritual action and a jñāna-kāṇḍa portion dealing with knowledge.

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Vedanta
"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara (ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja (ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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yogi
a practitioner of yoga (in Hinduism)

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Om
the most sacred syllable in Hinduism, containing all origination and dissolution; regarded as the "seed" of all mantras, its three mātrās or letters are taken to be symbolical of the Trimūrti, while the silence at its conclusion is seen as expressing the attainment of Brahma.

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dhikr
"remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word Allāh.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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guna
A cosmic quality, of which there are three: sattva (purity, harmony, essence), rajas (passion, energy), and tamas (obscurity, inertia) of which all of manifestation is constituted. The guṇas are the dynamic forces of prakriti (cosmic manifestation).

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guru
spiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

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hen
the one, which can mean: 1) Unity or Oneness in general; 2) the unity of anything that has unity or is one thing; 3) that which has unity, anything that is one; 4) the one thing we are speaking of, as opposed to ‘other ones’ (see: F.M. Cornford Plato and Parmenides, London, 1969, p.111); for Neoplatonists, the One is the ineffable source of Being, the Supreme Principle, explicitly regarded as God by Proclus; to hen transcends the demiurgic Intellect and constitutes the first divine hupostasis of Plotinus; it corresponds to Nun, the Father of the gods ( neteru) in the ancient Egyptian theology.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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Mevlevi


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moksha
liberation or release from the round of birth and death (samsāra); deliverance from ignorance (avidyā). According to Hindu teaching, moksha is the most important aim of life, and it is attained by following one of the principal mārgas or spiritual paths (see bhakti, jnāna, and karma).

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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psyche
(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

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qalb
The organ of supra-rational intuition, which corresponds to the heart just as thought corresponds to the brain. The fact that people of today localize feeling and not intellectual intuition in the heart proves that for them it is feeling that occupies the center of the individuality.

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ratio
literally, "calculation"; the faculty of discursive thinking, to be distinguished from intellectus, "Intellect."

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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tamas
In Hinduism and Buddhism, the lowest of the three cosmic qualities (gunas) that are a result of the creation of matter; tamas literally means "darkness" and this cosmic quality or energy is characterized by error, ignorance, heaviness, inertia, etc. Its darkness is related to the gloom of hell. In the Samkhya system of Hindu philosophy, tamas is seen as a form of ignorance (avidya) that lulls the spiritual being away from its true nature.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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yogi
a practitioner of yoga (in Hinduism)

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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cit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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modernism
The predominant post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment worldview of Western civilization marked by rationalism, scientism, and humanism. In the Muslim world, it refers to those individuals and movements who have sought to adopt Western ideas and values from the nineteenth century onwards in response to Western domination and imperialism.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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Mutatis mutandis
more or less literally, "with necessary changes being made" or "with necessary changes being taken into consideration". This adverbial phrase is used in philosophy and logic to point out that although two conditions or statements may seem to be very analagous or similar, the reader should not lose sight of the differences between the two. Perhaps an even more easily understood translation might be "with obvious differences taken into consideration…"

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rationalism
The philosophical position that sees reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Its origin lies in Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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arif
Knower, gnostic.

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ayn
al-‘ayn ath-thābitah, or sometimes simply al-‘ayn, is the immutable essence, the archetype or the principial possibility of a being or thing

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ayn
al-‘ayn ath-thābitah, or sometimes simply al-‘ayn, is the immutable essence, the archetype or the principial possibility of a being or thing

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ba
the ancient Egyptian term which means ‘manifestation’ of certain divine qualities, arranged in the descending and ascending hierarchy; in the eschatological and soteriological context, it may be understood as ‘soul’ moving up and down, as an individual in an out-of-body state which is attained through initiation or death, when the physical body ( khat, soma) is experienced as a corpse; ba is the vehicle of ascent, pictured as a human-headed bird which flies into the spheres of light and finally becomes aware of oneself as an akh; the concept of ba influenced the Pythagorean and Platonic concept of soul ( psuche) who tries to restore her wings through anamnesis, initiation into philosophy, and when ascends to the divine realm.

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batin
The “inner learning” (al-‘ilm al-bāṭin), which means esoteric or Sufic learning, is distinguished from the “outer learning” (al-‘ilm aẓ-ẓāhir) of the Doctors of the Law. Al-Bāṭin, “The Inner,” is one of the Names of God in the Qur’ān.

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cit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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dhakir
“the one who invokes” or “remembers”; in Sufism, dhākir usually means the human devotee who practices invocation as a spiritual method; it can also mean the supreme Self as the sole agent of consciousness; see dhikr, Madhkūr.

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dhikr
"remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word Allāh.

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fiqh
The science or discipline of Islamic law whereby legal opinions (fatwās) are derived from the Qur’ān and the sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad (ḥadīth).

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hajj
The rite of pilgrimage to Mecca; the fifth of the "five pillars" of Islam. It is required that all Muslims perform this rite once in their life, so long as they possess the health and wealth to complete the journey.

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Haqq
In Sufism designates the Divinity as distinguished from the creature (al-khalq).

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imam
In relation to ritual: he who presides when a number pray together; head of a religious community.

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khalifa
(1) Vicegerent or representative of God. The Qur’ān teaches that human beings were created to be God’s vicegerents on earth. For many this refers to the proper role of the human being in relation to creation. In Islamic political thought, the khalīfas or Caliphs are the vicegerents or the successors of the Prophet. (2) Literally, "successor"; a representative or vicar, often used in reference to the successors of the Prophet Muhammad; in Sufism, every man is in principle a khalīfah of God.

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madrasa
Literally, "a place of study." From the third Islamic century it has referred to places set aside for religious learning. In the modern period it has come to mean any type of school.

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Nur
Particularly the uncreated Divine Light, which includes all manifestation and is identified with Existence, considered as a principle. “God is the Light (Nūr) of the heavens and the earth…” (Qur’ān 24:35).

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pir
In Persian, literally, "old"; the term is used in Sufism to refer to a spiritual master, a shaykh (in Arabic). A pir commonly refers to the head of a Sufi order who is a spiritual guide for disciples following the esoteric path.

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pir
In Persian, literally, "old"; the term is used in Sufism to refer to a spiritual master, a shaykh (in Arabic). A pir commonly refers to the head of a Sufi order who is a spiritual guide for disciples following the esoteric path.

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qalb
The organ of supra-rational intuition, which corresponds to the heart just as thought corresponds to the brain. The fact that people of today localize feeling and not intellectual intuition in the heart proves that for them it is feeling that occupies the center of the individuality.

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Qutb
In Sufism: the pole of a spiritual hierarchy. The “pole of a period” is also spoken of. This pole is often unknown to most spiritual men.

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sadhana
A method of spiritual practice.

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secularism
The worldview that seeks to maintain religion and the sacred in the private domain; the predominant view in the West since the time of the French Revolution of 1789 C. E.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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sri
Literally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

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Sirr
In Sufism, designates the intimate and ineffable center of consciousness, the “point of contact” between the individual and his Divine principle.

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Sri
a prefix meaning “sacred” or “holy” (in Hinduism)

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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sunna
(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

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swami
A title of respect set before the names of monks and spiritual teachers.

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swami
A title of respect set before the names of monks and spiritual teachers.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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umma
"Community," or "people." A Qur’ānic term used to refer to the various peoples and nations of the earth. The Qur’ān speaks of the fact that God has sent a prophet to every umma, and it is understood in Islam that each prophet has his own umma, who follows his message. (Thus, in an Islamic context, umma refers to the "community" of Muslims spread throughout many nations.)

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zahir
Opposite of bāṭin (inner, hidden). Aẓ-Ẓāhir : the External, or the Apparent, is one of the Names of God in the Qur’ān.

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ananda
"bliss, beatitude, joy"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and chit, "consciousness."

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ascesis
(A) "exercise, practice, training," as of an athlete; a regimen of self-denial, especially one involving fasting, prostrations, and other bodily disciplines. (B) in ancient philosophy, this term designates not an ‘asceticism’, but spiritual exercises, therefore philosophia is understood not as a theory of knowledge but as a lived wisdom, a way of living according to intellect ( nous); an askesis includes remembrance of God, the ‘watch of the heart’, or vigilance ( nepsis), prosoche, or attention to the beauty of the soul, the examination of our conscience and knowledge of ourselves.

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Bon
The ancient, pre-Buddhist religion of Tibet, which still exists today; adherents are called Bön-Pos.

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deva
a god, a celestial being

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dharma
Truth, Reality, cosmic law, righteousness, virtue.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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pitri
Ancestors.

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psyche
(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

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ratio
literally, "calculation"; the faculty of discursive thinking, to be distinguished from intellectus, "Intellect."

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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satori
a Japanese term used to describe the enlightenment experience central to Zen. It is sometimes described as a flash of intuitive awareness, which is real but often incommunicable.

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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upanishad
Among the sacred texts of the Hindus, mostly Upaniṣāds discuss the existence of one absolute Reality known as Brahman. Much of Hindu Vedānta derives its inspiration from these texts.

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Âtmâ
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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avatara
the earthly "descent," incarnation, or manifestation of God, especially of Vishnu in the Hindu tradition.

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distinguo
literally, “I mark or set off, differentiate”, often used in the dialectic of the medieval scholastics; any philosophical distinction.

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philosophia
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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rationalism
The philosophical position that sees reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Its origin lies in Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."

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religio
"religion," often in reference to its exoteric dimension. (The term is usually considered to be from the Latin re + ligare, meaning to "to re–bind," or to bind back [to God] .)

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sophia
(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

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barakah
Sheikh al-barakah is a phrase also used of a master who bears the spiritual influence of the Prophet or who has realized that spiritual presence which is only a virtuality in the case of most initiates.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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Mutatis mutandis
more or less literally, "with necessary changes being made" or "with necessary changes being taken into consideration". This adverbial phrase is used in philosophy and logic to point out that although two conditions or statements may seem to be very analagous or similar, the reader should not lose sight of the differences between the two. Perhaps an even more easily understood translation might be "with obvious differences taken into consideration…"

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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Rama
In Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

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Rama
The seventh incarnation (avatāra) of Vishnu and the hero of the epic tale, Rāmāyaṇa.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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aya
in Islam, a “sign” or “mark” of Allah’s existence or power, especially a miracle; also refers to a "verse" of the Koran

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Brahmin
"Brahmin"; a member of the highest of the four Hindu castes; a priest or spiritual teacher.

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cit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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dharma
Truth, Reality, cosmic law, righteousness, virtue.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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kshatriya
a member of the second highest of the four Hindu castes; a warrior or prince. (Also includes politicians, officers, and civil authorities.) The distinctive quality of the kshatriya is a combative and noble nature that tends toward glory and heroism.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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prakrti
Literally, "making first" (see materia prima); the fundamental, "feminine" substance or material cause of all things; see "purusha (puruṣa)."

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prakrti
In Hinduism, literally, “making first” (see materia prima); the fundamental, “feminine” substance or material cause of all things; see guna, Purusha.

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rajas
In Hinduism, the second of the three gunas, or cosmic forces that result from creation. Rajas literally refers to "colored" or "dim" spaces, and is the guna whose energy is characterized by passion, emotion, variability, urgency, and activity. In the Vedas, the word is also used to designate the division of the world which encompasses the vapors and mists of the atmosphere, and which is below "the ethereal spaces."

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rajasic
In Hinduism, the second of the three gunas, or cosmic forces that result from creation. Rajas literally refers to "colored" or "dim" spaces, and is the guna whose energy is characterized by passion, emotion, variability, urgency, and activity. In the Vedas, the word is also used to designate the division of the world which encompasses the vapors and mists of the atmosphere, and which is below "the ethereal spaces."

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rajasic
In Hinduism, pertaining to rajas, which is the quality of activity or restlessness

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sattva
the quality of harmony, purity, serenity

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sattvic
pertaining to sattva, which is the quality of harmony, purity, serenity

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tamas
In Hinduism and Buddhism, the lowest of the three cosmic qualities (gunas) that are a result of the creation of matter; tamas literally means "darkness" and this cosmic quality or energy is characterized by error, ignorance, heaviness, inertia, etc. Its darkness is related to the gloom of hell. In the Samkhya system of Hindu philosophy, tamas is seen as a form of ignorance (avidya) that lulls the spiritual being away from its true nature.

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tamasic
In Hinduism and Buddhism, the lowest of the three cosmic qualities (gunas) that are a result of the creation of matter; tamas literally means "darkness" and this cosmic quality or energy is characterized by error, ignorance, heaviness, inertia, etc. Its darkness is related to the gloom of hell. In the Samkhya system of Hindu philosophy, tamas is seen as a form of ignorance (avidya) that lulls the spiritual being away from its true nature.

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varna
Caste; class; the four major social divisions in Hindu society include (in descending order): brāhmaṇas (priests), kṣatriyas (royals and warriors), vaiśyas (merchants and farmers), and śūdras (servants and laborers); situated outside the caste system are the caṇḍālas (outcastes and "untouchables") and mlecchas (foreigners and "barbarians"); members of the three upper castes are called "twice-born" (dvijā) and are permitted to study the Vedas.

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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acharya
A teacher or spiritual Master; learned in philosophy and realized in knowledge (jñāna).

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alter
the "other," in contrast to the ego or individual self.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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Atma
the real or true "Self," underlying the ego and its manifestations; in the perspective of Advaita Vedānta, identical with Brahma.

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bhasya
Commentary or exposition, especially of sūtras

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Brahma
God in the aspect of Creator, the first divine "person" of the Trimūrti; to be distinguished from Brahma, the Supreme Reality.

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Brahman
Brahma considered as transcending all "qualities," attributes, or predicates; God as He is in Himself; also called Para-Brahma.

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dharma
Truth, Reality, cosmic law, righteousness, virtue.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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jnana
Knowing or understanding. Though usually translated into English as "knowledge", "jñāna" does not mean proficiency in a subject like history or physics. It is not mere learning but inward experience or awareness of a truth. In Advaita it is the realization that one is inseparably united with the Supreme.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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karman
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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Maya
"artifice, illusion"; in Advaita Vedānta, the beguiling concealment of Brahma in the form or under the appearance of a lower reality.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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pramana
Authority; source of knowledge; a measure or standard; per­ception.

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sabda
Sound; word; logos.

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sri
Literally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

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sruti
Literally, "what is heard;" in Hindu tradition, a category of sacred writings understood to be the direct revelation of eternal Truth, including the Vedas, the Saṃhitās, the Brāhmaṇas, the Āraṇyakas and the Upanishads (Upaniṣads); in contrast to smriti (smṛti).

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Sri
a prefix meaning “sacred” or “holy” (in Hinduism)

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sura
a chapter or division of the Koran, the holy book of Islam. There are 114 sūar (plural) in the Koran.

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sutra
Literally, "thread;" a Hindu or Buddhist sacred text; in Hinduism, any short, aphoristic verse or collection of verses, often elliptical in style; in Buddhism, a collection of the discourses of the Buddha.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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Vedanta
"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara (ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja (ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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ba
the ancient Egyptian term which means ‘manifestation’ of certain divine qualities, arranged in the descending and ascending hierarchy; in the eschatological and soteriological context, it may be understood as ‘soul’ moving up and down, as an individual in an out-of-body state which is attained through initiation or death, when the physical body ( khat, soma) is experienced as a corpse; ba is the vehicle of ascent, pictured as a human-headed bird which flies into the spheres of light and finally becomes aware of oneself as an akh; the concept of ba influenced the Pythagorean and Platonic concept of soul ( psuche) who tries to restore her wings through anamnesis, initiation into philosophy, and when ascends to the divine realm.

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Brahman
Brahma considered as transcending all "qualities," attributes, or predicates; God as He is in Himself; also called Para-Brahma.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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Jami
Author of the treatise Lawā’iḥ (“Flashes”).

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jinn
Subtle beings belonging to the world of forms.

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maitri
benevolence; kindness.

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Qutb
In Sufism: the pole of a spiritual hierarchy. The “pole of a period” is also spoken of. This pole is often unknown to most spiritual men.

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Radhakrishnan
(1888 -1975 C.E.) An eminent Hindu philosopher and a prolific writer, who is known for interpreting Hinduism to the west.

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Rumi
Founder of the Mevlevī (Arabic: Mawlawīyyah) order of “whirling dervishes”; author of the famous mystical poem the Mathnawī, composed in Persian and which contains his whole doctrine.

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sheikh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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Talmud
Literally, “learning, study.” In Judaism, the Talmud is a body of writings and traditional commentaries based on the oral law given to Moses on Sinai. It is the foundation of Jewish civil and religious law, second in authority only to the Torah.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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urd
Figuratively: the cosmic amplitude.

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Yahweh
a transliteration of the supposed pronunciation, now lost, of the sacred Name of God in the Hebrew Bible or Christian Old Testament; revealed to Moses on Sinai and often translated as "I am" or "the One who is" (cf. Exod. 3:14).

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distinguo
literally, “I mark or set off, differentiate”, often used in the dialectic of the medieval scholastics; any philosophical distinction.

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pontifex
“bridge-maker”; man as the link between Heaven and earth.

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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ananda
"bliss, beatitude, joy"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and chit, "consciousness."

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deva
a god, a celestial being

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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materia prima
"first or prime matter"; in Platonic cosmology, the undifferentiated and primordial substance serving as a "receptacle" for the shaping force of divine forms or ideas; universal potentiality.

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prakriti
Literally, "making first" (see materia prima); the fundamental, "feminine" substance or material cause of all things; see "purusha (puruṣa)."

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prakriti
In Hinduism, literally, “making first” (see materia prima); the fundamental, “feminine” substance or material cause of all things; see guna, Purusha.

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purusha
Literally, "man;" the informing or shaping principle of creation; the "masculine" demiurge or fashioner of the universe; see "Prakriti (Prakṛti)."

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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Veda
The sacred scriptures of Hinduism; regarded by the orthodox (āstika) as divine revelation (śruti) and comprising: (1) the Ṛg, Sāma, Yajur, and Atharva Saṃhitās (collections of hymns); (2) the Brāhmanas (priestly treatises); (3) the Āranyakas (forest treatises); and (4) the Upaniṣāds (philosophical and mystical treatises); they are divided into a karma-kāṇḍa portion dealing with ritual action and a jñāna-kāṇḍa portion dealing with knowledge.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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alter
the "other," in contrast to the ego or individual self.

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ascesis
(A) "exercise, practice, training," as of an athlete; a regimen of self-denial, especially one involving fasting, prostrations, and other bodily disciplines. (B) in ancient philosophy, this term designates not an ‘asceticism’, but spiritual exercises, therefore philosophia is understood not as a theory of knowledge but as a lived wisdom, a way of living according to intellect ( nous); an askesis includes remembrance of God, the ‘watch of the heart’, or vigilance ( nepsis), prosoche, or attention to the beauty of the soul, the examination of our conscience and knowledge of ourselves.

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bhakta
a follower of the spiritual path of bhakti; a person whose relationship with God is based primarily on adoration and love.

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bhakti
the spiritual "path" (mārga) of "love" (bhakti) and devotion.

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chit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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chit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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Chit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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hypostases
literally, "substances" (singular, hypostasis); in Eastern Christian theology, a technical term for the three "Persons" of the Trinity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct hypostases sharing a single ousia, or essence.

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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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mahabbah


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pneumatikos
In Greek, “spiritual”. Used to refer to a person in whom the element of spirit predominates over the soul and the body (cf. 1 Thess. 5:23; 1 Cor. 2:14-15).

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rabb
"Lord"; in Islam, God in His aspect of Sovereign or Ruler; the divine complement of man as ‘abd.

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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Sirr
In Sufism, designates the intimate and ineffable center of consciousness, the “point of contact” between the individual and his Divine principle.

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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sunna
(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

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Tasawwuf
Designates the whole of the contemplative ways founded on the sacred forms of Islam. By transposition an Arab might speak of “Christian taṣawwuf” or “Jewish taṣawwuf” to indicate the esotericism of the respective traditions.

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theology
divine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

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Torah
"instruction, teaching"; in Judaism, the law of God, as revealed to Moses on Sinai and embodied in the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy).

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yoga
union of the jiva with God; method of God-realization (in Hinduism)

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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Mutatis mutandis
more or less literally, "with necessary changes being made" or "with necessary changes being taken into consideration". This adverbial phrase is used in philosophy and logic to point out that although two conditions or statements may seem to be very analagous or similar, the reader should not lose sight of the differences between the two. Perhaps an even more easily understood translation might be "with obvious differences taken into consideration…"

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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rationalism
The philosophical position that sees reason as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Its origin lies in Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum, "I think, therefore I am."

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religio
"religion," often in reference to its exoteric dimension. (The term is usually considered to be from the Latin re + ligare, meaning to "to re–bind," or to bind back [to God] .)

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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barakah
Sheikh al-barakah is a phrase also used of a master who bears the spiritual influence of the Prophet or who has realized that spiritual presence which is only a virtuality in the case of most initiates.

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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Mahayana
The Larger Vehicle in contrast to the Hinayana, or Smaller Vehicle. It claimed to be more universal in opening Enlightenment to all beings, and inspired the emergence of the Pure Land teaching directed to ordinary beings—denoted as all beings in the ten directions. This tradition is characterized by a more complex philosophical development, an elaborate mythic and symbolic expression which emphasizes the cosmic character of the Buddha nature, and its inclusion of the key virtues of compassion and wisdom.

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ma‘rifah
Al-ma‘rifah (knowledge), al-maḥabbah (love) and al-makhāfah (fear) make up the Sufi triad of motives or qualities which lead towards God.

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modernism
The predominant post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment worldview of Western civilization marked by rationalism, scientism, and humanism. In the Muslim world, it refers to those individuals and movements who have sought to adopt Western ideas and values from the nineteenth century onwards in response to Western domination and imperialism.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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silsilah
In Sufism, denotes the continuity of spiritual descent from the Prophet.

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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sunnah
(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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Vedanta
"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara (ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja (ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

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Aql
Al-‘Aql al-awwal : the first Intellect, analogue of the Supreme Pen (al-Qalam), and of ar-Rūḥ. Corresponds to the Nous of Plotinus.

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cit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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Haqq
In Sufism designates the Divinity as distinguished from the creature (al-khalq).

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mu
a Japanese term used to describe a non-ego self. The goal in Zen is to become mu-no-hito, a person without ego.

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rabb
"Lord"; in Islam, God in His aspect of Sovereign or Ruler; the divine complement of man as ‘abd.

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sophia
(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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dhikr
"remembrance" of God, based upon the repeated invocation of His Name; central to Sufi practice, where the remembrance often consists of the single word Allāh.

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Ghaflah


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idea
in non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

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jinn
Subtle beings belonging to the world of forms.

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mana


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mu
a Japanese term used to describe a non-ego self. The goal in Zen is to become mu-no-hito, a person without ego.

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philosophy
love of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

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psyche
(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

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Rumi
Founder of the Mevlevī (Arabic: Mawlawīyyah) order of “whirling dervishes”; author of the famous mystical poem the Mathnawī, composed in Persian and which contains his whole doctrine.

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Torah
"instruction, teaching"; in Judaism, the law of God, as revealed to Moses on Sinai and embodied in the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy).

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

(more..)

adam
In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

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Vedanta
"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara (ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja (ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

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avatara
the earthly "descent," incarnation, or manifestation of God, especially of Vishnu in the Hindu tradition.

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Jalal


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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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karma
action; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

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vasana
Latent tendency; hidden desire; habit of mind.

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Vedanta
"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara (ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja (ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

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logos
(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

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Tradition
(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

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abd
(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

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bast
The expansion of the soul through hope or spiritual joy.

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cit
"consciousness"; one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with sat, "being," and ānanda, "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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gnosis
(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

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sat
"Being;" one of the three essential aspects of Apara-Brahma, together with cit, "consciousness," and ananda (ānanda), "bliss, beatitude, joy."

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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shaykh
(1) In Islam, a Sufi or other spiritual leader or master. (2) The term is also used more generally as an honorific title for a chief or elder of a group.

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Shuhud


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sufi
In its strictest sense designates one who has arrived at effective knowledge of Divine Reality (Ḥaqīqah); hence it is said: aṣ-Ṣūfī lam yukhlaq (“the Sufi is not created”).

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