Tradition - with thanks to T.S. Elliott

… if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable… and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to train not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the history of the martial arts has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a martial artist traditional. And it is at the same time what makes him most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

The above is my modification of an article written by one of our greatest poets, T.S. Elliott on tradition in writing, not the martial arts. But tradition in one art is much the same as that in another IMHO.