there is no doubt that the way to gain access to religious rulings and doctrines is the sunna of the prophet and the imams, as only second to the holy qur’ān, which is reported in thousands of traditions in various tradition books. in the meantime, every theologian and ḥadīth researcher has to leave behind two stages for a proper understanding of traditions: in the first stage, he is to conside...

Highly successful acts of transcultural transmission of knowledge rest on an approach to translation that for the most part is highly literal. In the present lecture, I describe this methodology and show how it has not been applied in the westward transmission of Chinese medicine. Through practical examples, I demonstrate the conceptual problems that arise through failure to choose the methodol...