Is the Rosary part of the Western Orthodox tradition?

 

Pater Noster cord


The short answer is "No"; however, people bring up the use of the Pater Noster beads / cords from the 8th century; but, this ultimately isn't the Rosary, since the Rosary is far more than using a prayer rope or beads to say the Angelic Salutation.

What is ultimately meant by the Rosary is using meditative techniques, the attempts to imagine one self present at the declaration of mysteries, and such, these are real problems that will produce spiritual delusions.

Saying the Angelic Salutation, and other prayers numerous time, like saying "O God, be attentive unto helping me; O Lord, make haste to help me.." dozens or more times, is definitely ancient since the Ancient and Medieval Monastic Fathers talk about it. 

Again, I am never quite sure that everyone has the same meaning by "Rosary"; if by Rosary they mean the way modern RC's do it, then, I don't think in that form, it goes back much before the 15th century. 

If they mean using things like the Pater Noster cord, or Pater Noster belt, which either used notches or beads, and using them to count prayers said, that definitely goes back toPre-Schism, in Ireland to the 700s, maybe earlier in the East; they look like the rope chotkis, or, sometimes, chotkis that have small beads.  But, this, really, is not the Rosary.

In other words, the ancient unified tradition, East and West, was what we call a prayer rope, or 'chotki'; it only later, in the Post-Schism period, under the influence of various attributed visions, and the evolving emotionalistic and imagination centred spiritually of the late Medieval, and then Renaissance period, that this ancient tradition morphed into the Rosary proper.

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