ABSTRACT
The culture of secrecy so strongly associated with medieval Japanese religions largely came to an end during the Tokugawa period (1603-1868). Individual lineages of esoteric initiations continued, of course, but not the authority they once commanded. The emergence of a new culture of printed texts, public education, and the free exchange of knowledge gradually eroded the power of occult learning. Government policies and Buddhist priests accelerated this shift in values by promoting reformations that profoundly altered the ways that Japanese Buddhists (and modern scholars) would come to understand their own traditions.
