ABSTRACT
There are many kinds of secrecy and many motivations for them. I have discussed the political and sectarian implications of secrecy in the particular case of relic worship elsewhere (Faure 1999 and 2004), and other contributions to this book examine the relationships of secrecy and power in other areas of pre-modern Japanese society. In medieval Japan, secrecy characterized above all the tradition of esoteric Buddhism. By privileging the secret over the manifest, esoteric Buddhism was led, paradoxically, to privilege certain figures of the sacred, in particular mysterious deities that took precedence over the traditional symbols of Buddhism. As Yamaori Tetsuo (1991, pp. 113-20) has noted, Japanese deities (kami) were initially compared to the Indian buddhas as being symbols of the invisible in contrast to figures of the visible. Whatever one may think of the so-called aniconism of early Buddhism and of the inconceivable transcendence of the Buddha himself, in the concrete reality of the cult, the buddhas are eminently visible, and the main characteristic of their anthropomorphic manifestation is their aura, which symbolizes a world of light. In order to call attention to their transcendence, medieval Japanese Buddhism tended to conceal them, and this led to the notion of “hidden buddhas” (hibutsu 秘仏), whose secret nature, symbolized by their removal and concealment in the inner sanctum, evokes infinite power and potentiality. Japanese art historians, who have often monopolized the concept of hibutsu, have not always been able to distinguish between the circumstantial and the structural factors that led to the development of that ragbag category, nor to discuss its theological and mythological premises.1
