ABSTRACT
As the other contributions to this book have detailed, the esotericism prevalent in medieval Japanese Buddhism had a far-reaching impact on various dimensions of religious, cultural, and intellectual life. Central among its legacies was the articulation of “Shinto,” claimed by successive thinkers to be an autonomous body of doctrines and practices, but in fact owing much of its content and orientation to the matrix of esoteric Buddhism from which it emerged. What happened to this combination of elements with the rise of interest in Confucianism and the concomitant disavowal of Buddhism characteristic of early modern intellectual life? Confucian thinkers of all schools put priority on the ordering of society and the establishment of proper social relations; they also took as a given that, as categories, “public” (k2 公) was something positive, in contrast to “private” (shi, watakushi 私 ), which carried dubious and negative connotations. One might thus expect a commitment to Confucianism to bring with it a querying of esotericism and its attendant assumption that privileged knowledge should be guarded and transmitted only to the initiated.
