Eastern esotericism

[13][29][30][31] Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff defined esotericism as a specifically Western phenomenon, intending to overcome the religionist paradigm of an "esoteric core" common to all religions or a perennial universalist truth.

[13] According to Hanegraaff, Carl Jung was a major contributor in spreading the cross-cultural study of esotericism in a more global perspective, analyzing the Western occult tradition and seeking parallels with Eastern systems.

[32] For instance, studies such as Marcel Griaule's have been criticized for inducing the creation of mystifications considered "esoteric" in a non-Western context: that of the African religion of the Dogon,[32] in what he called "la parole claire" - the deepest level of secret knowledge.

[58] The main idea that scholars speculate is strongly rooted in the Avestan ritual is that of an opening of an esoteric path, through which priests could meet with Ohrmazd, gaining an early mental vision of the afterlife and the condition of saoshyant.

Kartir describes in his inscriptions his vision of the "final destination" according to such a special ritual context, in a deeply esoteric account of an encounter in Paradise with his female double dēn, "in the form of a woman".

[63] The recitation of the most important hymn, the Ahuna Vairya, is strongly linked to cosmological components,[63] and implies a secret knowledge held by the priest that possesses it, possibly correlating it to the 21 constellations of the northern part of the sky.

These constellations and those of the Zodiac were symbolized equally on the utensils of the ritual table, and a pattern of choreography by the priests indicates positions of the spatial axes and stages celestial movements, in an act to defeat the Evil Spirit.

[68] Manichaean doctrines derived many aspects from Zoroastrian terminology and thought, combining and modifying them with Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, and Gnostic ideas within an esoteric framework to explain life and death.

[73] In the 9th century, the Denkard presented evidence of a hermeneutical interpretation of the Gatha that shared the paradigm of "omnisignificance" according to James Kugel, analogous to the rabbinic traditions of Talmudic commentators, with a search for parallelism between texts and a possible reinterpretation of every word in divine scripture as containing a latent cryptic meaning.

[74] The Wizīdagīhā ī Zādspram ("Selections from Zadspram") is also another independent text from the same century within the Zoroastrian tradition, involving medical conceptions, numerology, and astrology to cosmic speculations, in contexts that may denote esoteric meaning.

[75] Azar Kayvan (16th-17th centuries), asserting that the end of the Islamic millennium was near, declared an era with Persian superiority and founded the Abadi order, combining Sufi, gholātī, and Illuminationist ideas with Zoroastrian texts.

[79] The tantra is considered a sprout of Vedic-Brahmanic and Yogic traditions whose system is mainly characterized by correspondences of macrocosm and microcosm and also by a reintegration of the mundane into the salvational path, such as the ritual employment of sexuality and dualism to achieve non-duality.

On the other hand, the alleged danger and destructive power of the veiled teaching also generated attraction: announcing the existence of a secret to outside listeners was part of a frequent strategy of esotericism, that of pseudo-simulation, precluding its disclosure.

[98] In several tantric sects, the phenomenon of sound production by the human body is considered to correspond to macrocosmic dimensions, as a replica of Creation processes, from the Origin, defining in Hindu theology a metaphysics of the Word and phonic and phonetic cosmogonies.

They were followers of Shiva and revered the angry form of this god, Bhairava, imitating him in transgressive rituals, such as smearing their bodies with ashes from cremation grounds, orgiastic practices, human sacrifices, consumption of meat and alcohol.

[109]In Bengal, from the 17th to the 19th centuries there was a development of esoteric tantric groups with yogic practices, such as the Karthābaja and Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā, involving sexual rituals, although to some extent there were exoteric expressions in devotional movements as well.

As in his other comparative work on Hindu traditions, Majma-ul-Bahrain ("The Meeting Point of the Two Oceans", c. 1655), Dara was influenced by the ancient Islamic historiography which considered that the Indians possessed a polytheistic religion of the masses, while a monotheistic aspect was reserved for an elite.

Furthermore, in accordance with a perennialist tendency, he traced a monotheistic "esoteric truth" to the Indian work, and affirmed the god Brahman as being the prophet Adam, who would have made a revelation before Muhammad on par with the doctrine of tawhid ("Unity") in the Koran.

[143] Women in Taoism were given great importance by the Shangqing school; they had a role as divine teachers, revealers of secrets, and bestowers of esoteric teachings of the Tao, which was actively continued until the Tang dynasty.

In contrast to the school of the Way of the Heavenly Masters (Tianshi), the Shangqing regarded rituals of sexual intercourse as of lesser importance, considering that "mixing the qi" and physically harmonizing the Yin and Mahayana did not lead to eternal life.

They contained aniconic emblems mixed with text, considered the esoteric manifestation of sacred scriptures or the cosmic qi itself condensed at the moment of the creation of the world and reflecting celestial writings.

There were innovations such as the one by Du Guangting (850-933), who established a model for rituals to the dead (zhai) and was flexible to the cults of local gods, trying to counter the threats of esoteric Buddhism and popular religions to Taoism.

In the early 17th century, spirit-writing altars (also called "phoenix halls") multiplied in private domestic settings, by small groups headed by literati, devoted to the worship of the immortal Lü Dongbin.

Pan Yi'an (彭伊安), a 17th-century recipient of the text that in the West came to be translated as The Secret of the Golden Flower, describes his process of initially composing the first part:[148] From what I remember, it was in the Wu Shen year [1668] that our holy patriarch Chunyang [i.e., Lü] began transmitting the 'Instructions'.

In the Heian period, the Chinese administration system was imported, including the creation of a special Yin and Yang Bureau (Inyôryô), which used Yin-Yang cosmology and astrology by officials, to divine fortune.

[149] From the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE, master-disciple lineages that interpreted Confucian texts like the Spring and Autumn Annals beyond the content of historical chronicle, including expanded meanings that would constitute strands of "esoteric classicism" emerged.

[150] After Lin was captured, the sky rained down the blood that transformed into writing at the main gate of Lu's capital, and that read, 'Prepare the laws quickly, for the sage Confucius will die; Zhou will be destroyed; a comet will appear from the east.

"[156] In general, it was with the emergence of orientalist academic studies in the 17th and 18th centuries that there was a great sedimentation of the category of esotericism in a comparative manner in relation to Persian, Arabic, Indian and Chinese texts and practices.

[157] Leibniz advocated for Agostino Steuco's concept of "perennial philosophy", that there would be a universal source present in all religious traditions, and took an interest in Chinese systems in his correspondence with the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet, who was sent on the first French mission to China.

[159][160] Notions that a "pre-Kabbalah" was found in a Chinese or Asian Revelation before the Jewish one was proposed by James Parsons and assimilated in Scottish Masonic circles, with a major diffuser of this being Andrew Michael Ramsay in his book The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (1748-49).