Two Ways of Looking at Any Religion

The difference between esoteric and exoteric religiosity

13 min readSep 15, 2022

Introduction

In the post about the 6 philosophical schools of India, I’ve briefly explored the differences between the terms “religion” and “philosophy”. This time, I’d like to further this discussion by trying to ask the question if there is a common ground on which religious experiences and philosophical inquiries can meet. To do this, first, we have to understand the meaning behind two important concepts: esotericism and exotericism. Without knowing what these words mean, it will be hard for us to see the ways in which philosophy and religion can come close, and where they part ways.

With New Age religions popping up like mushrooms after rain, the word “esoteric” has become used and misused with such frequency, that it has become almost impossible to grasp what it actually means. Just like not all products at the convenience store with the label “bio”, “eco”, or “organic” are good for you or the environment, in the same way, not all esoteric practices and beliefs that people adhere to are actually esoteric.

Esoteric or Exoteric?

Let’s clarify the mist by giving these concepts some clear definitions. According to dictionary.com:

Esoteric — likely to be understood or enjoyed by only a few people with a special knowledge or interest.
Exoteric — suitable for or communicated to the general public.

From an etymological perspective, the word “exoteric” is derived from the Greek word, exoterikos, meaning “outer”, whereas “esoteric” is derived from the Greek word, esoterikos, meaning “belonging to the inner circle.”

Furthermore, we can say that esotericism tends to look into the essence of a certain experience, while exotericism focuses on its translation into language and form. I think Michael Robbins sums it well by saying that:

“Exoteric practices are the outer garments of esoteric principles.”

Experience versus presentation

There are two ways to perceive the world: through one’s own direct experience or through the words of another. If someone’s direct experience of the world brings about profound insights about the nature of being, people often call such an experience “transcendental”, “religious”, “metaphysical” or “spiritual.” This is the starting point of any esotericism. Unfortunately, such experiences are sometimes cumbersome to understand and even more difficult to describe. For this reason, to make them more accessible to a wider audience, they are often guised in various ritual practices, dogmas, and beliefs that revolve around the essence without giving it fully away.

As an example, all of the great religions have begun with a certain individual (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, etc.) experiencing something amazing. That in terms was a deep, meaningful, and personal experience, which is often hard to put in words. Such an experience is definitely esoterical (difficult to understand). Hearing about such an insight, people who found it profound decided to translate it into a more relatable form. That is the stage when various symbols, regulations, and rules of conduct began to drown the primary revelation by weaving it into extra, more visible, yet diminishing layers.

While esotericism tends to focus on the essence of a given experience, exotericism provides it with a form. When various interpretations, principles, and hierarchies are built around the transcendental insight, the insight gets covered in the dust of its explanations. This often occurs even if the founder fears and rejects a cultish following. Maybe that is why before his deathbed, the great 16th-century Zen abbot Takuan Soho instructed the other monks residing in the same monastery:

“Bury me under a tree in the garden, put no stone, and continue your practices as usual.”

Takuan knew the dangers and limits of deviating from that which is most essential. By not seeing death as something special, he encouraged the other monks not to interrupt their life of meditation for ceremonies of worship. Death for Takuan was a natural event, just like the change of seasons. Why get blown off course by what is inevitable? Why pretend that you are an authority to others, while their only true authority is Dharma itself expressing itself through their minds and practice?

Authority, discipline, and responsibility. The case of Christianity.

When we think about the differences between esoteric and exoteric approaches towards a religion, we can’t avoid but inquire into the topics relating to authority and responsibility. What is “spiritual” authority? What is “religious” responsibility? Let’s start by saying that there are two sides to both of these concepts.

Authority can be either internal or external, whereas responsibility can be personal or delegated to another. If the authority of a certain belief is imposed on the practitioner from the outside while his or her responsibility lays in the hands of another — we are in the exoteric domain. On the other hand, if the authority lies in the practitioner’s own conduct and he takes up personal responsibility for his growth as a perceiver — we are approaching the esoteric.

A great example of these two modes of being can be found in Christianity and its denominations. What is the difference in how a Christian relates to the ideas presented by the orthodoxy of the Church and how he conducts his life according to the information found in the Gnostic gospels? For those who hear of Gnosticism for the first time:

Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: ‘having knowledge’) is a collection of non-canonical religious ideas and systems which coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects. These various groups emphasized personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) above the orthodox teachings, traditions, and authority of religious institutions.

The Gnostics were not the only ones who promoted personal responsibility in order to understand the unfathomable. Similar views can be found in the teachings of the 13th-century German theologian, philosopher, and scholar, Meister Eckhart. In his sermons he wrote:

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

Now, for many devout Christians of that time (and of any time, for that matter) both the ideas found in the Gnostic texts and the Sermons of Meister Eckhart would come across as blasphemy. Who do these Gnostic fellows think they are? And what about this Meister Eckhart character? Is he saying that a person can have a direct connection with the Supreme Being without the Church mediating the relationship? Is he claiming to have ascended to the status of God, saying that they both are one seeing, one knowing, one love?

Maybe for these and similar expressions, people such as the Gnostics and Meister Eckhart were often persecuted and seen as heretics by the Church. The Church, being the guard-keeper of exoteric practices and beliefs, frowns upon fresh and vigorous religious interpretations. In order to have dominance over which texts should be considered canonical, the lineage of patriarchs will not approve of any scriptures and interpretations that reside outside of their carefully knit web of meaning. Otherwise, what will the Church do with all of Jesus’ siblings? What relationship will it have with you, no more a stranger and afraid in the world you never made?

Different people, different experiences, different interpretations. The case of Hinduism.

According to Eastern mystics, there are many ways to arrive at a certain disposition where a person starts to perceive life for what it is. This can be done in a religious, philosophical, or even a scientific approach. Maybe that is why Zen Buddhist stories are full of tales about various people reaching Enlightenment through the most unlikely circumstances. It is common to believe that Satori can come about only after a long and rigorous self-subjugation to the practice of seated meditation, but Zen Buddhism is called the art of sudden realization not just for no reason. Even though an insight might flash while meditating, a person can also arrive at the same point after smelling a certain flower, or by getting slapped with a shoe. Therefore realization is not in the practitioner’s will, nor is it the fruit of his practice. Even if he or she meditates for 10000 hours with no stop, a moment of Kenshō can occur from seeing an unexpected pile of poo outside the practice hall. Maybe that is why a certain Hindu proverb states:

“There are hundreds of paths up the mountain,
all leading in the same direction,
so it doesn’t matter which path you take.
The only one wasting time is the one
who runs around and around the mountain,
telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.”

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

As some of the readers might already know, in traditional Hinduism there exists a belief in reincarnation (the idea that the non-physical essence of a living being begins a new life in a different physical form or body after biological death.) Following the Hindu line of thought, people which are alive right now might have lived before in one form or another. Therefore, different people might have varying degrees of reincarnational experience. For this reason in Hinduism and its underlying traditions, we can find various ways of interpreting the ideas and principles of the ideas presented in their holy scriptures, the Vedas. For people less inclined towards philosophical inquiries, there is a whole genre of literature called ‘the Puranas’, whereas for those with a more philosophically oriented mind there are the Upanishads. As a reminder:

Purana is a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics, particularly about legends and other traditional lore. The Puranas are known for the intricate layers of symbolism depicted within their stories.
The Upanishads are late Vedic Sanskrit texts which deal with meditation, philosophy, consciousness, and ontological knowledge while earlier parts of the Vedas concentrate more on mantras, benedictions, rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices.

If our reincarnational experiences differ, so will our preferred ways of acquiring knowledge and understanding. As proposed by Micheal Robbins:

“There’s always a way into the ageless wisdom and it is presented in ways that different strata of intelligence can understand. It is said that all men are created equal. Indeed, all men are created equal, but in one respect — as monads, as spirits — they are completely equal. In terms of their experience in time and space, there is great variation. So, we need to know how to teach the inner essence of things to those who can appreciate it, and to those who are in a way younger in their experience we have to have a more exoteric presentation.”

Not many people know much about the ideas presented in Patanjali’s yogic sutras, but many are deeply interested in various epics such as Mahabharata or Ramayana. Is that a good or a bad thing? Well, neither. It simply shows that different presentations appeal to different people. The only necessity here is to be able to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, the essence from the form.

A philosophical inquiry is fairly clear if you are able to understand the terms and grasp the ideas lying beneath them. Epic stories are full of pictorial and mythological images of various gods and goddesses intermingling in human and divine affairs, which poses the threat of getting lost in the external symbolism without grasping their between-the-lines meaning. Probably that is one of the reasons why the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh noted:

“The teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself. A finger-pointing at the moon is not the moon. Do not become caught in the teaching. You must be able to let it go.”

The same or distinct?

In one of his interviews, a scholar of esoteric thought Micheal Robbins stated:

“Esoteric systems of thought can be recognized underlying many theologies, whereas exoteric principles are exclusive to ‘a’ theology.”

What did he mean? For starters, let’s remember that a mystical experience refers to a profound, intimate, and direct experience of the reality of life. It’s speechless, wordless, but as vivid as the sky. Some people call it a pre-conceptual understanding, others call it liberation, but the word hear does not really matter. What matters is the experience itself.

As mentioned before, there is great variation in people’s ways of perceiving things, but what is fundamentally being perceived does not have to be different in and of itself. In this line of thought, all liberating experiences might be similar in their essence, even though their naming conventions differ. “Moksha” is the word used the describe Enlightenment in Hindu circles, “Nirvana” in Buddhism, “Satori” or “Kensho” in Japanese Zen, “Christ Consciousness” in Christianity… Can it be true, that different historical figures (such as Jesus, Gautama Siddhartha, Mohammed, and others) might have had similar experiences, but because of their cultural background, expressed them differently? Maybe that is why we can see many similar underlying principles shared between different esoteric movements such as Christian Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, Jewish Kabbalism, Hindu Vedanta, or Zen Buddhism, while their exoteric counterparts (traditional Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism) appear to be worlds apart.

A person that realized himself esoterically will not fight against a person with a different religious background, while the exoterically self-realized person will fend off the other as misguided or sometimes even plainly evil. This seems to miss the mark of not just religious tolerance, but also of esoteric common sense. Maybe that’s why the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky said that:

“Virtue and wisdom are sublime things, but if they create pride and a consciousness of separateness from the rest of humanity, they are only the snakes of self reappearing in a finer form.”

The question of “self” and identity.

The notion of “self” is common in most of the world’s cultures and traditions, and even though the concept is prevalent, it is often understood differently depending on the cultural context. There is the Jungian “self”, the Christian “self”, the Hindu concepts of “the higher and lower selves”, the Buddhist “no-self” and many others. Knowing the extent of the variations revolving around the elusiveness of this term, it is hard to avoid the question of what is this word alluding to? What is this “self”? To start D. Zahavi’s gives the description that:

“The self is an individual as the object of its own reflective consciousness.”

Now, we’re off on a good start! Probably that is how most of the people living in the Western hemisphere understand this concept. But let’s go further and explore a comment of the great Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, in which he states:

“The self is not only the center but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality…”

Right, so self is both the conscious and unconscious aspect of one’s psyche… So, is that it? What about the Hindu notion of higher and lower selves? What does the Bhagavad Gita saying “Through meditation, the Higher Self is seen” mean? And what does Dogen ellude to when he states:

“A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.”

Maybe Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation given in one of his interviews can shed more light on these thoughts. In order to unveil the mental state of Mushin (無心, “no mind”), he pointed out:

“True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There’s no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that you are no longer caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.”

So, during this small conceptual voyage, we can conclude that the interpretation of the “self” concept varies from a small reflexive ego to the wholeness of known and unknown contents of the individual psyche, to it being the entirety of what is being experienced at any given moment. In this entirety, all separation between “internal” and “external” or “subjective” and “objective” aspects drop away and what is left is the direct experience of that which forever eludes any conceptual frameworks and representations. Maybe that is what all the esoteric traditions are trying to point to. As explained by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

“To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found”

Now, what is the problem with the concept of “self” in an exoteric context? Micheal Robbins explains that:

“Many of the religions of today offer incentives to the lower ego. ‘You as a lower ego will be saved, you will spend time in paradise forever, you will be saved and others will not, etc.’ They view man as a lower, encapsulated identity. The ageless wisdom on the other hand begins to expand the notion of identity until we drop one false identity after another and begin to realize that the macrocosmic whole is all there is and we are that.”

I cannot find a better way to end this inquiry but with the words of a man that introduced C’han Buddhism to Japan and founded the Sōtō school of Zen. In his 13th century masterpiece “The Shōbōgenzō”, Dogen wrote:

“To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.”

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