ARTICLES Secrecy as a Social Process: Concealing, Revealing, and Classifying in Covert Shin Buddhism

Secrecy as a Social Process: Concealing, Revealing, and Classifying in Covert Shin Buddhism C) / the work of Karl Popper, Ivan Strenski has urged scholars in religious studies to focus on problems rather than subjects. 1 One core problem we have is how to best understand the concepts we use to characterize and analyze what we observe.By way of exhibiting such concepts, we could march out "ritual," "experience," "prayer," and "belief."Although the concept "secrecy" has received less analytical attention than other concepts commonly used in religious studies, it is worthy of greater consideration because, as several scholars have pointed out, it is vital for our understanding of religion, however we might de:ne it.Kees Bolle, for example, claimed that "there is no religion without secrecy." 2 Hugh Urban similarly argues that "secrecy is indeed a central and even de:ning aspect of that particular form of human activity called religion." 3Most succinct is Paul Johnson's claim that "without secrets, religion becomes unimaginable." 4 If secrecy is as important as these scholars say, we should delineate its operations and the actions it commonly entails.!e understanding of secrecy as simply connoting concealment is inadequate because it fails to account for how secrecy persists even after secrets are revealed.Mark Teeuwen indicates that there have been two basic approaches to the study of secrecy in religion: the :rst, which can be found in the works of Mircea Eliade and Kees Bolle, seeks to reveal the content of what is hidden; and the second, found in the works of Georg Simmel and Hugh Urban, seeks to understand secrecy through its forms and