Exoteric - Philosophical Context

Philosophical Context

Most philosophical and religious belief systems presume that reality must be independent of what an individual makes of it. However, even before the days of Plato, a prominent alternate theory of knowledge insisted that the perceived outside reality is merely an internal fabrication of the observer and that it has no existence or substance outside the imagination of the observer. The Buddha's statement: "All that we are arises from what we have thought" (Dhammapada 1.1) is reminiscent of this.

The Japanese swordsmaster Miyamoto Musashi, for example, in his The Book of Five Rings, noted that when he teaches people martial arts, "since generally makes them learn such things as have actual relevance to addressing, there is no such thing as a distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric."