A few notes about the Hidden Ring
The Hidden Ring is a website about Oriental Studies. This last term, "OS" , refers to a wide spectrum of doctrines originating in the Eastern part of the world. To summarize briefly , these doctrines are : Buddhism, Taoism, Yoga, Hinduism, Conficianism, Islam and Shinto, which is Japan's official religion. All the other sub-branches (Tibetan Buddhism, for example, or Sufism, or still Tantra) originate from these main stems. These doctrines , which can be deemed more precisely "philosophies" rather than "religions" (as most of them , except Islam, are not "revealed religions" worshipping one single divinity revelealed through prophets like Christans do) , are not what people usually refer to as occultism, or exoterism. This website doesn't deal with any form of hidden knowledge or magic. It deals with philosophy mostly. My initial project ws to write a book that could summarize them all, but on second thought I realized that a website was more appropriate to convey a general overview of this field of study, and to provide a sort of repository of links and resources to more detailed webpages about each of them. I thus called this work : "The Hidden Ring", meaning by this name (inspired by the work about Zen Buddhism "The unfettered mind" by D. Suzuki) that this effort to compile a compendium of all of these doctrines, while certainly not the only one ever made nor the most comprehensive one, will contain all which has been to us left from the shores of Africa to the most distant islands of the Pacific Ocean.