Aum Shinrikyo
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Aum Shinrikyo was a cult in Japan that reached its hey-day in the 1990s. Aum members followed the guru Asahara. Aum came to the world's attention in 1995 after releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system. Since then, the Japanese government has worked hard to eradicate the cult.
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[edit] History
Founded by Shoko Asahara (formerly Matsumoto Chizuo), the cult started claimed to be a Mahayana Buddhist sect. Asahara opened a yogao center in 1984 that was to become the basis for the cult. From then until 1990, when Asahara ran a slate of candidates for the Japanese Diet, it was a fairly conventional Mahayana sect with a focus on preventing the apocalypse. After Asahara failed to get a single member of the cult into the Japanese Diet, he became convinced that instead of working to prevent the end of the world it was necessary to induce it.[1]
However, secretly, the cult was already extremely violent and possessive. Members who lapsed or disobeyed Asahara were punished in excruciating ways, such as immersion in scalding water. This was sometimes fatal. Moreover, in 1989, Aum Shinrikyo killed a lawyer and his family when the lawyer began investigating the cult.[2]
Prior to the subway attack, another sarin attack was conducted in an attempt to kill three judges sitting on a panel hearing a lawsuit over a real-estate dispute in which Aum Shinrikyo was the defendant. Seven people died and 500 were sickened in the city of Mastusmoto (population 300,000).[3]
After the 1995 subway attack, with much of the country in shock, police began serious raids into Aum strongholds, eventually arresting all of the top leadership. Asahara was sentenced to death.
[edit] Theology
Many find the violence of Aum Shinrikyo abhorrent and puzzling. Buddhism is normally considered a very peaceful religion, and thus a violent Buddhist sect is at odds with how many in the West see it. This violence was justified by reference to the Buddhist concepts of Moppo and Shoho. Moppo is the state of the world as it is now, with sin and corruption running rampant. In the Moppo world, it is almost impossible for anyone to reach Nirvana. The next time in the cycle would then be Shoho, the time of peace and tranquility, when Nirvana is easy to achieve. By bringing the end of the world, they would restore Shoho.[4]
In addition, the Aum cult twisted the Tibetan idea of poa. Poa is a ritual performed to help the passage of the soul when one is dying, to help them ascend higher. For Aum, it was the idea that killing someone who was against the cult prevented them from accumulating additional bad karma, and thus was to their benefit.[5] Even after the trials and attempts and deprogramming, many of the adherents claimed that high-level members had the right and duty to "poa" people.[6]
The fact is that Aum Shinrikyo was not truly a Buddhist cult. Although they borrowed some ideas from Buddhism, their chief deity was the Hindu god Shiva. The cult also incorporated elements of Taoism along with their more "original" ideas.[7]
[edit] Why would anyone do this?
(Note: the following is lifted directly from a term paper that User:Researcher wrote in college. The style is not great, and he would love it if people were to edit it and make it better. However, he felt that the actual content was important from the perspective of the mission of RW.)
What made it possible for the people in Aum (and other such groups) to commit premeditated murder? Not only murder of the people opposed to their cult, but also of doubting members and innocents, such as Sakamoto’s baby? While such crimes have been committed by 'normal' people (id est, those acting without external guidance towards criminality), this discussion will focus on criminal enterprise founded in a fervently held social, political or religious belief.
Michiko Maekawa has posited that a large problem within Aum Shinrikyo (and many other cults today) is the “Authentic Self” ideology prevalent in many “New Age” groups. People need to find themselves, such groups say, and thus try to remove all of the socially constructed parts of themselves. The social constructs keep us “alienated” from our true self. In the process, people usually have to follow some guru who has already achieved liberation and authenticity.[8]
Along with this, there is a belief in the inherent wickedness of the world and specifically society. Soon, practitioners are aiming for some form of union with the guru. In Aum Shinrikyo’s case, the believers became unable to form normal social ties, and could only have a relationship with the guru, who was of course unable to reciprocate, except in the believer’s mind.
Thus, especially in Shinrikyo’s case, everybody involved withdraws into a fantasy world, and the rest of humanity comes to mean nothing. A special form of detachment from the rest of the world then occurs. Maekawa presents to us the case history of one young man who, during his trial for multiple murders, could no longer act as a human being. He tried to express contrition, because it was expected, and declared that he was willing to take any punishment as a way of further refining his spirituality. He could not understand until near the end of the trial why the families of the survivors could not accept such an apology. It was then that he realized that the everyone despised this detachment of his. Then, and only then, the detached persona he had built up in Aum came crashing down.
Thus, detachment was itself a major component of the disciple's willingness to use or excuse violence. Detachment was prized within Aum, and it was to be accomplished by ridding one’s mind of all the false teachings and refilling it with Aum. More specifically, believers were to ‘clone the guru,’ using mantras, drugs, and electric stimulation to do so. All of the high level leaders (with the possible exception of Asahara) were able to “present a calm and unruffled face to the world at large,” even while the police were knocking their doors down and searching for Asahara.[9]
Detachment is an important component of the believer‘s ability to commit violence, in that it made them unconcerned with the rest of the world. However, the “Authentic Self” ideology had little to do with it; the idea of “cloning the guru” shows that the “Authentic Self” ideology once practiced by Aum Shinrikyo was abandoned.
More important was the apocalyptic imagery that Aum Shinrikyo used, and the megalomania of the guru. Asahara was consciously seeking Armageddon as the greatest possible good that could happen to the world, and he managed to convince many of his subordinates of this. Beyond that, he convinced them that the war had already started, and that any death they inflicted was part of that war. As he was the greatest possible spiritual being, he knew how to direct the war (as he was told to do by Shiva), though it was probable the entire world would perish.
With that rationale, and his ideas on poa, it became natural that they should be able to kill those that opposed them, in order to protect themselves and help the others onto a better life. This provided the rationale for doing so, while the detachment provided the means to bypass any disgust or guilt over such acts. Asahara was able to launch a terrorist chemical attack on a major metropolis through social programming of his followers and the ability to acquire potent toxins.
The dogma presented followed an internal logic. Aum Shinrikyo went to great lengths to make sure that the believers were in no condition to truly think rationally, through programming through "Cloning the guru", groupthink, and the risk of social ostracism (or other punishment) from the group. Some of the people involved in the Sakamoto murders and the sarin attack have said that they felt guilty at the time they were doing them, but could not stop themselves.[10]
Even when members were able to see the problems and violence arising within the cult, they often had a hard time breaking away. Asahara had emphasized that loyalty to the guru was more important, ethically, than all other considerations. He used the concept of mahamudra, which traditionally means a state of “the unity of emptiness and luminosity” and “the purification . . . [of] the transitory contamination of confusion.” However, Asahura used it to mean beating down all resistance to the commands of the guru. If something seemed bizarre or wrong, the devotees would assume it was a mahamudra test of their worth. There were some who, even after the gas attacks and the capture of Asahara, refused to believe that Aum was involved or believed that Asahara must have been right to order it.
If a follower managed to make it out of Aum Shinrikyo, then he or she would have a hard time rejoining society. Quite a few felt guilt over their defection, and even after the 1995 attack, ex-members would talk about how great Asahara is.
In conclusion, in Aum Shinrikyo we see a melding of an extremely dangerous apocalyptic theology, which celebrates murder as a virtuous action, and a system that leaves its believers unable to make moral decisions. Compounding the tragedy, Aum Shinrikyo made a deliberate and systematic attempt to get the strongest weapons they could, including the sarin gas that the detached believers were all too willing to spread through the Tokyo subway system.
We would be willfully ignorant to believe that the same kind of theology could not replicate itself elsewhere; we have seen it happen too many times.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ D. W. Brackett, Holy Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo, 1996
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol5no4/olson.htm
- ↑ Metraux, Daniel A., Asian Survey, “Religious Terrorism in Japan: The Fatal Appeal of Aum Shinrikyo”, Vol. 35, Issue 12 (December: 1995) p. 1153
- ↑ Ibid
- ↑ Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It 1999
- ↑ http://www.apologeticsindex.org/a06.html
- ↑ Maekawa, Michiko, International Journal of Japanese Sociology, “The Dilemma of ‘Authentic Self’ Ideology in Contemporary Japan, Volume 10, Issue 2001, p. 16-21
- ↑ Reader, p. 80-81
- ↑ Lifton, p. 153
