Asahara wasn't blind; he drove a car

I thought I knew enough about Aum, the doomsday cult led by Shoko Asahara, that bloated, sweaty looking fellow with full-length beard and mustache and long hair, a far cry from the image of a holy man, who was said to be blind (or half-blind):

The sarin gas attack of 1995 on Tokyo's subway system, which killed more than a dozen and injured thousands;

 

The Matsumoto incident, where Aum sprayed sarin to kill the judges handling cases against Aum, but instead killing many innocent residents and, through police incompetence, making a prime suspect out of a hapless man in the neighborhood, even though his wife was put in a coma by the gas and was dying;

The forced entry into the apartment of the Sakamotos, the lawyer couple fighting against the cult, killing them and their baby at sleep; and

Aum's bid to enter politics through their bizarre campaigns -- cult members, many surprisingly young and attractive women, singing and dancing, wearing identical Asahara masks. The devotees wearing headgear studded with electrodes -- the device for the "Perfect Salvation Initiation" that sends electric shocks to the wearer's head in tune with the guru's brain waves (which were once said to have indicated that Asahara was brain-dead) -- was a familiar sight on TV and in magazines.

But the recent capture of the remaining fugitives, one at the end of 2011 and the other two in June 2012, again put media spotlight on Aum, and I started reading books about them.

This book was full of details I didn't know about Asahara and what the cult was doing to the society and to themselves: Asahara's childhood marked with poverty and defeats; his opening of an acupuncture clinic and arrest in 1982 for medical fraud; his fascination with the spiritual and mysterious; signing up to Agon-shu, another new Buddhist sect, apparently to learn how to run a religious organization; starting of a small yoga school named "the Aum Association of the Mountain Wizards" in 1984, and its later transformation, via Asahara's meeting with the Dalai Lama in India, into "Aum Supreme Truth".

The group with the new name (Aum Shinri-kyo), which, according to another book, was suggested by a business consultant and that Asahara chose because it sounded like another very successful religious group in Japan, "Tenri-kyo", begins to attract an increasing number of followers -- some through coercion but mostly by devotion -- including many graduates of the nation's most prestigious universities. Branches were opened abroad. Aum USA was incorporated in the state of New York. The Russian branch attracted many recruits under the nose of the Kremlin.

The popularity fuels Asahara's megalomania, but the defeat in the election of 1990, in which none of the 25 candidates were elected -- not surprisingly -- is said to have made Asahara change course: from preventing Armageddon by encouraging people to attain enlightenment through the practice of yoga and other "initiations", which were nothing but money-making, LSD-induced hoax, to causing Armageddon to prove that they've been right all along, leading to the subway attack.

The depiction of the attack was vivid; how they prepared the bags of sarin for the morning attack; how the cult members were allocated to several subway lines; how the plan was designed and timed to wreak the deadliest havoc at the Kasumigaseki-station, where many government and police employees get off; and how the bags were held, dropped, and punctured with the ground-tip of an umbrella.

As a patent translator, I was intrigued to learn from this book that Asahara had an invention to his credit. I checked, and what came up was entitled "Fluidized bed type incinerator" (JPH05322145A), which "enable salts within material to be burned to improve durability of a fluidized bed type incinerator". It reads like a legitimate device but when you think about how Asahara's disciples disposed of the bodies of defectors or those who were defiant enough to think for themselves, I would say this is spooky.

Asahara was sentenced to death in 2004. Many of his top lieutenants have also been sentenced to die by hanging. Murai, chief scientist and one of the most trusted by Asahara among the leaders, has been stabbed to death in broad daylight. Asahara's mind is said to have since "completely degenerated": according to an account of a prison worker in another book, he wears diapers.

The crimes committed by Asahara and his cohorts cannot be forgiven, but I cannot help but feel a sense of sadness for the followers because, after all, they all appear to have been serious young men and women searching for meaning in life. Their biographies and autobiographies tell stories of intelligent and philosophical youth, dissatisfied with the material world around them, trying to find something more spiritual and peaceful. In this respect, what's the difference between them and Siddhartha Gautama before he became Buddha, or Christ?

One difference, obviously, is that neither Buddha nor Christ preached the gospel of Armageddon. Buddha preached the "Middle Way," avoiding both self-indulgence and self-mortification, and taught his disciples to respect the "Dharma" and not him personally.

The devotees of Asahara may have made the mistake of choosing the wrong teacher. Zen stresses the crucial importance of selecting the right master. There must have been, and there will be, many Asaharas, maybe not so destructive: religious practitioners turned con men with overblown sense of their worth. I wonder if it might not be helpful if we had more objective education on religion and cults based on history, particularly in view of the survival of Aum in the form of "Aleph" to this day.

("The Cult at the End of the World: The Terrifying Story of the Aum Doomsday Cult, from the Subways of Tokyo to the Nuclear Arsenals of Russia" by David E. Kaplan and Andrew Marshall; the review originally posted on Amazon Review in Aug. 31, 2012)