History & overview · every faith gets one
What Aum became, still practising and still reporting to the state.
Aleph is the name Aum Shinrikyo took in February 2000. It apologised to victims, accepted a compensation obligation, withdrew some of Asahara's Vajrayana lectures from teaching, and continued: meditation, sutra recitation, retreats, communal centres. From about 2007 a majority faction restored Asahara to the centre of practice, which is when Joyu Fumihiro left with a few hundred people to found Hikari no Wa, a smaller group that presents itself as a philosophy circle rather than a religion. Japanese law does not treat Aleph as a new organisation. It is the same legal body, under continuous observation, required to report its members, its money and its buildings twice a year.
Aleph is legally the same organisation that carried out the 1995 sarin attacks. It has been under an observation disposition by the Public Security Examination Commission since February 2000, under the 1999 Act on the Control of Organizations Which Have Committed Acts of Indiscriminate Mass Murder, which obliges it to report its membership, assets and facilities to the Public Security Intelligence Agency. The agency reports roughly 1,600 members and about 30 facilities across 15 prefectures. Further restrictive dispositions have been issued against Aleph in recent years for failures to report. It pays compensation to victims of the 1994 and 1995 attacks under a court-supervised scheme.
Why it is filed this way
Whether Aleph is a successor or a continuation is not an open question in Japanese law — it is a continuation, and that finding is what makes the observation regime applicable. Whether it is the same thing religiously is argued: Aleph says it renounced the crimes, the state says the devotion that produced them is intact.
Active in Japan and, according to the Public Security Intelligence Agency, in Russia. Hikari no Wa, the 2007 split under Joyu Fumihiro, is a separate and smaller body and is likewise subject to reporting requirements.
The founding
Joyu had been Aum's public spokesman in 1995 — the fluent, telegenic one — and served three years for perjury. He took over the remnant on release and pushed a version of the group that de-emphasised Asahara, paid victims and cooperated with the reporting regime. It did not hold. By 2007 most members had gone back to Asahara-centred practice and Joyu left. Aleph today is the faction that stayed.
Its founding is bound to Joyu Fumihiro, as representative at the renaming — 2000 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Unchanged from Aum in its cosmology: ascending realms, karma, and a practice held to move a person through them..
The divine. Asahara remains the object of devotion for the main body, which is the reason the state keeps the group under observation. Aleph's own public material foregrounds meditation, victim compensation and the legal proceedings, and says relatively little about him; the Public Security Intelligence Agency describes internal practice as retaining absolute devotion to the founder. Those two descriptions do not agree, and a reader should know that both exist..
Death and after. As Aum: rebirth through the realms, shaped by karma and by practice..