A
Asahara Shoko.
Nearly blind from birth, a failed candidate for the Tokyo University medical school, convicted of selling fake medicine in 1982, and by 1990 the object of a devotion that included drinking water he had bathed in. He ran for the Diet in 1990 with twenty-four candidates; all lost badly, and the doctrine hardened afterwards.
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The shared center — held across the tradition
Liberation can be engineered.
Aum's pitch was that meditation has measurable stages, that a competent teacher can tell you which one you are on, and that the sequence can be accelerated. It is precisely this promise of technical certainty that drew engineers, doctors and physicists, and it is the shape of the group's whole later behaviour.
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Contested within — affirmed by some schools, refused by others
Poa — that a killing could improve the victim's next life.
Poa in Tibetan practice is a rite performed for the dying to guide consciousness at death. Asahara inverted it: a person accumulating bad karma could, he taught, be killed by an enlightened master as an act of mercy. This is the doctrine that made the murders internally legible, and it is rejected by every Buddhist school it was borrowed from.
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Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of reality
Layered and escapable. Aum taught a cosmology of ascending realms drawn from Indian and Tibetan sources, with the human world near the bottom, and held that a trained practitioner could move up through them within one life.
After death
Rebirth through the realms, determined by karma, with the guru able to intervene in where a person lands. That last claim is the one the doctrine of poa was built on.