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.
Go deeper — context →
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.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →