Poa is a genuine Tibetan Buddhist practice — a rite performed at or near death to direct consciousness — and Asahara's use of it is a straightforward inversion that no Tibetan school accepts. His argument was that a person accumulating bad karma is heading for a worse rebirth, and that a sufficiently advanced master can shorten that account by ending the life early, taking the karmic cost onto himself. It is filed as contested because it was never the public teaching: ordinary members and lay practitioners did not hear it, and many learned of it from television in 1995. The doctrine was held inside the leadership, and it is the bridge between a meditation school and a chemical weapons programme.