Asahara is the figure this page most risks flattening. Born Matsumoto Chizuo in 1955 in rural Kumamoto, blind in one eye and partly sighted in the other, he was sent to a school for the blind where his partial sight made him unusually powerful among the other children. He failed to get into medical school, ran an acupuncture business, was convicted of selling fake remedies in 1982, and opened a yoga school two years later. He was, by the accounts of members who left, an exceptionally attentive teacher in the early years — the kind who remembered what you had said about your practice a month before. The devotion built on that attention: initiations included drinking water he had bathed in, and disciples paid substantial sums for a lock of his hair.