Aum Shinrikyo

Aum Shinrikyo, Japanese Buddhist group that gained notoriety after its leaders were charged with the release of nerve gas in a crowded Tokyo subway station in March 1995, causing the deaths of 12 people and injuring more than 5,000.

Chizuo Matsumoto, known to his followers as Master Shoko Asahara, founded the new religion Aum Shinrikyo (Japanese for “Supreme Truth”) in 1987. Asahara combined tantric (mystic) yoga, Buddhism, and Daoism (Taoism) with his own vision of Christian prophecy and a belief that disasters would soon befall Japan. The system of beliefs and practices Asahara developed offered deliverance from this world to a higher world of Supreme Truth.

To gain deliverance disciples followed a path marked by three initiations. The first initiation introduced the student into the basics of yoga, meditation, and methods of personal purification. The second included the release of a kind of energy called kundalini, which practitioners of tantric yoga believe resides in a latent state at the base of the spine. The third initiation led to enlightenment and included a mystic transfer of energy from Asahara to the disciple. The initiation ceremonies reportedly included the partaking of consciousness-altering substances.

Asahara modeled the organization of the leadership after the Japanese government, with a number of appointed ministers overseeing various segments of the group’s activities. The cult’s most dedicated members, both men and women, were admitted to a monastic life. Approximately 10 percent of the 15,000 members in Japan had taken monastic vows.

While the majority of the members of Aum Shinrikyo were unsuspectingly practicing the religion, trouble arose within the group’s leadership. Authorities charged Asahara’s disciples with the murder of an anti-cult lawyer and his family in 1989, a 1994 nerve gassing in the central Japan city of Matsumoto that killed seven people, the manufacturing of illegal drugs, and other crimes. While these crimes remained unsolved, the leadership feared that the police were investigating them.

Some authorities have suggested that the March 1995 subway gassing was an attempt to divert the attention of the Japanese police from Aum Shinrikyo in the investigation of the lawyer’s homicide in 1989. However, police quickly tied the deadly gas attack to Aum Shinrikyo and within a few months the leadership, including Asahara, was arrested and charged with murder. Asahara’s trial lasted eight years. In 2004 he became the 12th member of Aum Shinrikyo to be found guilty of the fatal 1995 subway attacks and to be sentenced to death.