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Aum Shinrikyô

Aum Shinrikyô is a millennial Japanese new religion that attained notoriety through its March 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway. It is significant because it manufactured and used chemical and biological weapons against civilian populations and because its violence was redolent with religious meanings and underpinned by doctrines and apocalyptic visions that made it view violence and killing as legitimate. Thus, it is a striking example of apocalyptic millennialism and a prominent case study in the examination of the relationship between religion and violence.

Aum, Millennialism, and Mission

Founded in the 1980s by Asahara Shôkô (b. 1955), a blind prophet and guru (as his disciples called him), Aum Shinrikyô (“Aum Supreme Truth”) was legally registered as a religious organization in 1989, and it grew to around 10,000 members in Japan (of whom around 1,100 lived in its communes) by 1995. It taught that the world was entering an apocalyptic age in which a final conflict between the forces of good (led by itself) and evil (epitomized by the forces of materialism) would occur and through which the world would either be destroyed or a new spiritual age would emerge. Aum saw itself as charged to bring about this transformation, although initially members were more focused on practices such as yoga and meditation, designed to bring about their own enlightenment. It was highly syncretic, drawing on Buddhism, Hinduism, contemporary mysticism, and Christianity, from which it appropriated the term Armageddon to signify its end-time visions. Asahara publicized the movement by claiming spiritual powers, including the ability to levitate, and that he was the supreme spiritual master of the age with a mission to save humanity. An accomplished yoga and meditation teacher, he claimed to have attained enlightenment in India in 1986 and incorporated veneration of the Hindu deity Shiva into his movement.

Aum's millennialism was grounded in numerous texts—from the Book of Revelation to the prophecies of Nostradamus, to the Buddhist Kalachakra Tantra—that posited apocalyptic scenarios and end-time battles between good and evil. It viewed the phenomenal world as evil and obsessed with materialism. The consequence of living in such a realm was the accumulation of bad karma, which would drag the spirit into the Buddhist hells at death; the only way to avoid this was to follow Asahara, reject the world, and undertake austerities (ascetic practices) in Aum. Initially, the movement believed that the world could be transformed spiritually and that a new age in which materialism and evil would be destroyed could be achieved by spreading Aum's message globally and recruiting an army of spiritual warriors to overcome the world's negative karma. To this end, Aum built communes known as “Lotus villages” as a basis for its envisioned utopian order, to which disciples retreated, after having broken all links with their families and pledged absolute devotion to Asahara, to immerse themselves in austerities.

The Turn to Violence

Aum's relationship with the world rapidly became confrontational as its visions of world salvation were replaced by beliefs that only the select few who accepted Aum's truths and Asahara as guru were worthy of salvation and that violence was needed to change the world. This transformation was rooted in Asahara's increasing paranoia coupled with the experiences of the movement, which became embroiled in disputes with the families of disciples, with neighbors of its communes, and with various civil authorities whose rules it flouted. Moreover, although Asahara claimed he could save the world by training thousands of sacred warriors, the numbers who renounced the world were inadequate to fulfill his mission. The sense of failure this engendered coupled with external opposition gave rise to increasingly paranoid attitudes inside Aum; Asahara interpreted such things as signs that the world was so corrupt that it could not be saved and that all who lived in it deserved to be punished. He began to claim that a world conspiracy existed to prevent Aum from accomplishing its mission, with any setback being seen in this light until Aum's self-induced persecution complex embraced the entire world, apart from the Aum faithful, who were the only beings worthy of salvation. The rest of humanity, in contrast, had rejected the truth and thus merited destruction in the cosmic war that Asahara prophesied would occur by the end of the 20th century.

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