Ten years since the "Aum sarin attack" (1) - What has Japanese Zen done in the mean time?

"Aum Shinrikyo" is the name of a Japanese cult that released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway on March 20th 1995, and thus killed 12. Several others were killed before in smaller incidents. Although the cult worshipped Hindu God Shiva and the belief in Doomsday was crucial for the sarin attack, "Aum" is generally considered a form of Buddhism. A blend of Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings was at the center of its doctrine. The cult, now under the name "Aleph", still exists today, but it has much less followers than ten years ago, when more than 10.000 people in Japan (and about 30.000 in Russia) were followers of the cult, many of them graduates of elite universities in their twenties or early thirties. They were looking for something Japanese society couldn't offer them, spiritual liberation. The attacks ten years ago proved to most of them and the rest of Japan that they had been looking in the wrong spot for their "liberation".

The question remains, though, why these gifted young people didn't take refuge in traditional Japanese Buddhism in the first place, as it is represented by the Tendai or Shingon, Jodo or Zen schools? Shouldn't we expect that these schools offered a more authentic form of Buddhism and a more reliable gateway to what the Buddha called liberation?

In this sense, the attacks of 1995 did not only put the doctrine of the cult itself into question, but also that of all existing Japanese Buddhist schools. Buddhism is a religion that has to offer liberation to all sentient beings - it is not a funeral business. But that is exactly what Japanese today think about most of Japanese Buddhism: It is a business, not a religion. You visit a temple to take care of the family grave, not to hear the resident priest preach the Dharma. And the thought to become a Buddhist practioner in one of the traditional schools in order to reflect on one's own life and seek for true liberation wouldn't even occur to most Japanese.

During the next months, I want to examine how Japanese Buddhism, especially the Zen school (Rinzai and Soto) reacted to this challenge and what answers were given. Because if Japanese Buddhism can not respond to the spiritual demands of the young Japanese, it has to take responsibilty for these young people drifting towards new cults, and will also be responsible if an attack like that ten years ago happens again.