"We can't do anything!" (Ten years since the Aum salin attack, Part 4)

Who is to be held responsible for the Salin attack in the Tokyo subway ten years ago? No-one but the Aum cult itself of course. On the other hand, many Buddhists excuse themselves by saying that this cult is only pseudo-Buddhist and that the attack therefore has nothing to do with them. But this is not true. It goes without saying that there is nothing "Buddhist" about the attack. But this event, just as any other event, can not be singled out from its wider context, and the Buddhist community, especially the Japanese Buddhist community, is part of this context. I was impressed by the honesty of the Rinzai and Ôbaku officials, who called the attack not just a problem on the side of the Aum cult, but "our problem", and even went so far to say that if we do not solve this problem, a second or third attack of this kind might occur any time. So what answer do the officials give to their own question: "What can we do?"

Quite surprisingly, their answer is: "We can't do anything."
At the beginning of their symposium, the discussion had still focused on concrete questions like what monastery could take how many refugee Aum believers and how food and bedding could be provided for those refugees who's numbers might go into the hundreds. The officials learned quite soon though that there was no news of any Aum followers having asked for help or asylum at any Zen monastery. No-one on the side of the disappointed Aum believers seemed to expect the Zen priests to do anything. And on the side of the Zen priests it also seemed to be no-one but the officials in the sect's headquarters who asked themselves: "What can we do now?" On the level of the single family temples, which account for 99% of the Zen sect, no-one ever was interested in the problem posed by Aum. Even though the incident might be mentioned during the conversation of the priest with the parishioners after a funeral ceremony, neither the priest nor the parishioners would treat the topic as a religious or Buddhist one, not to speak of thinking of it as their "own problem". Aum was just another social event that produced gossip, and not much more. So no-one basically expected the Zen Budddhists to do anything - no-one in Japanese society in general, where Buddhism is considered to be just another way to make easy moeny, nor the Aum followers, who never trusted the Buddhist establishment in the first place, nor the Buddhist clerics themselves, because they are busy performing funerals.

The questions remains then why the officials at the top of the sect would talk so much about Aum being "our problem", if nothing of that concern is shared by the individual priests in local or city temples. How come that the consciousness inside the Zen sect is so divided? Let's search for some reasons next month.