Kritik am Buch „The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama ... - Neues von Shi De

the yogi’s projections the doctrine was able to easily overcome the cultural hurdles.
Behind Asahara’s decision to carry out his act of destruction lay the Indian god, Shiva, the lord of
destruction. The latter appeared to him a number of times, the guru said, and confirmed his
enlightenment in his own words. The members of the sect were from now on expressly required to
replace their own wills with the will of Shiva. One epithet of this god who lays waste to the world so
as to subsequently produce it anew in the violent cycle of death and rebirth, is Rudra. Translated from
the Sanskrit it means the “terrible one “, the “wild one “, the “violent one”. As the Rudra of the
apocalyptic fire (Kalagni Rudra) he destroys the universe and time itself (White, 1996, p. 232). “Once
it has consumed the waters of the ocean,” it says in a tantric text, “it will become the Kalagni Rudra,
the fire that consumes time” (White, 1996, p. 232). There can be no doubt that Asahara adopted
Rudra’s will to destroy from Tantric Buddhism. This is probably also true of the name: Rudra
Chakrin, the 24th Shambhala king who contests the final battle, undoubtedly combines the
characteristics of Buddha and of the wrathful Shiva in his person. That is exactly what Asahara sought
to do. Incidentally, the region around Dharamsala, the seat of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan
Government in Exile, is from a Hindu point of view dedicated to the god Shiva.
The Japanese guru does not stop at making loans from Christianity either. After his first reading of the
Bible he already announced: “I hereby declare myself to be the Christ” (Kaplan and Marshall, 1996,
p. 67). Afterwards he wrote a book on this topic and in it drew attention to his similarities to Jesus of
Nazareth: “Jesus changed water to wine, I changed ordinary water to the water that emits
light” (Kaplan and Marshall, 1996, p. 18). Here, Asahara is referring to a transformatory miracle he
performed in the presence of his pupils. From his own lips we learn “I am the last messiah in this
century” (Kaplan and Marshall, 1996, p. 67).
“The guru’s most insistent megalomanic claim was to deity. In addition to declaring himself an avatar of
Shiva, he professed to have achieved ‘the state of a Buddha who has attained mirror-like wisdom’ and to
be the ‘divine emperor’ of Japan and the world; the declared Christ, who will ‘disclose the meaning of
Jesus’ gospel’; the ‘last twentieth-century savior’; the ‘holiest holy man’, one ‘beyond the Bible’; and the
being who will inaugurate the Age of Aquarius and preside over a ‘new era of supreme truth’. For
disciples transfixed by guruism, he could indeed be all these things (Lifton, 2000, p. 167)
The fantasy worlds of certain comics also had an influence upon him. It is a fact that Asahara and
members of the sect took the virtual reality of the comic strips for real. The same is true of science
fiction novels. Isaac Asimov’s famous Foundation epic was declared to be a kind of holy book. In it
we can read the following sentences: “The Empire will vanish and all its good with it. Its accumulated
knowledge will decay and the order it has imposed will vanish” (quoted by Kaplan and Marshall,
1996, p. 29). Additionally Asahara was convinced that extraterrestrials constantly visit our planet. He
was, however, not on a friendly footing with them, as he believed among other things that they fed
themselves with human flesh. From the world of “esoteric fascism” he had his reverence for Adolf
Hitler, who was said to be still alive and be landing with an escort of UFOs in the near future.
The Japanese Chakravartin
Within his group the “Buddha of our times” had an absolute power monopoly. He was lord over life
and death in the truest sense of the word, the there were cases where members who resisted his will
were tormented to death. In accordance with the absolutification of the teacher drawn from the
tantras, he demanded that his pupils replace their own will with his own.