LIFTON: There were various kinds of meditation, including so-called standing worship-moving from a standing position to abject prostration and doing it 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 times-he took this from the preliminary practices of the Nyingma school. But I think the most significant idea he took from Tibetan Buddhism was phowa [a practice whereby a dying person’s consciousness is liberated from the body through the top of the head]. Phowa is to be learned from a guru and to be applied when one is in the process of dying, for the sake of enhancing one’s own spiritual movement toward Buddhahood. There’s uncertainty about the extent to which in actual tantric practice it might have been extended toward the performing of some violent act. But the way that it was interpreted by Asahara emphasized that in Tibetan Buddhism there are some very rough demands. If your guru says you must kill others, you must kill them. Because that means that their time to die has come, so it’s the right thing to do.
