In this preparatory meeting the basic themes for the discussions on Aum Shinrikyō and the Aum Shinrikyō Affair were set. Two basic questions emerged:
 
1)      What historical and cultural elements in Japanese society helped instigate the Aum Shinrikyō Affair?
          Among the possible factors cited were (1) the failure of prewar and postwar public education to provide Japan’s youth with a genuine religious education (that is, education addressing the issue of human life and death), and (2) the diversification of value systems and the increase in anxiety resulting from Japan’s rapid social and economic development after WWII (among the results of which were the appearance of the so-called New New Religions and the desire among young people for a “spiritual liberation” outside the bounds of the established religions).
2)      What is the responsibility of the Zen Sect, as one of Japan’s established religions?
          The principal factor suggested here was the modern Zen institution’s failure to recognize modern trends in Japanese religious development, owing to its complacent reliance on the danka system and its consequent insensitivity to the signs of decline in the status quo. This has rendered Zen, on the level both of the individual priest and the religious establishment, unable to respond in an appropriate manner to the spiritual needs of modern society. As a result most temples nowadays are no more than ceremonial halls, strange cultural artifacts that are irrelevant to the problems of modern people. The Zen clergy must reexamine its identity as meditation monks and temple priests, its traditional training methods, its methods of proselytization, and other aspects of its system as it relates to the modern world.
 
These two questions emerged from an understanding among the participants that the contemporary state of Japanese religion, including the Zen sect, was the soil from which Aum Shinrikyō emerged, and that the Aum Shinkyō Affair was thus not “someone else’s business” but a phenomenon directly related to Zen and one that calls into question every Zen priest’s mode of being and the Zen institution’s role in modern society.