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Shambhala

The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-La

Theosophical Publishing House

THE QUEST FOR SHAMBHALA

There was a time when the universal order was stable, with God the Creator at the center and an assured place for humanity and all its works constellated about the divine Presence, safe from the outer darkness. In the natural order every community, however small, reflected the heavenly order in the pattern of its life, in its cycles of festivals and labor, its myths and rites, which all centered on some place of magnetic and energizing sanctity: a temple, a sacred spring, shrine or cave, a totem-house, the palace of a godking, a chapel—all vital symbols of an ineffable Deity. It was precisely this centering process that brought repose, stability and a sense of certitude.

Today we are aware that that certitude has vanished. Now nothing is certain, and even the very concept of certainty is debatable. In a world in which all boundaries are dissolving, all values becoming ambiguous, all signposts illegible; in which centrifugal forces of destruction are flinging us outward, unwinding civilization; and in which change and instability are endemic—in such a world as ours is today the need for a new centering principle is paramount. In every conceivable context—spiritual, ecological, political, social—our need is for a magnetic center, for a zone of order within the primal chaos of possibilities; and in the search that has already begun for a saving new definition of self and cosmos the concept of the mandala provides the key.

Symbolically, the mandala is the embodiment par excellence of the centering principle, a device for focusing consciousness that has great transformative power. It is a diagram of perfect symmetry and balance, a mystical circle enclosing further boundaries of various shapes and values that draw the attention inward to the point of repose at the center. It is probable that the mind in its ordering operations is naturally mandalic, and that therefore a mandala is able to exercise over it a peculiarly regenerative, creative and stabilizing power, as yogis have always maintained. Certainly in traditional cultures the order humanity imposed on the cosmos was always of such a centralizing nature, with the zone of the divine presiding at its heart and radiating its unifying influence outward to the periphery of the universe. Ancient philosophies, religions and sciences have all conformed their worldview to this mandalic pattern as being the most in harmony with the natural contours of the mind.

"The Center," says Mircea Eliade, one of our foremost religious historians, "is preeminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality." The health-giving value of this realization is attested by the dominance of sacred mazes, labyrinths and "troy towns" in antiquity, as well as mandalic forms in space and movement such as the round dance, the spiralling ziggurat, the circumambulation of shrines—all of which were magical symbols of the Center that drew the mind inward to its deep creative core and activated the principle that renewed and stabilized the world. Today that world, that prophylaxis, has gone. We need new centering symbols. As the German physicist Werner Heisenberg warned, we have reached the limit of our exploration of the physical universe and need to find the path to what he called "the central order." We need a new vision of the mandala of salvation, a new quest. And it is precisely that quest for the center that leads us to Shambhala.

For thousands of years rumors and reports have circulated among the cognoscenti of the nations suggesting that somewhere beyond Tibet, among the icy peaks and secluded valleys of Central Asia, there lies an inaccessible paradise, a place of universal wisdom and ineffable peace called Shambhala—although it is also known by other names. It is inhabited by adepts from every race and culture who form an inner circle of humanity secretly guiding its evolution. In that place, so the legends say, sages have existed since the beginning of human history in a valley of supreme beatitude that is sheltered from the icy arctic winds and where the climate is always warm and temperate, the sun always shines, the gentle airs are always beneficent and nature flowers luxuriantly.

There in a verdant oasis only the pure of heart can live, enjoying perfect ease and happiness and never knowing suffering, want or old age. Love and wisdom reign and injustice is unknown. "There is not even a sign of nonvirtue or evil in these lands," the Lama Garje K'am-trul Rinpoche has said. "Even the words war and enmity are unknown. The happiness and joy there can compete with that of the gods." The inhabitants are long-lived, wear beautiful and perfect bodies and possess supernatural powers; their spiritual knowledge is deep, their technological level highly advanced, their laws mild and their study of the arts and sciences covers the full spectrum of cultural achievement, but on a far higher level than anything the outside world has attained.

Into this basic theme of a northern Utopia popular folklore has woven strange and wonderful features. The place is invisible; it is made of subtle matter; it is an island in a sea of nectar, a heaven-piercing mountain, forbidden territory. The ground is strewn with gold and silver, and precious jewels bedeck the trees—rubies, diamonds and garlands of jade; the place is guarded by great devas from another world and by walls as high as heaven; magic fountains, lakes of gems, of crystal and of the nectar of immortality, wish-fulfilling fruits and flying horses, stones that speak, subterranean caverns filled with all the treasures of the earth; these and many more wonders embellish the landscape of a primal paradise that seems to express the deepest yearnings of the human heart.

But beneath these accretions of the popular imagination there is an underlying bedrock reality that has existed for as long as humanity has kept oral records. These testify to the love and reverance with which countless generations of Asiatic peoples have enshrined the mysterious Wisdom center in their folklore. Nor are these mythical accretions, as we shall see, as far from reality as one might think.

There are countless local versions of this wondrous place in the depths of Asia, but all agree that at every level the journey to it is difficult and dangerous. For those who have not been called and duly prepared the journey ends only in storms, landslides, fruitless wanderings and even death, among the pitiless wastes of snow and ice, for mighty natural forces conspire to guard the home of the Enlightened Ones from those who are not yet ready to enter. Even to those prepared for the dangers of the journey, the way is perilous and uncertain, psychically as well as physically. "The road leading to the Center is a 'difficult road,'" says Eliade again. It is "arduous, fraught with perils, because it is in fact a rite of passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from man to divinity." His words can certainly be applied to Shambhala. The odyssey across the mountains, rivers and deserts of one of the most inhospitable parts of the world in search of the Land of the Bodhisattvas is described in Tibetan guidebooks as a contest with life and death—the goal, illumination.

For most people in the West, Shambhala, if it is known at all, is as remote from reality as Shangri-La, the mythical paradise that the novelist James Hilton immortalized in book and film. Nevertheless, Shambhala is gradually becoming known and taking tangible shape in the West as one author after another has attempted to outline its extraordinary supernatural contours. Their approach has varied. Some have been skeptical; some have dismissed it as an interesting fable, others as a guiding spiritual metaphor of value to the Hindu-Buddhist mystic in much the same way that Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is of value to the Christian's spiritual quest, but which cannot be taken literally. Finally, some have firmly and even passionately believed in it as a real place. This book falls into the latter category.

I believe the idea of Shambhala has not yet come to full flower, but that when it does it will have enormous power to reshape civilization. It is the sign of the future. The search for a new unifying principle that our civilization must now undertake will, I am convinced, lead it to this source of higher energies, and Shambhala will become the great icon of the new millennium. At the same time, I doubt we shall ever understand it as we understand other places on the earth. It will remain an enigma, one of those strange secrets that become stranger the more they are opened up. It is small wonder that the Russian traveler, Ferdinand Ossendowski, hearing about Shambhala on every side as he journeyed across Central Asia, declared that he could regard it as nothing less than "the mystery of mysteries."

Others have named it in the same awestruck spirit. It has been called the Forbidden Land, the Land of White Waters (which may refer to the white salt deposits in the Tsaidam lakes east of the Takla Makan), the Land of Radiant Spirits, the Land of Living Fire, the Land of the Living Gods and the Land of Wonders. Hindus have known it as Aryavarsha, the land from which the Vedas came; the Chinese as Hsi Tien, the Western Paradise of Hsi Wang Mu, the Royal Mother of the West; the Russian Old Believers, a nineteenth-century Christian sect, knew it as Belovodye and the Kirghiz people as Janaidar. But throughout Asia it is best known by its Sanskrit name, Shambhala, meaning "the place of peace, of tranquillity," or as Chang Shambhala, northern Shambhala, the name Hindus use to distinguish it from an Indian town of the same name.

Each of these peoples have had a tradition that Shambhala is the source of their own religion, whether it be Hinduism, shamanism, Buddhism, Taoism or other. Certain books of the pre-Buddhist Bon religion in Tibet, which knew the hidden kingdom as Olmolungring and Dejong as well as Shambhala, claimed that a kingdom called Shambhala had once actually covered most of Central Asia, from Lake Baikal to the Lob Nor and from Khotan almost to Beijing, and was the homeland of its cult. In the first century C.E. the Bonpo, the followers of Bon, mapped this country in its correct geographical relation to Persia, Bactria, Egypt, Judaea and other kingdoms of the then-known world and in the eighth century passed on the map and other documented information about Shambhala to the incoming Buddhists, although by then the kingdom had long since passed into myth.

Tibetan Buddhism has taken much of its material on Shambhala from the Kalachakra texts. According to Buddhist tradition, the Kalachakra texts were originally taught to the King of Shambhala by the Buddha, where they were preserved over the centuries, until they were eventually returned to India. They were translated into Tibetan from the Sanskrit in the eleventh century, along with numerous commentaries. Many of these texts and other lamaist writings on the subject, such as the White Vaidurya, the Blue Annals, the Route to Shambhala, and the Sphere of Shambhala, have been translated and published in the West in the last few decades.

However, rumors about an earthly paradise in the heart of Asia have been reaching the West since Greco-Roman times, when the Greek Philostratus recorded the journey he took with the great magus of the Mysteries Apollonius of Tyana, into the Trans-Himalayan wilds of Tibet, which he knew as the Forbidden Land of the Gods. Intrepid Christian missionaries traveling beyond the Himalayas were later to add their quota of information.

Shangri-la, the paradisial sanctuary of sages described in James Hilton's fictional work, Lost Horizon, and made famous throughout the world by the film of that name, was modeled on Shambhala and placed, not in the Himalayas, as might have been expected, but further north, in what seems to be the little-known Kunlun mountain range. Hilton having borrowed some of his material from the memoirs of Abbe Hue and other Catholic missionaries who explored Tibet and its lamaist culture in the nineteenth century.

THE SHAMBHALIC TRADITION IN THE WEST

Shambhala belongs to the most archaic stratum of Asiatic lore. A legend unfathomably old, it is the stuff of fable, of fairy tale, of romantic mythology, with the archetypal quality of a projection of the folk soul, which longs for just such an earthly paradise. Its true location has never been found, its hierarchy is invisible, its beginnings unknown, its existence unproven; and yet for those who care to look, evidence of its presence in the annals of human accomplishment is stubbornly substantial and undying. As alive today as it was thousands of years ago, it is regarded by most esoteric traditions as the true center of the planet, as the world's spiritual powerhouse and the heartland of a brotherhood of adepts from every race and country who have been influential in every major religion, every scientific advance and every social movement in history.

Ernest Scott, a Sufi member of a five-man team of researchers who delved into the origins of today's most notable cults, says that their findings were that every branch of esoteric tradition could be traced to a common parentage in Central Asia. Witchcraft, various western secret societies, Buddhist esoteric beliefs, Freemasonry, Sufism, Theosophy, alchemy and Vedanta—all, he implies, appear to have originated in Shambhala. The Sufis, who can trace their Central Asian lineage back to prehistoric times, believe that the head of their hierarchy takes his directions from Shambhala; in Shambhala the Buddha is supposed to have received the Kalachakra, the great Buddhist doctrine of the Wheel of Time; at the end of his life the Chinese Taoist teacher Lao-Tzu, returned to Shambhala, although he called it Tebu Land. And it is from Shambhala that Hindus expect the coming of Sri Kalki Avatara, their future savior and the last King of Shambhala for this age.

Moreover, the ubiquitous nature of the Shambhalic influence is reflected in the universal symbology of esoteric doctrine, which is the same all over the world. Thus from the most remote past, says W. Y. Evans-Wentz, the Buddhist orientalist, "there has been a secret international symbol-code in common use among the initiates, which affords a key to the meaning of such occult doctrines as are still jealously guarded by religious fraternities in India, as in Tibet, and China, Mongolia and Japan." Only in the western sphere with its impoverished esoteric tradition has the significance of this worldwide unity of initiatic language been lost. There the Shambhalic concept has remained very little known, although a garbled version of it seems to be contained in the medieval legends of the Holy Grail and the fabled kingdom of Prester John.

In the seventeenth century two Jesuit missionaries, Stephen Cacella and John Cabral, were stationed at Shigatse, the site of the Panchen Lama's monastery, and these were apparently the first Europeans in modern history to bring back informed accounts of the mysterious land of Shambhala that was ruled by the King of the World. The realm was even included in a map of Asia published by the Catholic authorities in Antwerp. Father Cabral wrote in 1625: "Shambhala is, in my opinion, not Cathay but what in our maps is called Great Tartaria." And a hundred years later a Hungarian philologist called Csoma de Körös, who spent four years in a Tibetan monastery in the years 1827 to 1830, actually gave Shambhala's geographical bearings as forty-five degrees to fifty degrees north latitude, beyond the river Syr Darya. But these rare firsthand forays into lamaist lore claimed little attention in the West, and it is to Helena Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Society in 1879, that the credit must be given for first alerting Western occult circles to the existence of the Central Asian sanctuary.

"Fabled Shambhallah," as she called it in her book The Secret Doctrine, was an etheric city in the Gobi Desert, the invisible headquarters of the Mahatmas, a brotherhood of great spiritual Masters who had moved there long ago after the submergence of the land of Mu under the Pacific Ocean. The heart of Mother Earth, Madame Blavatsky declared, "beats under the foot of the sacred Shambhallah." However, her account of it is brief, vague and confusing, and those interested scholars who began searching for the hidden kingdom—some, like the Buddhist explorers Alexandra David-Neel and Evans-Wentz, of considerable repute—were unsuccessful. Shambhala remained a rumor on the outermost fringe of credibility until the 1923–26 Roerich expedition was made across the Gobi Desert to the Altai Range.

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Excerpted from Shambhala by Victoria LePage. Copyright © 1996 Victoria LePage. Excerpted by permission of Theosophical Publishing House.
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