Shambhala

Also Known As: Sanskrit Sambhala, also spelled Shambala and Shamballa; Tibetan Sham bha la, glossed as a land of bliss; Mongolian Shambhala, often Northern Shambhala; its hereditary rulers are the kalkins, Tibetan Rigden
Region/Culture: Himalayan Region
Mythos: Tibetan Mythology, Buddhist Mythology, Mongolian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: A hidden kingdom somewhere north of Tibet where the Kalachakra teachings are kept whole while the rest of the world degenerates, and from which a final deliverer will ride out.
Role in Mythos: It is the reservoir and the guarantee of the Kalachakra tradition, the place the teaching was taken to for safekeeping and the place it will come back from.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people cannot walk there, and the two Indian masters who tried both turned back at the Himalaya and received their teaching in vision instead. What people do instead is pray to be reborn there, and across Tibet and Mongolia those wish-prayers were copied out in their hundreds.

The guidebook opens like an ordinary traveller’s account. It names real rivers, real passes, the sort of towns a caravan out of northern India would actually stop in. Then, somewhere past the last place a merchant could have confirmed, the road quietly stops being a road. The Panchen Lama Lobsang Palden Yeshe finished his Guidebook to Shambhala in 1775, having spent part of it writing up what he had recently learned about India from conversations with George Bogle of the East India Company, and he was honest about the rest. Walking would only take a person so far. The remaining distance had to be covered by merit.

The country waiting at the end of it is one of the most precisely described places in Buddhist literature, which is an odd thing to say about somewhere nobody has been. A nineteenth-century Tibetan painting in the Rubin Museum lays it out the standard way: a white lotus of eight petals, ringed by snow mountains the texts call impenetrable, and at the centre, lifted on a plateau, the capital city of Kalapa. The king sits in an ornate palace among green hills, pavilions and pleasure gardens. Directly in front of it stands the temple of the Kalachakra mandala, raised on a double vajra and wreathed in a dome of wisdom fire. The eight petals are eight regions, cut apart by rivers and further ranges, each holding twelve districts, ninety-six in all. Cold air, thin light, sandalwood, and a three-dimensional mandala kept permanently assembled inside a building put up for no other purpose.

The name is older than the kingdom. It surfaces first in the Vishnu Purana, around the fourth century of the common era, as a town where Kalki, the coming avatar of Vishnu, is to be born at the close of the age of disputes. The Buddhist Kalachakra literature, which appears in writing several centuries later, takes the word and enlarges it. Shambhala becomes a whole land to the north, and its first king Suchandra travels to India, receives the Kalachakra teaching from the Buddha in person, and carries it home, where he has the great mandala built at Kalapa. Seven kings follow him, the dharmarajas.

The eighth is the one who matters. His subjects were split by caste, and some of them were not Buddhists at all. He called them together and gave them a single initiation, which made every person in the hall vajra kin to every other, one family where there had been a ladder. For that he took the title kalkin, holder of the castes, which the Tibetans render Rigden. Then he told them why he had done it. An invasion was coming, centuries out, and a country whose people would not eat at the same table would not fight at the same wall either.

Twenty-five kalkins hold the throne. The twenty-fifth is Raudrachakrin, and in his ninety-eighth year, which the reckoning puts at 2424, a king named Krinmati will move north out of Delhi to take Shambhala and finish spiritual practice everywhere. The paintings love this part. In Tibetan thangkas the battle is crowded into the bottom register beneath the serene lotus, cavalry and elephants and worldly gods piling in on the side of the dharma; Raudrachakrin destroys the invaders before they reach his border, and a golden age begins. Buddhologists reading the same passage see a tenth-century map. The Kalachakra material seems to have taken shape somewhere around eastern Afghanistan, northern Pakistan and Kashmir, in the years when the Abbasid world was caught between the Fatimids in Egypt and their Ismaili vassals at Multan, and everybody in the region expected an army. The text’s actual prescription is not conversion. It is that Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists find enough common ground in their own doctrines to stand together.

There is a second reading folded into the first, because the Kalachakra system runs everything on three levels at once. Externally Shambhala is a place on the map of Jambudvipa, north of the river Shita. Internally it is the heart chakra. On the third level, the one the practice is actually for, the invaders are the winds of karma blundering through the body, the unification of the castes is the gathering of those winds into a single point, and the land of peace is the clear light mind that surfaces when they dissolve. The war is a diagram.

Nobody who set out to walk there arrived. The tradition says so itself, and it is not shy about it. The master Chilupa got as far as the Himalaya and was met by an emanation of Manjushri sent out to him by one of the kings; two generations later Kalachakra-pada the Elder made the same journey and received the same teaching the same way, in a vision, short of the border. Later attempts fare no better in the record. Alexander Berzin reports that his own teacher Tsenshap Serkong Rinpoche said his father, a celebrated yogi in the Kalachakra lineage, had gone to Shambhala and brought back a fruit that sat afterwards on the family altar, and Berzin’s reading is that the man travelled there in meditation rather than by caravan. Where the texts do give coordinates, they give them in the language of astronomy, through the length of the shortest winter day, and running the calculation puts Shambhala at roughly the latitude of Mount Kailash. The described terrain, a valley walled all round with two small lakes joined by a neck of land and the palace standing on it, looks a good deal like the valley of Srinagar.

Mongolia took the story somewhere Tibet did not. In 1780, at the Qianlong emperor’s court in Beijing, the same Panchen Lama wrote a wish-prayer to be reborn in Shambhala, and it dwells on the last battle, asking to stand first among Raudrachakrin’s companions. Translated into Mongolian, it went everywhere, and the nineteenth century produced a flood of Shambhala writing: the chronicle Bolor toli traced the line of Chinggis Khan and the line of Suchandra back to the same Indian ancestors, Kalachakra colleges went up across Mongolia and Buryatia, and in 1830 a Tsam dance staging the war of Shambhala was performed at Khamaryn Khiid in the Gobi with Danzan Ravjaa himself masked as one of the protectors. Karenina Kollmar-Paulenz, who has spent years on these texts and paintings, draws the contrast plainly: in Tibet the kingdom stayed mostly a spiritual and paradisiac idea, while in Mongolia it became political. You can see the shift in the canvases. On Mongolian thangkas the lotus kingdom slides to a corner and the battle takes the middle. By the revolution the myth was doing open work, and Sukhbaatar is said to have told his troops they would be reborn in the army of Shambhala.

Europe got hold of it late and badly. The first mention in a European language came in 1833, from Csoma de Koros, who was busy compiling the first Tibetan dictionary and had only fragments to go on; Schlagintweit’s Buddhism in Tibet added a little more in 1863. On that thin material Helena Blavatsky placed Shambhala on a sacred island in the Gobi and fitted it into a scheme of sunken continents that the Kalachakra texts know nothing about. Agvan Dorzhiev told the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that Shambhala was Russia and Nicholas II was Tsongkhapa returned, which did not get Tibet an army. Ferdinand Ossendowski came back from Mongolia in 1922 with an underground kingdom called Agharti, which Sven Hedin flatly accused him of lifting from a French novel of 1886 by Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, itself following Jacolliot in 1873. Nicholas Roerich went looking in the Altai between 1925 and 1928. And in 1933 James Hilton published Lost Horizon, whose Shangri-La is a romantic corruption of the name and has been standing in front of the original ever since. Even Chogyam Trungpa, who put the phrase Shambhala warrior into modern American English, wrote that his use of it had nothing to do with the Kalachakra teachings or with Shambhala.

What the place does, in its own literature, is keep something intact that the world is busy losing, and eventually give it back with an army behind it. What it will not do is admit anyone on the strength of stamina. The gate is purification, not endurance, which is why the guidebook that names real rivers ends by talking about merit, and why every expedition mounted on the other reading came home with nothing. The deliverance, in any case, is four centuries off. The prayer the Panchen Lama wrote in Beijing does not ask to go and see the kingdom. It asks to be born there.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Shambhala?

Shambhala is a hidden kingdom somewhere north of Tibet in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, where the Kalachakra teachings are preserved while the wider world declines. It is described as a white eight-petalled lotus of a country, ringed by snow mountains, with the capital city of Kalapa on a raised plateau at its centre. Its hereditary rulers, the kalkins or Rigden kings, guard the Kalachakra tantra and will eventually send out an army to end the dark age.

Where is Shambhala supposed to be?

The Kalachakra texts place Shambhala on the continent of Jambudvipa, north of the river Shita, and give its position through astronomical measurements rather than landmarks. Running those calculations puts it at roughly the latitude of Mount Kailash. The terrain described, a valley enclosed by mountains with two small lakes joined by a strip of land, resembles the valley of Srinagar in Kashmir, which may have been the model.

Who is the last king of Shambhala?

Raudrachakrin is the twenty-fifth and final kalkin of Shambhala. The prophecy holds that in his ninety-eighth year, reckoned at 2424, a king called Krinmati will march north from Delhi to destroy spiritual practice, and Raudrachakrin will defeat the invading force before it reaches his kingdom. A new golden age follows, and the age of disputes ends.

Is Shangri-La the same place as Shambhala?

No. Shangri-La is an invention of the British novelist James Hilton, who published Lost Horizon in 1933, and the name is a romantic corruption of Shambhala rather than a translation of it. Hilton’s hidden Tibetan valley belongs to a European line of thinking about Shambhala that runs back through Helena Blavatsky to a handful of fragmentary nineteenth-century reports. The Buddhist Shambhala is a kingdom in the Kalachakra literature with a named royal line, a capital, a prophecy and a date.

Can anyone travel to Shambhala?

Not on foot, according to the tradition’s own accounts. The Indian masters Chilupa and Kalachakra-pada the Elder both set out and both turned back at the Himalaya, receiving the Kalachakra teachings in vision instead. The Panchen Lama who wrote the best-known guidebook to the kingdom in 1775 said outright that the physical journey only goes so far and the rest is covered by spiritual practice, and the Kalachakra teachings treat Shambhala as accessible only to those who have purified their inner world.