converts to Islam, did not tolerate anyone who did not i t the “true”
faith, so they wiped out the Buddhist communities and monasteries in eastern Afghanistan and then advanced farther, taking over Punjab in northern India. When the Moslem hordes tried to seize Kashmir, the Buddhists were able to unite and defeat the intruders, between 1015
and 1021. A legend said that the mlecca armies were subdued by the force of mantras, so the Shambhala prophecy predicting the mlecca invasion and its subsequent defeat could be a legendary reference to the actual events in Kashmir. 6
h e Buddhists did not enjoy their success for long. Another and more powerful tide of Allah’s warriors dislodged the followers of Buddha from northern India and forced them to escape northward to the safety of the Himalayas and farther to Tibet. From there, Buddhism was later reintroduced into India. 7 It is highly likely that these runaway Buddhist communities searching for sanctuary in the north created the legend about the mysterious oasis of the true faith, bliss, and plenty shielded from the outside world by high, snowcapped mountain peaks.
Unable to stop the advancing Moslems, these escapees might have also found spiritual consolation in the prophecy that a legendary redeemer would reappear and inl ict a horrible revenge on the enemies of Buddha’s teaching. Whatever events contributed to the rise of the Shambhala myth, it is obvious that the prophecy was directed against Islam.
h e old texts containing the Shambhala legend repeatedly mentioned
“the barbarian deity Rahmana,” a reference to al-Rahman (the Merciful in Arabic). One of the texts directly pointed out that the lord of the barbarians was “Muhamman, the incarnation of al-Rahman, the teacher of the barbarian Dharma, the guru and swami of the barbarian Tajiks.” 8
h ose who shaped the Shambhala prophecy were clearly preoccupied not only with the spiritual resistance against the “barbarian Dharma”
but also with military logistics of the coming battle. Besides the millions 6
SHAMBHALA, KALACHAKRA TANTRA, AND AVENGING GODS OF TIBETAN BUDDHISM
of wild and mad elephants and thousands of warriors and horses that Rudra Chakrin would gather for his i nal battle, the legend mentioned the variety of weapons to be used against the “people of Mecca.” h ere were not only chariots, spears and other conventional hardware of ancient combat, but also sophisticated wheel-shaped machines of mass destruction. h ere would also be a special l ying wind machine for use against mountain forts. According to the Shambhala prophecy, this prototype of a modern-day napalm bomber would spill burning oil on the enemies. Moreover, the protectors of the faith would use a harpoon machine, an analogy of a modern-day machine gun, designed to simultaneously shoot many arrows that would easily pierce the bodies of ar-mored elephants. h e defeat of the mlecca barbarians would launch the Age of Perfection (Kritayuga), when the true faith would triumph and the Shambhala kingdom would expand over the entire world. People would stop doing evil and manifest only virtuous behavior. At the same time, they would enjoy their riches, freely indulge in sensual pleasures, and live long lives, up to nine hundred years. Cereals in the i elds and fruit trees would grow on their own, bringing plentiful crops and fruits.
At this new age, not only a selected few, but everyone would be able to reach spiritual enlightenment. 9
Modern seekers, including practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, either downplay the militaristic aspects of the Shambhala myth or do not talk about them at all. Instead, they focus on the spiritual inner aspects of the prophecy. Whenever they mention the Shambhala war, current books on Tibetan Buddhism usually alert that it is just a metaphor describing the battle against internal demons that create obstacles for spiritual seekers on their path, and that the victory of Rudra Chakrin over his enemies means spiritual enlightenment. h e deans of modern Tibetan Buddhism remind us that elimination of the enemies of Shambhala does not mean actual annihilation of the ini dels but overcoming one’s own ignorance and sins. Even particular details of the Shambhala war have been reinterpreted according to modern religious ethics. One of Rudra Chakrin’s major generals, usually depicted riding 7
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nearby and holding a banner, became a symbol of deep awareness. h e
four divisions of the Shambhala king’s army now stand for four major feelings: love, compassion, joy, and equality. In modern version of Shambhala, even Mohammad, the actual prophet of Islam, evolved into a metaphor of destructive behavior. 10
I do not mean to downgrade the current interpretation of the Shambhala legend as an inward path to spiritual enlightenment. Nor am I saying that this Shambhala does not fully match traditional and indigenous versions of the legend. If all versions of the Shambhala legend, past and present, were put into a time context, they would all appear as sound and valid. At er all, religions do not stay frozen in time and space. People constantly shape and reshape them according to their contemporary social and spiritual needs, and Tibetan Buddhism is certainly not an exception. In fact, such modern-day revisions of aspects of this faith should be commended as an attempt to bring Tibetan Buddhism closer to modern humanistic values. Hopefully, these ef orts will set a good example for present-day mlecca people, some of whom are still frozen in the medieval time tunnel and do not want to part with aggressive notions.
Kalachakra Tantra: Shortcut to Spiritual Perfection h e legend about the Shambhala kingdom and its subsequent war against Moslem intruders did not exist as a separate story. From the very beginning, the myth was an inseparable part of the Kalachakra teaching—a set of meditative and astrological techniques (tantras) i rst written down in Sanskrit in the 800s and then translated into Tibetan in the 1200s. Kalachakra (Dus’khor in Tibetan), translated from Sanskrit as
“the Wheel of Time,” describes esoteric techniques (meditations, mantras, and visualization of deities) that help the faithful achieve enlightenment in their lifetime. h ese techniques sprang up in northern India around the 600s as a challenge to Hinduism, which expected people to undergo a chain of reincarnations before reaching enlightenment. As 8
SHAMBHALA, KALACHAKRA TANTRA, AND AVENGING GODS OF TIBETAN BUDDHISM
always happens with alternative movements, a few centuries later this Buddhist counterculture itself evolved into canonized practices taught by lamas, “experts” in Kalachakra who knew the “correct” path.
In Buddhism, there are three ways of doing tantras. In “father” tantra, by reciting appropriate mantras, adepts think themselves intensely into merging with a particular deity and absorbing its spiritual power.
In “mother” tantra, adepts seek to create a state of emptiness and bliss by controlling and transforming sexual desire—the gateway to birth and rebirth. h is is the reason some tantras are so focused on sexuality.
Finally, in “dual” tantras, an adept combines both father and mother techniques. As a result, the adept appears as a powerful deity and simultaneously reaches eternal bliss through mastering bodily l uids. Kalachakra belongs to this third type of tantras.
Original Kalachakra texts did not survive. What is available now are their renditions called Sri Kalacakra and Vimalaprabha, translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan by the famous writer Buston in the mid 1300s. 11
h ese texts reveal that the glorious Gautama Buddha introduced Kalachakra to Suchandra, the i rst king of Shambhala, who began to teach these sacred techniques to the people of his kingdom. h e Kalachakra teaching is divided into “outer,” “inner,” and “other” segments. h e i rst part deals with the outside world and describes the universe, astrol-ogy, geography, and various prophecies. For example, here astrological formulas can be found explaining how natural rhythms af ect an individual’s existence. h e Shambhala legend, including the description of the glorious kingdom and its war against the mlecca, is a part of this outer section, which was open to everyone.
h e other two segments are reserved only for the initiated. h e inner Kalachakra deals with the anatomy of the mystic body; adepts of Kalachakra and other tantras believe the body is a collection of energy centers linked through channels. Various bodily l uids (the most important being semen and menstrual blood) l ow through these channels.
h e task of adepts is to empower themselves by “controlling” these l uids. h e third, or “other,” Kalachakra details how to spread, balance, and 9
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manipulate these energy l ows and how to attune them to the movement of the sun, planets, and stars; Tibetan Buddhism views a human body and the outside world as intertwined projections of each other.
h e same section contains a list of hundreds of deities and mandalas and explains how to practice chanting and how to visualize and merge with various deities. 12
Like much of original Tibetan Buddhism, Kalachakra was a male-oriented teaching designated to empower male adepts through seventeen initiations. Lower level initiations, known as the “stage of production,”
were available to all males. In fact, people could partake of this basic Kalachakra on a mass scale, visiting public initiations conducted by the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Lama, and other qualii ed masters. During these gatherings, adepts usually swore to follow the path of enlightenment, repent, and avoid misdeeds. h ey were also expected to suppress their egos and of er their minds, spirits, and bodies to the Kalachakra master performing the initiation. h
e goal of this technique was to turn
adepts into empty vessels that the master was to i ll with the spiritual power of a particular deity. Incidentally, the suppression of personal ego is not only a Kalachakra requirement, but also an essential attribute of all of Tibetan Buddhism. In other words, during these lower-level initiations, adepts ritually “destroyed” themselves as human beings and were “reborn” as deities.
Initiations of the highest level, the “stage of perfection,” were accessible only to a few chosen lamas and were conducted in absolute secrecy.
h ere was surely something to hide from laymen, for many of these rituals were designated to teach an adept to control his sexual drive and channel it into spiritual bliss. h ese types of initiations required the presence of karma mudra, young women whose ages ranged from ten to twenty years; in modern times, actual females have frequently been replaced with ritual objects symbolizing women. At the same time, old Kalachakra texts inform us that an adept could not reach enlightenment without the presence of the karma mudra. During these initiations an initiate was sexually aroused in the presence of a naked woman and was 10
SHAMBHALA, KALACHAKRA TANTRA, AND AVENGING GODS OF TIBETAN BUDDHISM
challenged to restrain himself from ejaculation. For instance, one of the old texts prescribed that a master show an undressed girl to an adept and ask him to stroke her breasts. 13 Like other tantras, Kalachakra is focused on preservation and return of semen, which is viewed as precious energy of creation and the key to spiritual enlightenment: “h e yogin needs to avoid with every ef ort passion for emission, by which avoiding it will attain the motionless bliss, liberating himself from the bonds of transmigration,” and “All yogins attain Buddhahood through the interruption of the moment of ejaculation.” 14 h e man who could not hold on was called an animal, whereas the one capable of restraining himself from ejaculation was considered a hero with divine attributes.
Top initiations included even more challenges for an adept. In one of them, a master was to have intercourse with a karma mudra by allowing his semen to l ow into her vagina in order to create “red-white l uid.” h en this mix of the male (white) and female (red) l uids was collected and fed to an initiate with the words, “h is is your sacrament, dear one, as taught by all Buddhas.” Another high initiation required an adept to have intercourse with a female participant, but again without ejaculating. Moreover, in the seventeenth, the last initiation, a student was to copulate with several women, dipping his vajra in their vaginas to get female l uid without spilling his seed. h ese ritual manipulations were directed to empowering an adept through “sucking” the female power of creation and merging it with the male one, which would turn the initiate into a superhuman transgender being—quite a misogynistic technique from a present viewpoint.
