The Kingdom Hidden Behind a Wall of Snow

The kingdom is lotus-shaped.

This is the description given in the earliest Tibetan accounts of Shambhala: a valley shaped like a lotus flower, with eight petals that are eight regions, surrounded by a ring of snow mountains so high and cold that no ordinary traveler can pass them. At the center of the lotus is the capital city, and at the center of the capital is the palace of the Rigden king, and in the palace is the transmission of the Kalachakra — the Wheel of Time teaching — kept intact and continuously practiced since the Buddha himself gave it to the first Shambhala king, Suchandra.

The population of Shambhala is human, but not entirely ordinary human. They live for centuries. Disease is rare. The political order is stable in a way that no historical kingdom manages to sustain — not because the Shambhala kings are dictators, but because the entire population has been practicing the Kalachakra teachings for long enough that the mental afflictions driving most political instability have been substantially reduced. Not eliminated: the texts are careful about this. The Shambhala kingdom has problems. But it has the tools to address them that ordinary kingdoms lack.

The number of people who can find Shambhala is directly related to the state of their merit and their preparation. The road there is not hidden — it runs north from Tibet, across the steppes, into the mountains. The obstacle is not geographic. The obstacle is that ordinary perception cannot navigate terrain that is partly visible and partly not. A person with sufficient preparation finds the road open. A person without it walks past the junction without seeing it.

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The apocalyptic dimension is what gives Shambhala its urgency in the texts.

At a future time — the Kalachakra texts specify a date that various commentators have placed anywhere from two to four centuries from the present — a confederation of forces called the Barbarians will overrun most of the world. These forces are described in terms that different interpreters have identified with Islam, with materialism, with the Communist erasure of Tibetan culture. The identity of the Barbarians matters less than their nature: they represent the organized form of the three poisons — greed, aggression, and delusion — applied to geopolitical power.

When this overrunning is complete, the Rigden king of Shambhala will emerge.

He will ride out with the armies of Shambhala — not the armies of one kingdom but the combined force of all the beings who have preserved the teachings in their pure form — and the battle that follows will end the age of darkness. What comes after is not described in detail: the texts say only that the world that follows will be one in which the Dharma can be practiced openly and fully, which is all the Dharma needs.

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The deeper teaching in the Shambhala myth is about where the kingdom actually is.

Several Tibetan masters — notably Mipham Rinpoche and Chogyam Trungpa — have taught that Shambhala is not simply a geographic location to be found by traveling north. It is also, and perhaps primarily, a quality of mind: the enlightened society that arises when enough practitioners have realized the basic goodness at the heart of human experience. The snow mountains that seal it are not ice: they are the layers of habitual confusion that ordinary perception cannot penetrate.

This is not demythologizing. The geographic Shambhala is real in the tradition. But the geographic and the psychological coexist: the practice that opens the road to the outer Shambhala is the same practice that reveals the inner Shambhala, and the two are not ultimately separable.

The lotus kingdom hidden behind the wall of snow is inside and outside simultaneously. The Rigden king who will emerge at the end of the age is the practitioner’s own recognition of basic goodness, brought to the point where it has force sufficient to meet the world’s confusion. The final battle is always happening. The army that will win it is always being assembled.