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Shambhala, Kalachakra Tantra, and
Avenging
Gods of Tibetan Buddhism
First chapter of the book: Red Shambhala by Andrei Znamenski
Somewhere far in the north, goes a
Tibetan legend, is the kingdom of Shambhala,
shielded from the outside world by mountain peaks as high as the heavens
and sharp as the teeth of a tiger. This land has the shape of a giant lotus
with eight petals. Those fortunate enough to reach this wonderful place are
awed by its beautiful and plentiful lakes, ponds, meadows, forests, and
groves. In the middle of Shambhala stands its
capital, Kalapa, whose palaces are all made of
pure gold, silver, turquoise, coral, pearl, emerald, moon crystal, and
other precious stones. Instead of ceilings, these palaces have special
circular magnifying crystal spheres through which people can gaze at the
gods, the sun, the moon, and the stars, so close that they appear within
reach. Window screens are made of sandalwood, and the thrones are all of
pure gold. South of Kalapa the seeker will find a
special pleasure grove, and in the west one catches a glimpse of the
beautiful lake where humans and gods enjoy boat rides together.
The kings who rule Shambhala indulge themselves in sensual pleasures and
enjoy their wealth. Despite their pursuit of wealth and pleasure, they
strive to be nice to other people and to help them to reach enlightenment
and liberation, so the virtues of the royalty never decrease. The people of
Shambhala never become sick or old, and they are
blessed with handsome and beautiful bodies. The laws of the land are mild
and gentle, and beatings along with imprisonments are totally unknown. Last
but not least, Shambhala inhabitants never go
hungry.
All in all, residents of the kingdom
are good, virtuous, and intelligent, and capable of reaching Nirvana in
their lifetime. Shambhala’s priests are very
faithful and humble. They reject material possessions and go barefoot and
bareheaded, dressed only in white robes. And, most important, Shambhala is the place where Buddhism exists in its
purest and most authentic form.
The way to this land of spiritual
bliss and plenty lies through special Kalachakra-tantra
practices and virtuous behavior. (1)
An old Buddhist parable conveys this idea well: “Where are you going
across these wastes of snow,” a lama hermit asked a youth who embarked on a
long journey to fi nd
the wondrous Shambhala land. “To find Shambhala,” answered the boy. “Ah, well then, you need
not travel far. The kingdom of Shambhala is in your
own heart.” (2)
The Shambhala
legend is the description of the famous Buddhist paradise – the land of
spiritual enlightenment and simultaneously the land of plenty that people
of the Mongol-Tibetan world dreamed about since the early Middle Ages. The concept
of this paradise was absent in early Buddhism; it was introduced later to
cater to the sentiments of common folk who could not comprehend some of the
abstract principles of the Buddhist faith and needed something “real” to
latch onto. (3) Current practitioners
of Tibetan Buddhism move back to the original roots of the faith, in some
sense, by downplaying the material side of the utopia and putting more
stress on its spiritual aspects. The first to introduce this legend into
Western spiritual culture was the famous Western seeker Helena Blavatsky,
founding mother of Theosophy, who most likely learned about Shambhala by reading accounts of European travelers to
Tibet and hearing about this wondrous land during her brief sojourn to the
Tibetan-Indian border. Adjusting the Buddhist legend to the theory of
evolution, which was becoming popular at the end of the nineteenth century,
Blavatsky argued that Shambhala was the center of
evolving superior wisdom—the abode of the so-called Great White Brotherhood
located somewhere in the Himalayas. The hidden masters (whom she also
referred to as mahatmas) from this brotherhood guided humankind in its
evolution away from materialism toward the highest spirituality, which
would eventually give rise to the superior sixth race that would replace
contemporary imperfect human beings. Such politically incorrect
generalizations, especially after what happened during World War II, might
offend the sensibilities of current spiritual seekers, yet during
Blavatsky’s lifetime and well into the 1930s, this kind of evolutionary
talk was quite popular among all educated folk who considered themselves
advanced and progressive, including Theosophists.
Buddhist
Holy War: Shambhala as Spiritual Resistance
Spiritual bliss and plenty were not
the only sides of the Shambhala legend. There was
another side, which is usually downplayed in current Tibetan Buddhism –
spiritual resistance against people who infringed on the Buddhist faith.
The story about this aspect of Shambhala, which
is an inseparable part of the legend, is not so benevolent and tranquil,
but it is no less valid.
The entire Shambhala
legend sprang up in northern India in the early Middle Ages, between the
900s and 1200s. Along with the description of Shambhala
as the land of enlightenment and plenty, it mentioned that at some point
barbarian demons coming from the west would inflict devastating damage on
the Buddhist faith. In Sanskrit texts these alien infidels were called mlecca people. Tibetan sources referred
to them as lalo. The invaders, the legend
said, would bring misery and chaos, and the whole world would enter Kaliyuga (the Age of Disputes), when the
true Buddhist faith would decline. The northern Shambhala
kingdom would remain the only stronghold of the true faith and would
eventually redeem people from this misery.
To deliver Tibetan Buddhist people
from the danger, the last Shambhala king, Rudra Chakrin (the Wrathful
One with the Wheel, Rigden Djapo
in Tibetan), would enter a trance so that he could see the coming events.
Then he would gather a mighty army and launch a merciless attack against
the barbarians. In the ensuing horrible, Armageddon-like battle, the
infidels would be totally crushed, and the Age of Disputes would be over.
After this successful Shambhala war, the true
faith (Tibetan Buddhism) would triumph all over the earth. Lobsan Palden Yeshe, the third Panchen
Lama, who was considered the spiritual leader of Tibet and who composed a
1775 guidebook to Shambhala, prophesized this
final battle as follows:
Thee, great lama, who lives in this paradise land and who is
constantly in prayer, shall adopt the title of Rigden
Djapo and shall defeat the armies of lalo. Thy army shall include people of many nations. Thee shall have 40,000 large wild elephants, four
millions of mad elephants, many warriors, and Thee shall pierce the heart
of the king of lalo. Thy twelve powerful gods
shall completely destroy all evil gods of the lalo.
Thy elephants shall kill their elephants. Thy horses shall smash lalo’s horses, and Thy golden chariots shall crash
their chariots. Thy people shall tame the lalo’s
protectors, and lalo’s influence shall be totally
gone. And then the time shall come when the true faith spreads all over.
After many years of preaching the faith, on the 22nd of the middle spring
moon in the year of the horse, Thee shall take the seat of the great god
and shall be surrounded by mighty warriors and medicine women. (4)
The references to the Age of Disputes
and to the king redeemer most likely originated from Hinduism, which had a
legend that Vishnu was born in the village of Shambhala.
Like Rudra Chakrin,
Vishnu was destined to defeat those that stepped on the wrong spiritual
path and then to reawaken the minds of hesitant people. Scholars also
believe that the apocalyptic notions of the final battle and the whole talk
about the forces of good and evil fighting each other might have penetrated
Tibetan Buddhism from Manichaeism and especially from Islam. It is well
known that in the early Middle Ages, the mlecca
people, or people of Mecca, at first mingled with Buddhist communities in
eastern Afghanistan and northern India and then mercilessly drove them out.
(5)
In eastern Afghanistan under the
Abbasid dynasty in the first half of the 800s, Buddhists and Hindus lived
side by side with Moslems in relative peace. The Buddhists were even
allowed to keep their faith, which opened the door to an exchange of
religious ideas. In fact, during this period of peaceful coexistence, to
the dismay of the Buddhist clergy, many faithful switched to Islam. Simple
and straightforward, the religion of the mlecca
people was more alluring to some common folk than Buddhism with its complex
and vague principles. In the 900s this multicultural paradise came to an
end. The warlike Sunni Turks, new converts to Islam, did not tolerate
anyone who did not fi 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)
The 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 inflict 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.
The 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) Those 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 of
wild and mad elephants and thousands of warriors and horses that Rudra Chakrin would gather
for his final battle, the legend mentioned the variety of weapons to be
used against the “people of Mecca.” There were not only chariots, spears
and other conventional hardware of ancient combat, but also sophisticated
wheel-shaped machines of mass destruction. There would also be a special
flying 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 armored elephants.
The 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 fields 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. The deans of modern Tibetan Buddhism
remind us that elimination of the enemies of Shambhala
does not mean actual annihilation of the infidels 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 nearby and holding a banner, became a
symbol of deep awareness. The 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. After 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 efforts 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
The 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) first 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. These 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 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. This 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 fluids. 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) These texts reveal that
the glorious Gautama Buddha introduced Kalachakra
to Suchandra, the first king of Shambhala, who began to teach these sacred techniques
to the people of his kingdom. The Kalachakra teaching
is divided into “outer,” “inner,” and “other” segments. The first part
deals with the outside world and describes the universe, astrology,
geography, and various prophecies. For example, here astrological formulas
can be found explaining how natural rhythms aff ect an individual’s existence. The 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.
The other two segments are reserved
only for the initiated. The 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 fluids
(the most important being semen and menstrual blood) flow through these
channels. The task of adepts is to empower themselves by “controlling”
these fluids. The third, or “other,” Kalachakra
details how to spread, balance, and manipulate these energy flows 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. The 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 qualified masters.
During these gatherings, adepts usually swore to follow the path of
enlightenment, repent, and avoid misdeeds. They were also expected to
suppress their egos and offer their minds, spirits, and bodies to the Kalachakra master performing the initiation. The goal
of this technique was to turn adepts into empty vessels that the master was
to fill 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. Th 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. These 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 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: “The yogin needs to
avoid with every eff 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)
The 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 flow into her vagina in order to create “red-white
fluid.” Then this mix of the male (white) and female (red) fluids was
collected and fed to an initiate with the words, “This 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
fluid without spilling his seed. These 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.
To hide these esoteric techniques
from laypeople, old texts used various metaphors to make it hard to grasp
the content of the rituals. For example, the vagina was routinely referred
to as “lotus,” sperm was called “enlightenment consciousness,” menstrual
blood was labeled “the sun,” and breasts were the “vase that holds white.”
Although until recently, Kalachakra masters did
not reach an agreement about whether the presence of the second sex should
be actual or symbolic, it is obvious that in the past, Kalachakra
practices did involve ritual use of sexuality. The best evidence for this
is the images of Tibetan Buddhist gods, who were frequently
portrayed brandishing various morbid objects such as skulls and weapons
while simultaneously having sex with their divine female consorts.
As important as it might be,
channeling sexual fluids into spiritual energy was not the only technique
used at the stage of “perfection.” In the highest initiations, an adept was
to ingest various substances forbidden in Tibetan Buddhism, such as
menstrual blood, flesh, urine, pieces of skin, liver, and anal excrements.
It was assumed that by exposing himself without fear to these disgusting
substances, an adept was capable of going beyond good and evil toward
spiritual bliss. In other words, to reach enlightenment, an initiate had to
bravely stare the Devil in his eye. Or, as an old tantric wisdom said,
“Those things by which evil men conduct are bound, others turn into means
and gain thereby release from the bonds of existence.” (15)
The same logic might explain why
Tibetan-Mongol culture became so fascinated with the morbid. Buddhist art
widely depicts images of skulls, severed heads, corpses, and scenes of
murders. Monks were encouraged to meditate upon corpses in various stages
of decay. It was also recommended that the highest Kalachakra
initiations be performed at crematoria, charnel fi
elds, graves, and murder sites. (16)
God
Protectors and Defenders of the Buddhist Faith
What immediately strikes one who
looks at the images of Tibetan Buddhist deities is that many of them do not
appear to be friendly beings. One definitely will not find here any weeping
Holy Mary’s or suffering Christs. Instead, there
are plenty of menacing and angry faces, sickles, daggers, and necklaces and
cups made of human skulls, along with corpses trampled by divine feet. Th e greater part of the text of The Handbook of
Tibetan Buddhist Symbols, the most complete description of Tibetan
Buddhist iconography, deals with weapons, weapon-related artifacts, severed
limbs and heads, human skulls, and bones. (17)
Tibetan Buddhism has two special
groups of deities that are invoked during a time of trouble to combat
internal demons or enemies of the faith. The first are god-protectors (yi-dam—Hevajara,
Sang-dui, Mahamaya, Samvara,
and Kalachakra) (18) who shield lamas from demonic forces. The second are eight
terrible ones (dharmapalas), protectors of
the faith (Begtse, Tsangs-pa,
Kuvera, Palden Lhamo, Yama, Yamantaka, Hayagriva, and Mahakala),
who wage war without mercy against all enemies of Buddhism. (19) Depicted on sacred scrolls or
cast in bronze, these deities have wrathful features, and their body
postures manifest anger and aggression as if saying, “Beware, demons and
enemies of the faith.”
The avenging terrible ones are
usually portrayed as short, muscular beings who
wave various weapons (hatchets, battle axes, and swords) and crush human
and supernatural enemies of Buddhism. Some of them wear crowns made of
skulls with flaming pearls, ornaments of human bones, and necklaces of
freshly severed human heads. One of the most important attributes of both
god-protectors and the terrible ones are the skull cups (kapala) fi lled with the blood of enemies. Moreover, many of these
deities are frequently depicted having intercourse with their divine female
companions—a reference to tantric practices.
The most ferocious defender of the
Buddhist faith is Palden Lhamo,
the personal goddess-protector of the Dalai Lama and the holy city of
Lhasa. On painted sacred scrolls, Palden Lhamo is frequently portrayed as a black, bony,
four-armed lady with barred teeth, riding a horse. In her upper right hand
she holds a chopper, and her second right arm holds a large red scull cup.
The upper left hand brandishes a diamond shaped dagger. The body of the
goddess is covered with snakes, wreaths made of human skulls, and necklaces
of severed heads. Her own head is topped with a crown of flowers. The upper
part of her body is covered with elephant skin and her hips with skin of an
ox. Sometimes she is also pictured as standing amid a cemetery.
A gory legend, which one will never
find in current coffee-table books about Tibetan Buddhism, recounts how
this goddess turned into such a ferocious being. Palden
Lhamo was married to the king of Ceylon, who did
not care about Buddhism, and that drove her crazy. As a die-hard true
believer, Palden Lhamo
took a horrible oath: if she failed to convert her husband to the true
faith, she would destroy all her children in order to interrupt the royal
lineage so hostile to Buddha’s creed. No matter how hard she tried, the
goddess could not convert her infidel husband, and, eventually, while the
king was away, she had to fulfill her terrible oath by murdering their only
son. Not only did the queen kill the little one, but she also skinned him,
ate his flesh, and drank his blood from a skull cup. Having completed this
ferocious act, Palden Lhamo
saddled her horse, using the son’s skin as a saddle, and galloped
northward. Furious, the devastated father shot at her with a poisonous
arrow and hit her horse. The runaway queen pulled out the arrow and uttered
magic words: “May the wound of my horse become an eye large enough to
overtake the twenty-four regions, and may I myself extirpate the race of
these malignant kings of Ceylon!” Sadly, the legend does not have a happy
ending. Unpunished, the sadistic mother continued her journey through
India, Tibet, and Mongolia, eventually settling in southern Siberia. (20) One does not need to guess
twice to figure out the brutal moral of the story: loyalty to one’s faith
is supreme.
Modern-day literature about Tibetan
Buddhism, which has been adjusted to Western ideas of human rights and
universal peace, does not mention these facts from the past lives of the
terrible ones, which is perfectly fi ne: people
who do not wish to be stuck in a medieval time tunnel usually change their
religion and move on. For example, Celestial Gallery, an oversized
coffee-table book composed by current adherents of Tibetan Buddhism in the
West, asks us not to fear Palden Lhamo’s garlands of skulls because she is simply “the
wrathful mother who tramples on the enemies of complacency and
self-deception” and challenges us to step on the path of spiritual
evolution. The same book also reveals that her demonic forms symbolize our
own dark forces we have to deal with. (21)
The worship of wrathful dharmapalas was, and still is, very
popular in the Tibetan Buddhist world. Common folk believe that prayers to
the terrible ones are more eff ective than those addressed to benevolent gods, who are
good anyway. In the past, to appease the ears of Palden
Lhamo, Mahakala, Begtse, and other angry gods, lamas usually played
thighbone trumpets made from human or tiger thighbones. Equally pleasing
for these deities were sounds produced by skull drums made of human skins
stretched over two human craniums. People could solicit the help of these
gods through various offerings. The most effective one, at least in the
past, was blood, preferably from humans. The best blood was to be taken
from a corpse or extracted from people suffering from a contagious disease,
for example leprosy. Menstrual blood of widows and prostitutes was also
considered very effective. Another type of good blood could come from the
blade of a sword or from a young healthy man killed during battle. (22) The text of a 1903 sacrificial
prayer addressed to Genghis Khan (who had been turned into a protective
deity) to ward off enemies of the faith, robbers, and lawbreakers
prescribed, “Mix the following in brandy in equal parts: the blood of a man
who has been killed, dwarf from an iron bar by which a man has been killed,
and offer this with fl our, butter, milk and black tea. When this kind of
sacrifice is offered, without any omission, then one will certainly be able
to master anything, be it acts of war, enemies, robbers, brigands, the
curses of hated opponents, or any adversity.” (23)
Footnotes
1. John R.
Newman, “A Brief History of the Kalachakra,” in The
Wheel of Time: The Kalachakra in Context, ed.
Beth Simon (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1991), 54–58.
2. Edwin Bernbaum, The Way to Shambhala:
A Search for the Mystical Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1980), 25.
3. Sergei Tokarev, History of Religion (Moscow: Progress
Publishers,1989), 314.
4. “Predskazanie sviashchennosluzhitelia
Lobsan Palden Yeshe,” [Lobsang Palden Yeshe Prophecy] in Baron
Ungern v dokumentakh i materialakh [Baron Ungern: Documents and Materials], ed. S. L. Kuzmin, (Moscow:KMK,
2004), 1:150–51.
5. Victor Trimondi and Victoria Trimondi,
The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan
Buddhism, part 1 (2003), http://www.iivs.de/~iivs01311/SDLE/Part-1-10.htm (accessed
Dec. 6, 2009).
6. Johan Elverskog, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia:
Pennsylvania University Press, 2010): 96–98; Alexander Berzin,
“Holy Wars in
Buddhism and
Islam: Th e Myth of Shambhala,”
http://www.berzinarchives.com (accessed
Dec. 5, 2009); Trimondi, Shadow of the Dalai
Lama.
7. Helmut
Hoffman, The Religions of Tibet (London: Allen and Unwin, 1996), 125–26; Roger Jackson, “Kalachakra in Context,” in Wheel of Time, 33.
8. Newman,
“Brief History of the Kalachakra,” 85. The Tajiks are Turkic-speaking seminomadic
people in Central Asia who embraced Islam in the early Middle Ages.
9. Ibid.,
78–80.
10. Berzin, “Holy Wars in Buddhism and Islam.”
11. See Lokesh Chandra, ed., Th
e Collected Works of Bu-ston (New Delhi:
International Academy of Indian Culture, 1965).
12. Bernbaum, Way to Shambhala,
123–24.
13. Trimondi and Trimondi, “Kalachakra: Th e Public and
the Secret Initiations,” chap. 6 in Shadow of the Dalai Lama, part
1.
14. Edward A.
Arnold, ed., As Long As Space Endures: Essays on the Kalacakra
Tantra in Honor of H. H. the Dalai Lama (Ithaca,
NY: Snow Lion Publications, 2009), 58, 83, 98.
15. David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), 1:125–26.
16. Trimondi and Trimondi, “Th e Law of Inversion,” chap. 4 in Shadow of the
Dalai Lama, part 1.
17. Robert
Beer, Th e Handbook of Tibetan Buddhist
Symbols (Boston: Shambhala, 2003).
18. The Kalachakra deity is the personification of Kalachakra tantra. 240
19. For a
detailed description of protective gods in Tibetan Buddhism, see Alice
Getty, Th e Gods of Northern Buddhism (Rutland,
VT: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1974), 142–64.
20. Emil Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet (1863; reprint,
New York: A. M. Kelly, 1969), 112–13.
21. Romio Shrestha and Ian A.
Baker, Celestial Gallery (New York: Fall River Press, 2009), 16.
22. Rene de Nebesky-Wojkowitz, Oracles and Demons of Tibet: Th e Cult and Iconography of the Tibetan Protective
Deities (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt,
1975), 343.
23. Walther Heissig, A Lost Civilization: The Mongols
Rediscovered, trans. From German D. J. S. Thomson (New York: Basic
Books, 1966), 86.
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