Shambhala

Shambhala belongs to the Kalachakra system. In the traditional account, King Suchandra of Shambhala travelled to South India to request the Kalachakra Tantra from the Buddha and carried the teaching home to his northern kingdom; the text reached Tibet around the eleventh century and became the root scripture of the Kalachakra lineage. The tantra describes a realm sealed behind ranges of snow mountains, its territory shaped like an eight-petalled lotus around the central palace of Kalapa, seat of a line of dharma kings whose subjects all practise the Kalachakra. Prophecy names seven dharma kings followed by twenty-five Kalki kings; the last, Raudra Chakrin, will ride out in a degenerate age, crush the armies of barbarism, and open a new golden era.

In Tibetan tradition Shambhala hovers between geography and pure land: it lies north of the Himalayas, beyond the River Sita, yet only those of purified karma, following itineraries set down in "guidebooks to Shambhala", can arrive; ordinary travellers would find nothing but empty mountains. The best known of these guides was written in 1775 by the Sixth Panchen Lama, Lobsang Palden Yeshe.

From the late nineteenth century Shambhala entered Western imagination: Blavatsky's Theosophy made it a secret seat of earthly adepts; Nicholas Roerich gathered Shambhala lore across Central Asia during his 1925-1928 expedition and published a book under that name; and James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon spun it into "Shangri-La", a name the Chinese county of Zhongdian in Yunnan officially adopted in 2001.