They tried to make sense out of the little pieces that they learned about and were finally able to translate, but they didn’t have the whole picture. In fact, these are the people that made the first dictionaries of Sanskrit and Tibetan. How did they possibly understand this? They didn’t have the advantage that we have nowadays of so much of that literature being available in translation. But now we have to start thinking what it was like for the early Europeans who came to India and met little pieces or were introduced to little pieces of Hindu and Buddhist literature. We’ll look a little more deeply, a little bit later in our talk, about further levels of meaning of Shambhala in the Buddhist teachings. So, similar, just a variant of the theme. Then, there’s a succession of these Kalki rulers, and the twenty-fifth one, it’s at his time when this invasion occurs from the forces that are bent on destroying all spiritual practice the forces of Shambhala, under the leadership of this Kalki, are going to defeat these invaders and again there’ll be a new golden age. He predicts that there will be an invasion in the future, a number of centuries later, and that everybody has to get together in order to be able to fight off this invasion. After seven generations of kings, there will be a new king who’s going to unify all the castes – the Indian system of castes – and he’s going to take the title Kalki, this name of the Vishnu avatar. There Shambhala is a whole land, not just a village, and there will be a king that comes to India from there and gets the Kalachakra teachings from the Buddha and brings them back to Shambhala. Kalachakra means the “wheel of time” or “cycles of time,” and there we find a variation of what we had in the Hindu source. After he destroys them, there will be a new golden age, and that will be the end of the kaliyuga.Ī number of centuries later, we find Shambhala again, in Buddhist literature, specifically in a group of material known as the Kalachakra texts. He’s called Kalki, and he will destroy an invading group that is bent on destruction.

It says that the eighth avatar, or incarnation, of Vishnu will be born in a city called Shambhala. There it speaks about the different ages, the four ages of the world system, ending with the kaliyuga (“age of disputes”). We first find it in an early Hindu text, The Vishnu Purana, from the 4th century CE. It originally comes from both Hindu and Buddhist sources. When we hear the word Shambhala, it conjures up all sorts of romantic images and associations for many people.

Where is shambala