Gateways to Shambhala

A GATEWAY TO SHAMBHALA

(This essay previously appeared in Cahiers De L'Herne)


“It became clear to me that humankind is full of gods, like a sponge immersed in the open sky. These gods live, attain the apogee of their power, then die, leaving to other gods their perfumed altars. They are the very principles of any total transformation. They are the necessity of movement.” – Louis Aragon (Le Paysan de Paris. – Paris, Gallimard 1953-P. 143)

I

As is well known, Gautama Buddha renounced the possibility of being a world ruler in order to take the path which led supreme complete enlightenment. He made this choice in order to discover a way to liberate all sentient beings from the endless cycles of delusion and suffering in which they are inevitably ensnared.

The choice he made and indeed advocated in most of his subsequent teachings is based on a strict dichotomy between the world of form and the formless, between engagement in the secular world of humankind and commitment to spiritual awakening. This has been the paradigm for enlightenment not just in Buddhism but in most other world religions.

After Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche left Tibet and his traditional role as an abbot-lama, he began to explore the possibilities in re-uniting these two paths. In the Political Treatise, one of the earliest texts written after he came out of Tibet, he expressed the view that the spiritual path is not the only means to enlightenment, nor is it necessarily the highest of such paths. In fact, he considered that the path of a political or social leader could be a more evolved manifestation of the awakened state.

While Trungpa Rinpoche emphasized the continuity between spiritual practice and ordinary daily life in the way he taught Buddhist practices, it was in presenting the Shambhala teachings that he opened a form where engagement in the secular world became a complete path of enlightenment.

It is implicit in the Shambhala view that enlightenment can be realized by many paths of discipline. But, as the great early twentieth century sage, Jamyang Mipham Rinpoche once observed, while the goal of every (Buddhist) path is the same, the experience and the way it is conveyed is colored by the path which was taken to reach it.

Thus the enlightenment, the unconditioned awareness that may be realized by a concert pianist or a diplomat or a nurse or an astronomer or a vagrant differ from one another as they do from that of a religious practitioner. The teachings relating to the Kingdom of Shambhala constitute a vision in which these many paths may find greater clarity, inspiration and support on a common ground.

II

There are many ancient legends concerning the Kingdom of Shambhala as an enlightened society. Nevertheless, it is not a past ‘golden age’ since it is still considered to be alive. Nor is it is not a future utopia in the Occidental sense of being an arrangement of laws and institutions set forth to produce some kind of ideal state of existence. The “vision of Shambhala” is not a vision of something seen, but rather a way of seeing and perceiving and acting in the context of the phenomenal world. The Kingdom of Shambhala is an innate and spontaneous longing to realize the freedom of the awakened state within the context of our existing social life.

Unlike a monastic path which emphasizes cultivating the awakened state by renouncing worldly pre-occupations and the detailed exploration of mind itself, the Shambhala path proposes going into the world ever more deeply and thoroughly. This is the path of discovering the vivid wakefulness in every aspect of daily living as one leads the life of a householder: working, cooking, cleaning, and relating to spouses, lovers, parents, children, friends and neighbors. When we cut through the narrow preoccupations and projections of ego-fixation, wakefulness illuminates as the processes of everyday tasks.

This path is a discipline much like art and requires attention to the minutiae of the mundane and love in the ways one shapes it. It is in some ways more difficult than the monastic approach since there is no vinaya (monastic rules) and less outward communal support.

To intensify this awareness, Trungpa Rinpoche introduced (in addition to the practice of meditation and the teachings now part of Shambhala Training) the practices of poetry, Kyudo (‘Zen archery’), flower arranging, equitation, theater, Bugaku, calligraphy, cooking and military strategy, among others. Such personal disciplines establish a basis for sharing the world and uncover, moment by moment, the ongoing ground of enlightened society.

III

There are however obvious and continuing obstacles on this path. How easy it is to conflate indulgence and appreciation, self-aggrandizement and inspiration, obsession and discipline. Trungpa Rinpoche was untiring in his scorn for comfort- seeking and the pursuit of endless entertainments. These were in his view the building blocks of what he called “the cocoon” and this desire to build a private world of ease and diversion around ourselves is not merely a psychological quirk but one with solid cultural enfranchisement.

As Walter Benjamin noted in his discussion of trends that began during in France in the period of Louis-Phillippe (1789):

“For the private citizen, for the first time the living-space became distinguished from the place of work. The former constituted itself as the interior. The office was its compliment. The private citizen who in the office took reality into account, required of the interior that it should support him in his illusions. The necessity was all the more pressing since he had no intention of adding social preoccupations to his business ones. In the creation of his private environment he suppressed them both. From this sprang the phantasmagoria. This represented the universe for the private citizen. In it he assembled the distant in space and in time. His drawing room was a box in the world-theater.”

(Walter Benjamin, tr. Harry Zohn- Paris the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, NLB 1973pp.167-8)

And in moving to his considerations on art nouveau, he continued:
Art nouveau “appeared, according to its ideology, to bring with it the perfecting of the interior. The transfiguration of the lone soul was its apparent aim. Individualism was its theory.” (supra. P.168)

With the telephone, television and attendant home entertainment systems, the internet, and so forth, these trends have clearly accelerated to a level that would have been impossible to imagine even fifty years ago. Now it is quite easy to be informed about events throughout the world, the nation, one’s city, and one’s neighborhood, and to conduct widespread communications about them without leaving home or meeting anyone face to face. Immediacy, presence, authentic community and even solitude are, within this social construct, exotic. Alone amid the endless torrent of images, commercial promises, manufactured needs and ‘information’, silence and the sheer momentariness of life afford only haunting anxiety.

IV

“The people need poetry that will be their own secret
to keep them awake forever,
and bathe them in the bright-haired wave
of its breath.”
(Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems, tr. Brown and Merwin, Atheneum Press, NY 1974, p.xiii)


The stories and songs concerning the Kingdom of Shambhala as an enlightened society have been current throughout central Asia for a thousand of years, and have, as David-Neel, Stein, Hessig, Bernbaum, Samuels and Roerich among others have shown, provided enduring inspiration for rulers as well as ordinary men and women. This lore exists in liturgies, prayers, songs, epics, histories and folk tales. In them Shambhala itself is often described in three simultaneous ways: as a real place on the earth which is sometimes manifest and sometimes not; as a pure realm, a place where the practice and communication of the awakened state of mind proceed without obstacle; and as the innate structure of the human heart.

In this tradition, the Kingdom of Shambhala is not just an enduring aspiration for enlightened society but is equally a kind of ongoing substrate within our lives. For just as it is said that enlightenment is the natural state, it is likewise true that the Kingdom of Shambhala represents the intrinsic ground of all societal possibilities.

Beyond the lore that describes the Shambhala kingdom and its rulers, there are also accounts of heroes and heroines for whom Shambhala provided crucial inspiration or who expressed this vision from their own intuition. These stories do not take place in an ideal world and are concerned with the struggle to uplift the human condition.

In several important texts, Trungpa Rinpoche gave particular emphasis to four historical exemplars of the spontaneous appearance of the Shambhala path. These four ancestral sovereigns combine the inspired and the pragmatic in a very heightened way. All are warriors. None received the throne as a matter of course but had to seize the throne and make great alterations in the pre-existing social order. Sometimes these changes were in the direction of restoring tradition and sometime they involved ideas and institutional norms that were entirely new. In uplifting their social world entirely, the ways in which these monarchs ruled each represents a specific kind of fruition of the warrior’s path. Trungpa Rinpoche correlated each of these sovereigns with specific attributes from the Shambhala teachings, and considered that each was the embodiment of specific qualities of the warrior. Trungpa Rinpoche therefore referred to these four as the ancestral sovereigns of Shambhala.

First mentioned of the four ancestral sovereigns is Ashoka Maharaja who ruled India and lived from 304- 232 BC. Ashoka is the warrior-monarch associated with meekness, modesty, kindness and mercy. He embodies the activity of pacifying, and in his own life transformed himself from a rapacious conqueror into one who extended non-violence and compassion as the foundation of his laws and polity.

Next is Gesar, King of Ling who is semi-legendary but who lived in the ninth or tenth century AD. Gesar is associated with perkiness, unceasing discipline and uninterrupted wakefulness. He embodies the action of cutting through all delusions. Gesar unhesitatingly plunged himself into demonic realms of madness and chaos in order to conquer them.

Then follows the third Ming Emperor, Yong Le who lived from 1360 to 1424. The Yong Le Emperor is connected with the quality of outrageousness in going completely beyond hope and fear to immerse himself in all the complex totality of the world and its requirements. He magnetized and illuminated his empire, and established an order that lasted for three hundred years.

Finally, there is Prince Shotoku Taishi who was Regent of Japan and lived 574-622 AD. Prince Shotoku Taishi embodies the warrior quality of inscrutability, unshakable confidence pervading one’s whole existence such that one does not need to act nor to doubt those actions one has undertaken. As a Prince Regent of Japan, Shotoku Taishi did not take the throne but enriched his country by initiating many spiritual and temporal forms that characterize Japanese culture to this day.

The ancestral sovereigns of Shambhala delineate a terrain in which spiritual enlightenment would appear, at first, to be in conflict with secular life, but they proceed to explore ways in which the two can, and in fact, must be carried forward inseparably. By so doing, the spirit and the reality of Shambhala dawns.

Each of these four rulers opened the path of secular enlightenment in the heart of his social order and each worked unceasingly until it pervaded his entire society. Their vision was shared with all their subjects and was in turn embodied by many. Though their lives were immersed in the needs of a specific time and place, the accounts of their deeds resonate as a living possibility without the constraints of time and space.

So it is said of the ancestral sovereigns

If there is a vision of mercy in this world,
It is Ashoka.
If there is a vision of victory in this world,
It is Gesar.
If there is a vision of luminosity in this world,
It is Yung Lo.
If there is a vision of true warriorship in this world,
It is Shotoku Taishi.
-The Razor of Kalapa


V

Even the most cursory review of human history cannot avoid the fact that to live on this earth is to inhabit a slaughterhouse. For more than five thousand years, the number of lives subjected to war, slavery, starvation, plague, grinding labor, random violence and terrible uncertainty dwarf the number of lives that have been prosperous and secure. We cannot escape the recognition that our heroes tower over battlefields littered with legions of the anonymous dead and our histories of our momentary Golden Ages do not recount the lives of the masses that endured the grinding misery of unending servitude.

And yet, at the same time, human beings have never ceased to produce heroes, moral exemplars, teachers and artists. The past is equally bursting with heartbreaking and hauntingly beautiful artifacts: pottery, sculpture, painting, songs, stories, dances, buildings, philosophies and spiritual visions.

Truly, suffering and beauty are inextricable in this realm and it is here that the four ancestral sovereigns have by their great endeavors marked their age with the light of an inspiration that continues into our own time.

A definitive representation of such figures is neither possible nor, perhaps, fruitful. The stories of the ancestral sovereigns can manifest in innumerable permutations and renditions as epic, as fiction, as song, music and drama. One hopes, in exploring and presenting the stories of these rulers, that they open a further and more intense and deeper sense of life altogether.

Because, as is said:

As a kingdom on this earth,
As a Pure Land ,
As eternal in the human heart,

Shambhala opens
In the unchanging heart-light
To which you return.
-The Razor of Kalapa