Shambhala (Kingdom)

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Shambhala (also Shambala, Shamballa, Tibetan : བདེ་ འབྱུང་ ; Wylie: bde 'byung, pronounced De-jang) is a mythical kingdom in Tibetan Buddhism that is said to be hidden somewhere in Central Asia and especially plays a role in the tradition of Kalachakra .

The Buddhist Shambhala myth was taken up and expanded in Western esotericism , initially primarily by Helena Blavatsky , theosophical and ariosophical and from the 1960s by occult and right-wing esoteric authors as well as in the context of speculations about occult influences on National Socialism. Similar concepts such as that of the subterranean kingdom of Agartha were incorporated into the transformation and, together with places such as the fictional hidden paradise of Shangri-La, were incorporated into popular culture.

Shambhala in the Buddhist tradition

In Tibetan Buddhism, the traditional legend of Shambhala describes a mythical kingdom that preserves the teachings of Buddhism, especially Kalachakra , while the world is overrun by barbarians , who are mostly identified as Muslims. After they have triumphed and wiped out the Dharma , the 25th King of Shambhala, Raudra Chakrin, leaves his kingdom with a Buddhist army and destroys the barbarians. According to legend, this marked the beginning of a new age of pure Buddhism.

Chögyam Trungpa founded his own school of Shambhala Buddhism . He brought the traditions of Kagyu and Nyingma from Tibetan Buddhism together and combined them with his Shambhala philosophy, which he had presented in the work Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the warrior in the 1970s. The aim was to give western people easy access to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism.

Shambhala in Western esotericism

Shambhala was first mentioned in the west in 1833 in an English article by Sándor Csoma .

In the reception by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Shambhala became a real geographic place and seat of the Lord of the World , which was located in the Gobi desert . After the fall of Atlantis and Lemuria , the chosen of the fourth root race escaped there, and the core of the fifth root race was formed, with the first sub-race of the Indian Aryans and the currently most highly developed fifth sub-race of the whites.

These ideas were taken up and further developed by theosophists, other authors such as Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln and Jan van Rijckenborgh, as well as right-wing esoteric authors such as Miguel Serrano and Wilhelm Landig , and in speculations on occult influences on National Socialism by Gerald Suster , Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier as well Trevor Ravenscroft .

The teachings of Adyar theosophy designate Shambala as the abode of the wise masters of the greatest brotherhood of spiritual adepts.

In his book The Brotherhood of Shamballah , the founder of the Lectorium Rosicrucianum claims that the seat of the Brotherhood of Shamballa, which directs world redemption, is in Central Asia (Gobi Desert).

According to the right-wing esotericist Miguel Serrano , Adolf Hitler is a tantra master from the Kingdom of Shamballah, where he lives today. After the Second World War, the entrance to Shamballah between Shigatse and Gyantse was closed and moved to the South Pole . Since then, Hitler has been waiting for a favorable opportunity to defeat the powers of darkness in an end-time war and then to establish the “Fourth Reich”.

In the first volume of a romantic trilogy on the Thule myth written by Wilhelm Landig and received mainly in right-wing extremist circles , a Tibetan abbot named Ngön-kyi Padma Dab-yang reports about Shambala and Agartha as opposing sources of material and spiritual energies. Shambala is the source of the material energies of the path of the left hand , a city of power and strength ruled by the king of fear . The opposite pole is the city of Agartha , source of the spiritual energy of the path of the right hand , an inner, subterranean realm of contemplation and the spirit. In Agartha the Lord and King of the world rule, who at a predetermined time will lead the good in a campaign against the bad to establish the Mongol Empire . Certain personalities of the Third Reich would have completely submitted to the destructive forces of Shamballa, thereby playing into the hands of Stalin, his envoy . Landig's source is apparently Le Matin des magiciens (1960) by Pauwels and Bergier.

In his best-selling conspiracy theory, Secret Societies and Their Power , Jan Udo Holey , better known as Jan van Helsing, reports on a myth allegedly handed down by the Thule Society , according to which Shambhala and Agartha are not opposing forces, but that Agartha is an underground kingdom and Shambhala is its capital. According to this, a pre- worldly super race of Aryans, who came to earth from the star Aldebaran, inhabited a continent called Hyperborea , which, however , sank during the Ice Age. With their superior technology, they would have drilled huge tunnel systems under the Himalayas and founded the empire "Agartha" or "Agarthi" with its capital "Shamballah" there.

Jan van Helsing then notes that, contrary to this , according to the geographer Karl Haushofer , the former residents of Thule / Atlantis / Hyperborea split into two groups, namely the good guys who called themselves "Agarthi" after their oracle and sat under the Himalayas, and their opponents, the representatives of evil called "Shamballah", who went west. This struggle between good and evil would continue into Haushofer's presence, with the Thule Society and Third Reich representing the good Agarthi and Freemasons and Zionists representing the evil Shamballah at the time. The ruler of the underground kingdom is the Rigden Iyepo , the king of the world, represented on the surface of the earth by the Dalai Lama . Haushofer comes into play here because he is said to have met Hitler during his imprisonment in Landsberg and to have introduced him to the concepts of geopolitics and also to Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race . A very similar story is developed in this novel, namely that of a super-race living in an underground realm, who ruled spirit and matter with the help of the so-called Vril force. It is not proven that Haushofer would have advocated any esoteric hollow world theories .

The Shambhala myth was also incorporated into its eschatology by Shōkō Asahara , the founder and leader of Ōmu Shinrikyō , a religious group also known as the AUM sect . According to this, Japan should first be converted into a Shambhala kingdom based on the so-called Lotus Villages of the sect, and finally the whole world should become Shambhala. Asahara portrayed himself as the embodiment of the eschatological king of Shambhala, the warrior king who leads the armies of Shambhala in the apocalyptic war. On a very small scale, the sect was able to realize an apocalyptic scenario in 1995 through the poison gas attack in the Tokyo subway .

When US troops failed to get hold of Osama bin Laden during the Afghan war , American esotericists speculated in 2002 that he might have withdrawn into the underground world of Shambhala, whose entrances were located in various places in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Localizations and expeditions

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Reception in popular culture

literature

  • Martin Brauen : dream world Tibet: western illusions. Publishing house Paul Haupt Berne, Bern; Stuttgart; Vienna 2000, ISBN 3-258-05639-0 .
  • Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke : Black Sun Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press 2002, ISBN 0-8147-3124-4 .
  • Joscelyn Godwin : Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. Adventures Unlimited Press 1996, ISBN 0-932813-35-6 , pp. 95-104.
  • Katja Rakow: Transformations of Tibetan Buddhism in the 20th Century: Chögyam Trungpa and the Development of Shambhala Training. Diss. Univ. Heidelberg, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen / Bristol 2014, ISBN 978-3-525-54018-3 , especially chap. 4: Religious historical background: Tibetan Buddhism and the myth of Shambhala , pp. 109–156
  • Chögyam Trungpa : Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior . Shambhala, Boston 2007, ISBN 978-0-8348-2120-0
  • Andrei Znamenski: Red Shambhala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia. Quest Books, Wheaton, Ill. 2011, ISBN 978-0-8356-0891-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johan Elverskog: Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, And the State in Late Imperial China . University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 2006, ISBN 0-8248-3021-0 , p. 140
  2. ↑ Jeffrey Ourvan: The Star Spangled Buddhist: Zen, Tibetan, and Soka Gakkai Buddhism and the Quest for Enlightenment in America . Skyhorse Publishing, New York City 2013, ISBN 978-1-62087-639-8 , p. 80
  3. ↑ Brewing: Dream World Tibet. Haupt, 2000, p. 47, p. 67.
  4. ↑ Eva Kingsepp: The power of the black sun. (Ok) cultural perspectives on Nazi / SS esotericism. In: Zeitschrift für Anomalistik 15 , pp. 89–93 (2015).
  5. ↑ Brewing: Dream World Tibet. Haupt, 2000, p. 60, p. 67, p. 69ff., P. 75, p. 91, p. 234 and p. 247.
  6. ↑ Horst E. Miers : Lexicon of Secret Knowledge (= Esoteric. Vol. 12179). Original edition; and 3rd updated edition, both Goldmann, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-442-12179-5 , pp. 124 and 571.
  7. ↑ Brewing: Dream World Tibet. Haupt, 2000, pp. 65-66.
  8. ^ Wilhelm Landig: Idols against Thule. Hans Pfeiffer Verlag, Hanover 1971, pp. 629–31. Quoted from: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Black Sun Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press 2002, pp. 141 f.
  9. ^ A b Jan van Helsing: Secret societies and their power in the 20th century. Or how not to rule the world. , Ewertverlag, 1993, pp. 104-110.
  10. ↑ Rudolf Hess was a student of Haushofer and Haushofer visited Hess in Landsberg several times. A closer relationship between Haushofer and Hitler is not proven.
  11. ↑ Brewing: Dream World Tibet. Haupt, 2000, p. 73.
  12. ^ Dawn Perlmutter: Investigating Religious Terrorism and Ritualistic Crimes. CRC Press, Boca Raton 2004, ISBN 0-8493-1034-2 , pp. 34-36.
  13. ↑ Michael Barkun : A Culture of Conspiracy. Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America . University of California Press, Berkeley 2013, p. 167 f. Compare Osama in Shambhala? In: UFO Roundup 7 (January 1, 2002), [1] .