Kritik am Buch „The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama ... - Neues von Shi De

doctrine, they are considered sacrosanct. They are pure, good, and exemplary. Since Trungpa’s
Shambhala Training unquestioningly incorporates all of the established tantric deities, the entire
martial field of Tibetan Buddhism with its entrenched concept of “the enemy” and its repellant
daemonic power is adopted by people who naively and obligingly set out to attain personal
enlightenment.
We thus have the impression that the pupils of the tantra masters are exposed to a hypnotic suggestion
so as to make them believe that their own spiritual development was the agenda whereas they have
long since become the pawns of Tibetan occultism in whose unfathomable net of regulations (tantra
means ‘net’) they have become entrapped. Once their personal ambitions have been dissolved into
nothingness they can be enslaved as the loyal lackeys of a spiritual power politics which no longer
sees the “higher self” in the “universal monarch” but rather a real political “wrathful wheel
turner” (Rudra Chakrin) who lays waste to the world with his armies from Shambhala so as to then
establish a global Buddhocracy.
Other Western Shambhala visions
James Hilton's novella, Lost Horizon, published in 1933, counts among the best-sellers of the last
century. It tells of a monastery in the Land of Snows whose name, Shangri-La, is reminiscent of the
kingdom of Shambhala. The term has in the meantime become a synonym for leisure, refinement, and
taste, at least in the English-speaking world, and is employed by an Asian luxury hotel chain. The
idyll described in the book concerns people who had retreated from the hustle and bustle of the
modern world to the Himalayas and now devote themselves to exclusively spiritual enjoyments. It is,
however, no Tibetan tulku but rather a Catholic missionary who collects together those tired of
civilization in a hidden valley in the Land of Snows so as to share with them a study of the fine arts
and an extended lifespan. The “monks” from the West do not even need to do without European
bathtubs — otherwise unknown in the Tibet of the thirties. The essence of the Shangri- La myth
ultimately consists in the transportation of “real” products of European culture and civilization to the
“roof of the world”.
The most recent western attempt at spreading the Tibetan myth is Victoria LePage's book, Shambhala.
The author presents the secret kingdom as an overarching mystery school, whose high priests are
active as “an invisible, scientific and philosophical society which pursues its studies in the majestic
isolation of the Himalayas” (LePage, 1996, p. 13). For LePage Shambhala is the esoteric center of all
religions, the secret location from which every significant occult, and hence also religious, current of
the world has emanated. Esoteric Buddhism, and likewise the ancient Egyptian priestly schools, the
Pythagoreans, Sufism, the Knights Templar, alchemy, the Cabala, Freemasonry, Theosophy — yes
even the witches cults — all originated here. Accordingly, the Kalachakra Tantra is the overarching
“secret doctrine” from which all other mystery doctrines may be derived (LePage, 1996, p. 8).
The mythic kingdom, which is governed by a sun ruler, is to be found in Central Asia, there where the
axis of the world, Mount Meru, is also to be sought. This carefree adoption of Buddhist cosmology
does not present the author with any difficulties since the axis mundi is said to only be visible to the
initiated. In accordance with the mandala principle her Shambhala has distributed numerous copies of
itself all over the world — the Pyramids of Giza, the monastery at Athos, Kailash, the holy mountain.
Sites of the Grail like Glastonbury and Rennes le Chateau are such “offshoots” of the hidden
imperium — likewise only perceivable through initiated eyes. Together they form the acupuncture
points of a cosmic body which corresponds to the mystic body of the Kalachakra master (i.e., taken