People tend to look for something that may never have been in the world.
At various times they were looking for the Promised Land, Atlantis, the kingdom of Presbyter John - but you never know what else. Sometimes confusion arose, because people are able to fantasize and have speech, and words change meanings, that is, not only people "play with words", but also words, including the names of places, one might say, "play with people."
At the end of the 19th century, people had a new object for their search: Shambhala. In Europe, they first heard about Shambhala in 1627 from two Jesuits. They wandered across South Asia, entertaining the natives with stories about Jesus and the other world, and they were told that, they say, thank you, we already have Shambhala, the seat of the Great Teachers. And they pointed their fingers north.
Subsequently, Shambhala was searched for in the Gobi Desert, in the Himalayas and in the Pamirs, but at that time these places were not only not explored, but were not even discovered, and therefore neither the Spanish, nor the Portuguese, and no other authorities sent expeditions to who knows where to search for the heterodox did not become paradise.
Chasing a dream
But dreamy people, inclined to philosophizing, are interested! And if there is demand, then sooner or later there will be an offer. In the 18th century, an instruction appeared on how to get to the Buddhist paradise: "The history of Aryadeshi and the path to Shambhala, the Holy Land." It was composed by the Tibetan lama Lobsang Palden Yeshe.
The lama teaches that one must master the art of contemplation and meditation, because the path to Shambhala is not external, but internal. Having long forgotten that once their own priests also "went into themselves", for the sake of greater meditation, having eaten the bayun grass, the Europeans accepted as a revelation that they would see monsters, winged lions, demons and other horrors on the way. They did not understand that this was about the inner, about a journey to the other world in dreams, but decided that in fact, winged lions and demons live somewhere in Asia. The speculative "country" began to acquire features of "reality" in the minds of people.
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Alice Bailey, one of the first who introduced Shambhala into esoteric constructions, did not consider it an ordinary country among others, but believed that this is the name of the place on Earth where the planetary Logos focuses its energies. Helena Blavatsky taught that the coming Messiah would be born here, whose name is unknown, but before his name was Vishnu, Buddha, Christ, etc., and that you can get to Shambhala, but the path is not open to everyone.
Judging by the writings of these theorists, the search on Earth for the "real Shambhala" would have no more chances of success than the search for Christian hell or heaven.
Search Engines Practice
In the 19th century, Asia began to actively explore: from the north to its center, the Russian Geographical Society and the General Staff of the Russian Army sent more than twenty expeditions. Przhevalsky, Obruchev, Grumm-Grzhimailo, Semenov-Tyan-Shansky and others did not look for Shambala, but were engaged in route surveys, astronomical and other observations, collected collections of plants and minerals.
And from the south, Asia was colonized by the British, and the question of who would control the center of the continent intensified from year to year. It hardly came to shootouts.
In 1904, the British invaded Tibet, took Lhasa. The Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia, where he discussed plans to emigrate to Buryatia with the Russians. Meanwhile, Petersburg, after being defeated by its British ally, Japan, curtailed activity in the region and recognized many lands as a British sphere of influence. Of course, there was no question of Shambhala, and suddenly a new plot twist: Buddhists declared Shambhala … Russia!
In Russia, Buddhism was recognized as the official religion in 1741 by the decree of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. And in the XX century, the Buryat monk Aghvan Dorzhiev, adviser to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, in view of the pressure from the British, persuaded his boss to turn to the king for help, assuring him that Shambhala was Russia. After all, Shambhala, according to legend, is located north of Tibet - and Russia too!
They turned to Nicholas II, but by this time Russia and England had agreed on Tibet as follows: together to maintain its independence and neutrality, entering into relations with the Dalai Lama exclusively through the mediation of the Chinese government. And although England clearly violated this treaty, the Buddhists did not achieve political success in St. Petersburg. But they received permission to build their own temple (datsan) here.
The datsan was opened in 1915, and the Russian artist Nicholas Roerich was part of the committee for its construction.
Expedition of Nicholas Roerich
Nicholas Roerich "fell ill" with Shambhala and in 1924-1928, in the company of his son Yuri and his wife Elena, visited China, Mongolia, Tibet and many other places. Along the way, he studied plants and languages, painted pictures, but above all he was looking for Shambhala. He had an old "guide to Shambhala", which said that this was an internal spiritual search, but at the same time he asked all the people he met, where they had Shambhala, and later wrote that he had personally heard countless stories about her. Of course, if you ask many, you will hear from many.
Roerich arrived in Tibet as a representative of an American Buddhist organization. Expecting a meeting with the Dalai Lama, he asked to make and send him from America the Order of the All-Conquering Buddha in order to reward the high priest. But in the fall of 1927, the expedition was delayed by the Tibetan authorities, it had to endure snow and frost for several months, and the meeting with the Dalai Lama did not take place! As soon as the artist escaped to civilized places, he immediately wrote to the Buddhist center in New York that the lama was wrong and it was necessary to distance ourselves from him.
Roerich did not find Shambhala. This did not stop him from describing it in his book as a holy city north of India. Well, at the same time, so that the innumerable stories of oncoming and transverse ones would not be lost in vain, he noted the clear similarity of Shambhala with Tula - a country hidden at the North Pole, and the undoubted connection of Shambhala with the underground kingdom of Agharti, where an underground tunnel under the Himalayas goes. The philosopher was not at all embarrassed that no one had ever seen Thule and that kingdom, and had not wandered through the invented tunnel.
Unlike America, Russia at that moment could not send an expedition to Asia on dozens of camels, and therefore one person set off on the road, but what one: the Chekist Yakov Blumkin, polyglot and adventurer. The top of the Cheka knew about the project, and the main ideologist was Barchenko, a fanatic of Shambhala. He even tried to interest the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), probably out of the considerations that there is no one to organize the proletarian revolution in Asia due to the absence of the proletariat, so why not rely on the monks? Later, this idea was buried along with most of those involved.
Blumkin, pretending to be a dervish, then a wandering Buddhist and collecting intelligence, reached Tibet, joined Roerich's expedition and made such a strong impression on him that he received the nickname "young lama". The artist even painted a painting "The News of Shambhala", which depicts "Lama Yakov".
The famous fighter against the Bolsheviks, Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, in 1920 led his army from Russia to Mongolia.
There, the lamas told him about Agharti, the underground kingdom located under Mongolia. The baron was imbued with the idea and already believed that he understood the soul of the local population. But Sukhe-Bator, the pro-Soviet leader of the Mongols, who opposed him, turned out to be a more advanced mystic: raising his fighters to battle with the "black baron", he promised them that, having died in battle, in the next life they would be reborn as warriors of Shambhala. This prospect inspired the heroes, and they, having defeated Ungern, took the capital of Mongolia Urgu (now Ulan Bator). True, the Red Army helped them a little.
Leonid MOSKVIN
The official reports of the Nazis said - Shambhala does not exist! But this did not prevent them from gazing intently into non-existent horizons.
The leaders of the Third Reich did not deprive their attention of the mysterious Shambhala. Even before the start of the war, the Nazis sent several expeditions to Tibet. Officially, they were considered scientific research. However, in fact, many "geologists" and "anthropologists" turned out to be scouts or members of occult Nazi organizations - "Legacy of the Ancestors", "Order of the Green Dragon" and "Ahnenerbe". Their goal was to conclude an alliance with the powerful rulers of Shambhala, so that they would help the "Aryan brothers" to defeat.
It is believed that expeditions were sent annually, up to 1943. Some researchers even believe that the Nazis really managed to find a mysterious country, but the rulers of Shambhala refused to help them. In Hitler's entourage, not everyone adhered to occult views. And the most sane generals tried to convince the Fuhrer that the enormous forces and money spent on the search for the mythical Shambhala would have been better spent on real goals.
For example, the organization of the assassination attempt on the "big three" Stalin - Churchill - Roosevelt, which met in Tehran in November 1943. Fortunately for the whole world, Hitler began to listen to these voices of reason too late. Therefore, attempts at terrorist attacks in Tehran were successfully prevented, and Germany's chances of winning the war finally evaporated.
