As related by Joanna Macy

This story is about the coming of the Kingdom of Shambhala, and it is also about you and me. I learned of it from my Tibetan friends in India in 1980, when I heard many of them speak of this twelve-century-old Tibetan Buddhist prophesy as coming true in our time. The signs it foretold, they said, are recognizable now, in this generation. Since it speaks of a time of great danger – apocalypse – I was, as you can imagine, very interested to find out about it.

Some interpretations portray the coming of the Kingdom of Shambhala as an internal event, a metaphor for one’s inner spiritual journey, independent of the world around us. Other interpretations present it as an entirely external event that will unfold in our world independent of what we as individuals may choose to do, or what our personal participation in the healing of our world may be.

A third version was given to me by my friend and Dharma brother Cheogyal Rinpoche of the Tashi Jong community in northern India:

There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. At this time two great powers have arisen; these are the “laloes” [barbarians]. One is in the western hemisphere and one in the center of the Eurasian land mass. Although these two powers have spent their wealth in preparations to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable death and devastation, and technologies that lay waste our world.

It is in this time, when the whole future of sentient life seems to hang on the frailest of threads, that the Kingdom of Shambhala begins to emerge.

Now, you can’t go there, for it’s not a place, not a geographical entity. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. [That is the term Choegyal used: “warriors.”] Nor can you recognize a Shambhala warrior when you see her or him, for they wear no uniforms, no insignia, and carry no banners. They have no barricades on which to climb to threaten the enemy, or behind which they can rest, to hide, recoup or regroup. They haven’t even any home turf – for always they must move on the terrain of the “laloes” or barbarians.

Now the time comes when great courage, moral and physical, is required of the Shambhala warriors, for they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power, into the pits and pockets and citadels where the weapons are kept, to dismantle them. To dismantle weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where decisions are made.

Now, the Shambhala warriors have the courage to do this because they know that these weapons are “manomaya”: mind made. Made by the human mind, they can be unmade by the human mind. The Shambhala warriors know the dangers that threaten life on Earth are not visited upon us by extraterrestrial powers, satanic deities or any preordained evil fate – rather, they arise from our own decisions, our own lifestyles, our own relationships.

So in this time, the Shambhala warriors go into training….

When Choegyal said this, I asked, “How do they train?”

“They train,” he said, “in the use of two weapons.”

“What weapons?” I asked. He held up his hand in the way lamas hold the ritual objects of bell and dorje in the lama dance.

The weapons are COMPASSION and INSIGHT. Both are necessary. You have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion to move – when you open to the pain of the world, you move.

But that weapon by itself is not enough. Alone, it can burn you out. So you need the other: insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena, their interconnectedness, their deep ecology. With that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between the good guys and the bad guys, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.

With that insight into our profound interrelatedness, you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern. By itself, insight may appear too cool, too conceptual, to sustain you and keep you moving, so you need the heat of compassion.

Together, within each Shambhala warrior and among the Shambhala warriors as a group, these two weapons can sustain us as agents of social change. They are gifts for us to claim now in the healing of our world.