The Shambhala Warrior

From the Tibetan Buddhist tradition:
a metaphor for a being known as a Bodhisattva.

There comes a time when all life on earth is in great danger. Great barbarian powers have arisen, unrestrained and blind with lust for power, loving not the earth, not her beauty, but only power. Although they amass untold stores of wealth and resources, they squander their holdings in massive preparations to annihilate each other. Sworn mortal enemies, they are intimately connected, like images in a mirror, and have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste the world.

So, it is now, in this time of danger, when the future of all beings hangs by the frailest of threads, that the Kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

You cannot go to Shambhala for it is not a place. The Kingdom of Shambhala exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors. But you cannot recognize Shambhala warriors by sight, for they wear no uniform or insignia, there are no banners, crests or shields. And they have no barricades from which to threaten the enemy, for the Shambhala warriors have no land of their own. Always they move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.

Now comes the time when great courage is required of these warriors, moral and physical courage. For they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power and dismantle the monstrous weapons. To remove these weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where the decisions are made and the weapons are devised and guarded.

The Shambhala warriors know they can do this because they understand that the weapons, however horrible their carnage and vast their reach, are "manomaya"—all these weapons and all their devastation are created by the human mind. So they can be unmade by the human mind.

The dangers that threaten life on Earth do not come from evil deities or malevolent extraterrestrial powers. They arise directly from our own choices and relationships. So the Shambhala warriors must go forward to defeat them with only two weapons of their own.

The weapons of the Shambhala warriors are compassion and insight. Compassion moves us to act on behalf of other beings, from the fire of our hearts, yet by itself its heat can burn us out. So the second weapon is needed as well: insight into the interdependent, co-arising nature of all things. This lets us see that the battle to be waged is not between good people and bad people, but rather, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. With insight we realize that we are interconnected, and that each act undertaken with pure motivation affects the entire web, bringing consequences we cannot measure or even see. Yet insight alone can be too cool, so to proceed with strength and clarity, we need the fuel and fire of compassion, of our openness to the world's pain.

Used skillfully and courageously, these together are the only tools available to the Shambhala warrior to disarm the weapons of the barbarians and bring into being the kingdom of Shambhala. Armed with these weapons and single-minded intention, these warriors will bring their kingdom into being.

This legend of the Shambhala warrior, of the bodhisattva path to disarming evil and creating the reality of peace, is available to us, and valuable to us, as we face the unprecedented challenges of these times.