Shambhala, the Happy Land

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 5 pages

A short editorial appendix written in reply to T. Subba Row, and the standard reference in the library for what Shambhala is taken to be. The legend, she writes, is alive to this day among the people of Tibet: the fair island is no more, but the country where it once bloomed remains, and the spot is known to some of the great teachers of the snowy mountains, however much the cataclysm convulsed its topography. Every seventh year those teachers are believed to assemble there.

What makes the piece useful is that she does not pretend to a precision the tradition does not have. General belief places it in north-west Tibet; some put it in the unexplored central regions inaccessible even to the nomadic tribes; others hem it between the Gangdisri range and the northern edge of the Gobi; others still between Namur-Nor and the Kuen-Lun — which, as she notes drily, affords the curious mind a pretty large latitude. What all agree on is the character of the place: a fertile, fairylike land, once an island and now an oasis, where the inheritors of the wisdom of its earlier inhabitants meet. The closing paragraph makes a different kind of argument, pointing to what geologists already accepted — that the substance of those peaks was once part of a sea floor.

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