Tibet | Shambhala | Japanese Pilgrim Ekai Kawaguchi

Much of what we know about Agvan Dorzhiev and his connection with the Shambhala Mythologem comes from the writings of Ekai Kawaguchi, a Japanese pilgrim who had traveled to Tibet in 1900. Disgusted by what he considered the worldliness and corruption of Buddhism as practiced in Japan he set out for India in June of 1897 in hopes of finding a truer, more authentic brand of the faith. By July of 1900 he had moved on to Tibet. He was reportedly the first Japanese to ever enter the country. He was traveling incognito, since foreigners were not allowed in the country at the time. That he arrived penniless and had to learn the Tibetan language on the fly and yet somehow managed to survive and even prosper in Tibet is a testament to his ingenuity and perseverance. 

Ekai Kawaguchi

His book about his travels, Three Years in Tibet, is full of picaresque details. If we are to believe his account, Tibetan women found him, a celibate Japanese monk, well-nigh irresistible, and he spent a good deal of his time fending off their amorous advances. He escaped marriage to one love-lorn lady only by the skin of his teeth. He also had a lot to say about the Mongols he encountered in Tibet:

How lazy and sluggish the average Tibetans are, it is almost beyond the power of Westerners to imagine. Not so with the Mongols: one never sees them enjoying themselves in such an indolent fashion. They study very hard and always take a very active part in the catechetical exercises, principally because they are alive to the purpose for which they have come so far from their home and country. Four hundred out of the five hundred Mongols are generally fine students; while the ratio has to be inverted in the case of Tibetans, four hundred and fifty out of five hundred of whom are but trash . . . Mongols are studious and progressive, but one common fault with them is that they are very quick-tempered, so that the slightest thing causes them to flare up in tremendous rage. Being always conscious of the fact that they are the most assiduous of the students, and that the largest number of the winners of the doctor’s degree always come from amongst them, they are very proud and uppish.

Kawaguchi continues:

There was a Mongolian tribe called the Buriats, which peopled a district far away to the north-east of Tibet towards Mongolia. The tribe was originally feudatory to China, but it passed some time ago under the control of Russia. The astute Muscovites have taken great pains to insinuate themselves into the grateful regard of this tribe . . . It was evident that this policy of Russia originated from the deep-laid plan of captivating the hearts of the priests, whose influence was, as it still is, immense over the people. From this tribe quite a large number of young priests are sent to Tibet to prosecute their studies at the principal seats of Lamaist learning [restrictions on Buryats studying in Lhasa had eased by this time] . . . There must be altogether two hundred such students at those seats of learning; several able priests have appeared from among them, one of whom, Dorje [Agvan Dorzhiev] by name, became a high tutor to the present Dalai Lama while he was a minor. This great priest obtained from the Hierarchical Government some twenty years ago the honorable title of “Tsan-ni Kenbo,” which means an “instructor in the Lamaist Catechism . . .”

Kawaguchi also relates a prophecy he heard while in Tibet:

It must be remembered that a work written in former times by some Lama of the New Sect contained a prophetic pronouncement—a pronouncement which was supported by some others—that some centuries hence a mighty prince would make his appearance somewhere to the north of Kashmīr, and would bring the whole world under his sway, and under the domination of the Buḍḍhist faith. . . This announcement alone was not sufficiently attractive to awake the interest of the Tibetans, and so the unborn prince was represented as a holy incarnation of the founder of the national religion of Tibet, Tsong-kha-pa . . . The prophet went into further details and gave the name of the future great country as “Chang Shambhala;” Chang denoting “northward”. . . With a precision worthy of Swift’s pen, the prophet located the new Buḍḍhist empire of the future at a distance some three thousand miles north-west of Buḍḍhagayā (Bodhgaya) in Hinḍūsṭān, and he even described at some length the route to be taken in reaching the imaginary country.”

Dorzhiev was well aware of this prophecy and soon decided to put it to his own uses. According to Kawaguchi:

He [Dorzhiev] wrote a pamphlet with the special object of demonstrating that “Chang Shambhala” means Russia, and that the Tsar is the incarnation of Je Tsong-kha-pa [Tsongkhapa (c.1357–1419), founder of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism]. The Tsar, this Russian emissary wrote, is a worthy reincarnation of that venerable founder, being benevolent to his people, courteous in his relations to neighboring countries, and above all endowed with a virtuous mind. This fact and the existence of several points of coincidence between Russia and the country indicated in the sacred prophecy indisputably proved that Russia must be that country, that anybody who doubted it was an enemy of Buddhism and of the august will of the Founder of the New Sect, and that in short all the faithful believers in Buddhism must pay respect to the Tsar as a Chang-chub Semba Semba Chenbo, which in Tibetan indicates one next to Buddha, or as a new embodiment of the Founder, and must obey him. Such is said to be the tenor of that particular writing of the Tsan-ni Kenbo. It seems to exist in three different versions, Tibetan, Mongolian and Russian.

As noted, the original prophecy supposedly stated that Chang Shambhala was three thousand miles northwest of Bodhgaya, in India. It was probably no coincidence that Moscow was just over 3000 miles northwest of Bodhgaya. Kawaguchi goes on to note:

Tsan-ni Kenbo’s [Dorzhiev’s] artful scheme has been crowned with great success, for today almost every Tibetan blindly believes in the ingenious story concocted by the Mongolian priest, and holds that the Tsar will sooner or later subdue the whole world and found a gigantic Buḍḍhist empire. So the Tibetans may be regarded as extreme Russophiles, thanks to the machination of the Tsan-ni Kenbo.

Kawaguchi admits that he never actually saw the pamphlet in question, but only heard second-hand accounts of it, and several commentators have pointed out that a copy of the pamphlet has never surfaced and some doubt that it ever existed. However, another pamphlet supposedly written by Dorzhiev in much the same vein did turn up in the archives of the East India Company. Apparently a Mongolian lama gave a copy of it to a British official in Darjeeling. Also written in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Russian, in it the author “‘explained to the Grand Lama [Dalai Lama] the many advantages which the Buddhist Church would gain by friendship with so great a monarch, and represented that if the Grand Lama visited the Russian capital he might convert the Tsar to the Buddhist faith.’” Although attributed to Dorzhiev, there is again no conclusive proof that Dorzhiev himself was the author of this document. However, a Kalmyk lama by the name of Dambo Ulyanov who visited Tibet in 1904–05 did reiterate much of what Dorzhiev had supposedly written in a document entitled “Predictions about the House of Romanov and a Brief Account of My Travel to Tibet”, published in St. Petersburg in 1913. Yet another pamphlet, a copy of which was said to be in St. Petersburg, “claims to trace the history of the Romanov Dynasty of Russia back to King Suchandra  [the first King of Shambhala, to whom the Buddha, according to tradition, taught the Kalachakra Tantra to Shambhala.” Thus when the Younghusband Mission appeared on the Tsangpo south of Lhasa Dorzhiev already had the Thirteenth Dalai Lama primed and loaded to flee north to Mongolia and then on to Russia, the new Chang Shambhala.

Suchandra, first King of Shambhala