Mongolia
The war of Shambhala, adapted to the steppe.
When Tibetan Buddhism became the religion of the Mongol courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it carried the Kālacakra literature: the prophecy of a final war between Shambhala and the barbarian armies of the age, ending in the victory of the dharma. The Mongolian chronicles, above all the Altan Tobči, embed this eschatology inside a national history in which the Chinggisid line is bound to a cosmic schedule.
The indigenous layer is older and harder to recover: a sky-and-earth cosmology in which the ot (fire) and the tngri (sky powers) sustain an order that can be offended and restored, not a creation moving toward a verdict. Before the Buddhist reception, the Mongolic peoples renewed the world continuously rather than concluded it.
The same Shambhala motif that Tibet internalised as an inner war, Mongolia externalised again, mapping it onto the destiny of a people. The tradition is treated in Mongolian Eschatology, beside Kalachakra and the War of Shambhala and Buddhist Eschatology.
See also
- Mongolian EschatologyA steppe Buddhism that received the Kalachakra war and the Shambhala myth, and a
- Kalachakra and the War of ShambhalaThe Wheel of Time's final war: the hidden kingdom of Shambhala preserves the dha
- Buddhist EschatologyBuddhism looks to the decline of the Dharma after the Buddha's teaching, a futur
- TibetThe Kalachakra tantra, transmitted to Tibet in the eleventh century, holds that