The Kingdom at the End of Time

Introduction

They totally differ from us in religion, as we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa.

al-Biruni, Kitab ta’rikh al-Hind, c. 1030, tr. Sachau

Al-Biruni wrote that about the Indians he had spent years studying, and he meant it. His own book proves him wrong. Few medieval writers took another civilisation’s beliefs as seriously as he did.

That tension is a good place to start.

The Kalachakra Tantra is an eleventh-century Buddhist text. It foresees a final war between Shambhala, a hidden kingdom in the north, and the followers of a religion founded in Mecca. Alexander Berzin has written about this prophecy more than once, first in a short essay of 2002 and later in a fuller account for Study Buddhism. His reading is careful. The tradition interprets the war on several levels at once: as a historical conflict, allowed only in defence and only within ethical limits, and as an inner battle against ignorance and hatred, which it ranks higher. Berzin set this beside Islamic teaching on sacred struggle and found the same pattern there, down to the defensive limit and a similar record of rulers borrowing sacred language for their own wars.

This essay starts from that comparison and follows it outward. The Kalachakra knows Islam far better than its polemic suggests. And its central images recur across Islamic, Zoroastrian, Hindu and Christian material: a hidden sanctuary, a king who returns at the end of an age, a war fought inside the body.

A note on method. Two traditions can resemble each other because one borrowed from the other, because long contact blurred them together without any single moment of transfer, or because both thought separately about the same human situation. Where the evidence for borrowing is good, the essay says so. Where it is not, a parallel is offered as a parallel. Several of the links below are still open questions in the scholarship, and they are presented that way.

The two registers of struggle

The traditions discussed here agree on very little about the nature of the self. Most of them still describe its discipline as a war, and most rank that inner campaign above any outer one.

The best-known Islamic version is a report about the Prophet coming home from an expedition. He tells his companions that they have returned from the lesser struggle to the greater, and that the greater is the servant’s struggle against his own desire. The report is much loved and weakly transmitted. Al-Bayhaqi, who preserved it in his Kitab al-zuhd al-kabir, flagged the weakness of its chain himself, and Ibn Hajar later agreed. The idea survives without the chain. The Qur’an promises that “those who strive in Us, We shall surely guide in Our ways” (29:69). Ibn al-Qayyim never used the language of greater and lesser, but he called the struggle against the ego, desire, Satan and attachment to the world the most binding form of striving.

Al-Ghazali gave the inner campaign an administration. In the Kimiya-yi sa’adat the body is a city. The heart is its king and the intellect his vizier, while desire and anger are officials who serve well only as long as they obey. The book on the marvels of the heart in his Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din builds this out into an account of the heart’s armies.

Rumi needed one image. In the first book of the Masnavi, breaking the enemy’s ranks is the easy thing. The true lion is the one who breaks himself.

The Buddhist parallel is close in image and far apart in metaphysics. In the eighth-century Bodhicaryavatara, Shantideva treats anger, craving and confusion as worse enemies than any outside foe, because they live in the mind and there is nowhere to run from them. Tibetan even translates arhat, the liberated one, as dgra bcom pa: “one who has vanquished the foe”.

The Kalachakra takes the idea furthest. The whole system rests on a set of parallels between the outer world, the human body and meditative practice, so its war means something on each level. Outwardly it is a historical conflict. In practice, Berzin explains, the invaders stand for unawareness, disturbing emotions, destructive behaviour and the karmic forces those leave behind. The rival castes of Shambhala that have to merge into one stand for the body’s conflicting energy-winds, which in advanced practice dissolve into the subtlest level of mind, the “clear light”. The army of Shambhala is the realisation of voidness that follows, and it is what defeats ignorance. The tantra is explicit about which level comes first:

The battle with the lord of the non-Indic invaders is definitely inside the body of embodied beings. On the other hand, the external (level of the battle) is, in fact, an illusory form. (Thus,) the battle with the non-Indic invaders in the case of Mecca is not (actually) a battle.

Abridged Kalachakra Tantra, tr. Berzin

Its great commentary, the Vimalaprabha attributed to the Second Kalki Pundarika, says the same.

“Inside the body” is meant literally. The Kalachakra belongs to a family of Indian systems that locate spiritual change in a subtle anatomy of channels, winds and centres. Muslim contemplatives met comparable material in the Amrtakunda, a lost Indian yoga text translated into Arabic as Hawd al-hayat. Carl Ernst has counted about forty-five manuscripts of it, many in Istanbul and several misattributed to Ibn ‘Arabi. In the sixteenth century the Shattari master Muhammad Ghawth reworked the material in Persian as Bahr al-hayat for his own disciples. Ernst describes this as yogic technique absorbed into a Sufi practice that already existed. He does not treat it as a source that Sufism grew from, and this essay keeps to his distinction.

The pattern reaches past Buddhism and Islam. Gandhi read the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Bhagavad Gita as an allegory of the heart, with Arjuna’s kinsmen standing for the loyalties and passions that divide a person against himself. Paul told the Ephesians that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” (6:12, KJV) and described armour made of truth, righteousness and faith.

Each names the enemy differently: the lower self, the afflictions, ignorance, the powers of darkness. Those differences are real. What they share is a conviction that the decisive fight happens inside, with no witnesses.

The Kalachakra’s knowledge of Islam

A text that predicts war with a foreign faith might be expected to know little about it. John Newman, whose studies of the Kalachakra are the most careful in English, found the opposite. Within Sanskrit literature the tantra gives an unusually full and largely accurate account of Islamic belief and practice (Newman 1998). Its authors knew that the newcomers slaughtered animals while saying the name of their God, practised circumcision, veiled their women, and prayed five times a day facing their holy land.

The historical setting

Berzin ties the outer layer of the prophecy to a specific time, the late tenth century, and a specific fear.

The Sunni Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad and their vassals were afraid of their great rivals, the Isma’ili Fatimids of Egypt, and of the Fatimids’ allies in Multan in northern Sindh. Isma’ili teaching of the period was messianic. Its followers expected the Mahdi to unite the Islamic world under his rule, restore its purity and bring the whole world into Islam before the coming of the Dajjal, the return of Jesus and the end. The end felt close. A widely held belief put it five hundred years after Muhammad, early in the twelfth century.

Buddhists in eastern Afghanistan and in Oddiyana, the Swat valley in what is now northwestern Pakistan, lived under Hindu Shahi kings, between Multan and Baghdad. On Berzin’s reading they shared their Muslim neighbours’ fear of an Isma’ili invasion. It sharpened in 976, when eastern Afghanistan passed to the Ghaznavids, Sunni allies of the Abbasids. The invaders of the Kalachakra, on this account, are the Isma’ilis these Buddhists dreaded, and not Islam as a whole.

A second layer seems slightly later. The tantra says the invaders will first conquer the country around Delhi and then march on Shambhala. It assigns them to the asura caste, followers of jealous gods who rival the gods of Shambhala’s brahmins. Berzin suggests this part absorbed the memory of the Ghaznavid campaigns against Kashmir in 1015 and 1021, both of which failed.

Kashmir mattered for another reason. It was home to Buddhist tantra and to Hindu Shaiva tantra, and the two competed for the same patrons. To make the threat intelligible to a Hindu audience, the Kalachakra used the Hindu theory of the three gunas, the constituents of all matter. The sages of the Vedas have sattva, clarity. The avatars of Vishnu have rajas, passion. The prophets of the invaders have tamas, darkness, which here means they will destroy Indian culture.

The enumeration of prophets

The clearest evidence of what the authors knew is a single verse. The Abridged Kalachakra Tantra (I.153) names the teachers of the foreign dharma: Adam, Noah and Abraham, then Moses, Jesus, “the White-Clad One”, Muhammad and the Mahdi. Earlier translations read some of the names differently, with Enoch in place of Noah and “Mathani” for the last figure. Berzin keeps Noah and the Mahdi and identifies the White-Clad One as Mani, the founder of Manichaeism.

Leave Mani out and the list closely matches the Isma’ili count of seven law-bringing prophets, which is the basis of Berzin’s case that the tantra had the Isma’ilis of Multan in mind (Berzin 2010). Mani is harder to place. Berzin suggests a confusion with the “Manichaean” heresies that Afghan and Indian Buddhist translators would have met in Baghdad, where some of them worked for the Abbasids in the late eighth century. Neither part of the hypothesis is beyond dispute. Together they explain details that a general reading leaves loose.

Where the verse sits matters too. It comes straight after a list of the eight descents of Vishnu, and Berzin thinks the number eight was chosen to echo it. Whatever the intention, the effect is to put the prophets of one tradition where the avatars of another stand, as envoys sent one after another to successive ages. The tantra judges them harshly. A Muslim reader would still recognise the form. The Qur’an holds that every community has been sent a messenger (10:47) and says that not all of them have been named (40:78).

A calendar reckoned from the Hijra

The tantra also dates itself by Islam. It says the sixty-year astronomical cycle began 403 years after the era of “the lord of the mlecchas”, meaning Muhammad. Tibetan scholars wrote the figure in symbolic numerals, “fire-space-ocean”, counted it from 624, and arrived at 1027 CE.

That year opens the first rab byung cycle of the Tibetan calendar. Tibetan almanacs still number their cycles from it; the seventeenth began in 1987. The final war, predicted for 2424, is counted from the same starting point, eighteen centuries on.

A tradition that saw Islam as its chief adversary set its own clock by the Prophet’s era.

The vajra-caste as a response

The First Kalki of Shambhala, Manjushri Yashas, is said to have seen the danger coming. The brahmins of his kingdom were divided and neglected their own scriptures, and many people would drift to the new religion. His remedy was the Kalachakra initiation, which brought everyone into a single “vajra-caste”. Hindus and Buddhists would stop avoiding each other and stand as one society. Only a society united in this way could follow a future king, Kalki, against an invasion led by the Mahdi.

Berzin insists that this was not a call to convert anyone. It answered Hindu practice in kind. Hindus already counted the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu, which made every Buddhist a good Hindu. The Kalachakra turned this around and made the first eight avatars emanations of the Buddha, which made every Hindu a good Buddhist. Both communities already expected Kalki, Vishnu’s tenth and final avatar, to defeat foreign invaders and open a new golden age. So the king of Shambhala could invite Hindus to accept his own successor, twenty-five generations later, as the Kalki of their scriptures, born in Shambhala just as the Puranas said.

Berzin extends the invitation one step further. Orthodox Muslims also feared the army of a deceiver who would claim to be the Mahdi, and on his reading they too could have joined the front. Muslim law of the period already treated Hindus and Buddhists living under Muslim rule as protected peoples of scripture, a precedent that went back to the conquest of Sindh in 712.

One irony is hard to miss. The remedy looks a good deal like the appeal of the faith it was meant to resist, which also offered one community undivided by caste. Whether that was deliberate cannot be known from the text. It does show that the authors understood what made Islam attractive, and answered with something comparable from inside their own tradition.

Hidden sanctuaries and sacred geography

Shambhala is pictured as a kingdom ringed by snow mountains, its land often drawn as an eight-petalled lotus. The teaching survives there intact while the world outside declines (Bernbaum 1980). Its kings are not gone. They are held in reserve until they are needed.

Buddhism is not alone in imagining a guarded remnant like this.

Jabulqa, Jabulsa and the eighth climate

Shi’i tradition describes two cities at the ends of the earth, Jabulqa in the east and Jabulsa in the west, lying in darkness beside Mount Qaf, the mountain that rings the world in Islamic cosmography. In the Kitab al-haft wa’l-azilla, a text preserved by the Nusayris, Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq is made to say that the Qa’im, the one who will rise at the end of time, will live there. Later Twelver writers linked the cities with the Green Island, where the descendants of the Twelfth Imam are said to live during his occultation.

Philosophers then read these places much as the Kalachakra’s commentators read Shambhala. In the Hikmat al-ishraq, Suhrawardi placed Jabulqa, Jabarsa and Hurqalya in an “eighth climate”: a real world beyond the seven geographical climates, reached through purified inner perception. Henry Corbin called it the mundus imaginalis (Corbin 1977). In the early nineteenth century Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i went further and taught that the Hidden Imam lives in those cities, within the subtle realm of Hurqalya, so that the whole story of his occultation belongs to that plane. The clergy of his day condemned him for it.

Both traditions, then, turned a hidden kingdom inward without giving up the claim that it is real.

They share an outline of the cosmos as well. Qaf rings the inhabited world. Meru stands at its centre. Shambhala has its own ring of peaks. Each time, the mountain is the edge between the ordinary world and what it cannot reach on its own.

The vara of Yima

The oldest version may be Iranian. In the second chapter of the Zoroastrian Vendidad, Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king, that a killing winter is coming. Yima builds an enclosure, the vara, and brings into it the best of people, animals and plants. They live there happily while the world outside is destroyed (Darmesteter 1880).

Al-Mas’udi records that some authors placed the Flood in the reign of Jamshid, the later Persian name for Yima, so Muslim historians themselves set the vara next to Noah’s ark. Tibetan Buddhism has its own version in the beyul, hidden valleys sealed by Padmasambhava and opened only when the times grow dark.

Prester John and the Qara Khitai

Latin Christendom produced a version too, and it touches the Kalachakra’s world directly. In 1145 the chronicler Otto of Freising reported a Christian priest-king beyond Persia who had beaten the Muslim rulers of Iran and meant to come to the aid of Jerusalem. From about 1165 a letter in his name circulated, describing a kingdom of fabulous virtue and wealth.

The victory behind the rumour was real. In 1141 the Seljuk sultan Sanjar was defeated at Qatwan by the Qara Khitai, a dynasty of Khitan origin. Its rulers were not Christian, and its court seems to have been largely Buddhist.

Around 1220 the legend moved to Genghis Khan, cast as a Christian king named David. Later Mongol tradition called Genghis an emanation of Vajrapani, the same bodhisattva it saw in Suchandra, the first king of Shambhala (Berzin 2002). For a while in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian and Buddhist hopes pointed at the same steppe, and at rulers who belonged to neither faith in the way the hopes assumed.

The restorer at the end of the age

Kalki and the Puranic inheritance

The Kalachakra did not invent its kings. The Bhagavata Purana foretells that at the close of the Kali Yuga, Vishnu will be born “in the house of the eminent brahmin of the village of Shambhala, the great-souled Vishnuyashas” (12.2.18). Puranic tradition gives him a white horse, Devadatta, and a sword with which he removes the tyrants who have seized the thrones. An age of truth follows.

The Buddhist tantra took the place name and the royal title, and its first Kalki, Manjushri Yashas, has a name that echoes the Puranic father’s. Bernbaum and Newman both read this as deliberate appropriation (Bernbaum 1980; Newman 1998). The last Kalki, Raudrachakrin, defeats the foreign army in 2424 and opens a golden age in which the teaching flourishes, with Hindu gods fighting on his side. A Hindu saviour, moved into a Buddhist end-time, was set against a foreign faith.

The Mahdi and the return of Jesus

Islamic eschatology has its own sequence. A man of the Prophet’s family, the Mahdi, will fill the earth with equity and justice as it had been filled with oppression and tyranny, in the wording Abu Dawud preserves. In a report preserved by Muslim, Jesus descends near a white minaret east of Damascus and kills the Dajjal, the false messiah. In another he declines to lead the prayer and defers to the community’s own leader.

The two figures are distinct. Sunni and Shi’i ideas of the Mahdi differ a great deal, and Twelvers identify him with the Twelfth Imam, already in occultation. In every version the Mahdi is a guided human ruler. He is not a descent of the divine, and that separates him from Kalki at the root.

The Kalachakra’s list of foreign prophets ends with the Mahdi and, in one rendering, calls the eighth teacher “the blinded one”. Berzin connects the epithet to the darkness the tantra assigns these prophets. A Muslim reader may hear something else, since the hadith describe the Dajjal as blind in one eye. No link between the two is claimed here. The coincidence is recorded for what it shows: from outside, the figure one tradition awaits can appear in the colours that tradition keeps for its deceiver.

The Saoshyant and the Chinvat bridge

The Zoroastrian Saoshyant is the oldest of these figures. Later tradition describes three saviours born at long intervals from the seed of Zoroaster, preserved in a lake. The last of them brings the frashokereti, the renovation of the world and the raising of the dead.

Zoroastrian eschatology also has the Chinvat bridge, which every soul crosses after death. It is broad for the righteous and narrow as a blade for the wicked. The sirat of Islamic tradition is very like it. Whether one depends on the other is unresolved.

The rider of Revelation and Maitreya

The Book of Revelation describes heaven opening and a rider on a white horse, called Faithful and True, who judges and makes war in righteousness (19:11). The Puranic Kalki rides a white horse too. Nobody has shown a line of transmission between them.

Buddhism’s more typical answer to a declining age is Maitreya, the next Buddha. He comes when the teaching has been forgotten, and he restores it by teaching. There is no conquest in his story.

These figures differ in almost every theological respect. One is a descent of Vishnu. One is a guided descendant of the Prophet, one a prophet whom Christians also hold to be God, one a saviour from Zoroaster’s line, one a future Buddha. What they share is the shape of a story. An age declines. A deceiver or an oppressive order wins. A restorer appears, and order is renewed. The shape travels between traditions easily. The meaning does not travel without loss.

Historical routes of transmission

Convergence alone could explain the parallels so far, except that there is a large record of real contact. Stories, techniques and people moved between these traditions for centuries, often in directions the polemics on either side would never suggest.

Balkh and the Barmakids

When Xuanzang passed through Balkh around 630, he counted roughly a hundred monasteries. The greatest was the Nava Vihara, Nawbahar in Arabic and Persian sources. Its hereditary heads held the title pramukha, “chief”, and the Arabic family name Barmak comes from it.

Arab forces garrisoned Balkh in 725. The family converted to Islam, and within two generations its members were viziers to the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, where they paid for Indian scientific works to be translated into Arabic. Kevin van Bladel has shown that the family’s first language was Bactrian and its first religion Buddhism, correcting an older view that made them Zoroastrian (van Bladel 2011).

Balkh also gave Sufism one of its founding legends. Ibrahim ibn Adham is remembered as a prince of Balkh who gave up his throne to wander as an ascetic, and Sufi writers made him the model of renunciation. Rumi, born in Balkh himself, retold the story in the Masnavi, and Reynold Nicholson remarked in his commentary that the legend looks modelled on the life of the Buddha. The historical Ibrahim seems to have come from an Arab family, and the royal episode is probably a later addition. That makes the resemblance more interesting. The city’s memory of an older renunciant may have shaped how it remembered its Muslim saint.

Barlaam and Josaphat

A Mahayana account of the Buddha’s early life passed through a Manichaean version into Arabic, and circulated in Abbasid Baghdad as the Kitab Bilawhar wa Budhasaf. The prince’s title can be followed letter by letter. Sanskrit bodhisattva became Middle Persian bodisav, then Arabic Budhasaf. One extra dot under the first letter made it Yudhasaf.

In the tenth century Georgian monks recast the story as the Christian Balavariani. A Greek version followed, long attributed to John of Damascus and now usually credited to Euthymius of Athos, and it carried Ioasaph into Byzantine and Latin Christendom (Lang 1966; Almond 1987). Barlaam and Ioasaph entered the Orthodox calendar on 26 August, and Barlaam and Josaphat the Roman Martyrology on 27 November.

For several centuries the Church venerated the Buddha as a saint. His name reached it by way of Baghdad.

Muslim scholarship on Indian religion

Muslim scholars also studied Indian religion at first hand. Al-Biruni’s book on India, finished around 1030, treats Indian philosophy with a patience that still impresses. Early in the fourteenth century Rashid al-Din put a life of the Buddha into his universal history for the Ilkhanid court, written with help from a Kashmiri monk.

The Mughal prince Dara Shikoh went furthest. His Majma’ al-bahrayn of 1655, “the meeting of the two seas”, takes its title from the Qur’an (18:60) and sets Sufi and Vedantic terms side by side. In 1657 he sponsored a Persian translation of fifty Upanishads. Anquetil-Duperron put that Persian text into Latin in 1801 and 1802, and in that form it reached Schopenhauer. One of the main roads by which the Upanishads entered modern European thought ran through a Muslim prince’s comparative project.

Some proposed transmissions have not held up. R. C. Zaehner argued that Bayazid Bistami took Vedantic ideas from his teacher Abu ‘Ali al-Sindi (Zaehner 1960). A. J. Arberry answered that the evidence was thin and that “Sind” might be a village in Khurasan (Arberry 1962). The question is still open.

The fig of Surat al-Tin

The ninety-fifth sura of the Qur’an opens with four oaths: by the fig and the olive, by Mount Sinai, and by this secure city (95:1 to 3). Most classical commentators read the last three as places of revelation. The olive is Jerusalem and so Jesus, Sinai is Moses, and the secure city is Mecca and the Prophet. The fig was harder to place. Ibn Kathir records opinions that link it to Damascus or to a mosque of Noah, and others took both fruits literally.

In the twentieth century Hamid ‘Abd al-Qadir proposed another reading in a study of the Buddha’s life and philosophy. The fig, he suggested, points to the tree at Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha attained awakening, so each of the four oaths would mark a place where a teacher received his calling (‘Abd al-Qadir 1957). He paired this with an identification of the Buddha as Dhu’l-Kifl, a prophet the Qur’an names twice without telling his story (21:85, 38:48), reading Kifl as an Arabic form of Kapila, for Kapilavastu, the Buddha’s home city. Muhammad Hamidullah gave the identification qualified support, and Imtiyaz Yusuf has argued for the fig reading more recently.

The difficulties belong beside the proposal. The Bodhi tree is Ficus religiosa, the sacred fig of South Asia, while tin normally means the common fig of the Mediterranean and Arabia, a different species of the same genus. Most commentators identify Dhu’l-Kifl with Ezekiel or with a righteous man of Israel. The reading rests on symmetry and etymology. It cannot be proved.

It still holds together. If every community has been sent a messenger, a sura that swears by the sites of revelation might reach beyond the Near East, and no tree in Asia is more closely tied to a moment of illumination than the one at Bodh Gaya.

The Liber scalae and Dante

The traffic ran west as well. At the court of Alfonso X of Castile in 1264, accounts of the Prophet’s night journey and ascent were translated, and the resulting Liber scalae Machometi, the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder, circulated in Latin and Old French. In 1919 Miguel Asín Palacios argued that Islamic ascent literature had shaped Dante’s Divine Comedy. The thesis met strong resistance until the Liber scalae itself was edited in 1949 (Cerulli 1949), which showed that such material had been available in Dante’s Europe. How much it shaped Dante is still debated.

The Muslim community of Lhasa

Contact went beyond books. In the seventeenth century famine in Kashmir drove Muslim families to Lhasa. The Fifth Dalai Lama gave the community land for a mosque and a cemetery and the right to settle its own disputes under the Shari’a through an elected council. He exempted it from some taxes and released it from the meat prohibitions of the Buddhist holy month. Local tradition says he had arrows shot in the four directions and gave the community the ground they covered, remembered as the park of the far-reaching arrow.

The Dalai Lamas are among the principal holders of the Kalachakra lineage. The tradition whose tantra names Islam as its final enemy also marked out ground for a mosque in its capital.

Ethical restraint in warfare

Berzin reads both traditions as holding that the outer war is defensive, never a way to win converts, and bound by ethical limits. The primary sources on each side spell those limits out, and other traditions have their own versions.

Permission is given to those who are fought, because they have been wronged.

Qur’an 22:39

The next verse gives the reason in surprisingly broad terms. Had God not checked some people by means of others, monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques, where His name is often remembered, would have been pulled down (22:40). The Qur’an’s first permission to fight is justified by protecting houses of worship, and the mosque comes last in the list. The same scripture tells believers to fight those who fight them without transgressing (2:190), and says there is no compulsion in religion (2:256).

The early caliphate turned these principles into field orders. The directives attributed to Abu Bakr for the armies sent to Syria, preserved in Malik’s Muwatta’, forbid killing women, children and the old, and cutting down fruit-bearing trees. They tell the soldiers to leave alone anyone who has withdrawn into a cloister to worship God.

The Mahabharata sets rules before the war that the Gita opens: combat only between equals, and no blow against anyone who is unarmed, fleeing or has surrendered. In the Contra Faustum, Augustine located the real evil of war in the love of violence, cruelty and the lust to dominate, rather than in fighting itself. Buddhism has the penitent king. In his thirteenth rock edict Ashoka recorded his remorse for the conquest of Kalinga and the suffering it caused, and declared that the only conquest he now valued was conquest by the Dharma.

The Kalachakra sets the same kind of condition. If peaceful means fail and force becomes necessary, it has to come from compassion and a clear understanding of reality, never from hatred. Berzin admits that this is extremely hard to sustain with soldiers who are not bodhisattvas, and the history of every tradition here bears him out. Each of them wrote the standard down anyway. That says something about what they thought such a war was for.

The political appropriation of prophecy

End-time prophecy is easy to recruit. It gives a recruiting officer exactly what he needs: a reason why this war, and why now. Every tradition discussed here has seen its imagery of the end attached to causes its own commentators would not have recognised.

Berzin records three uses of Shambhala within roughly a generation. Agvan Dorjiev, a Buryat monk and assistant tutor to the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, presented Russia as Shambhala and the Tsar as a Kalki, to pull Tibet away from British influence. Sukhbaatar, leading the Mongolian revolution of 1921, promised his soldiers rebirth in the armies of Shambhala. In the 1930s the Japanese authorities in Mongolia promoted the claim that Japan itself was Shambhala (Berzin 2002).

Islamic history has its own cases. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad of Dongola declared himself the Mahdi in the Sudan, and his movement overthrew Egyptian rule. In November 1979 an armed group led by Juhayman al-‘Utaybi seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca, proclaimed his brother-in-law Muhammad al-Qahtani the Mahdi, and held the sanctuary for about two weeks. A figure whose task, in the hadith, is to fill the earth with justice was invoked to turn the holiest site in Islam into a battlefield.

Prester John did similar work for Latin Christendom. The legend appeared just after the fall of Edessa in 1144, as the Crusader states were losing ground, and the hope of an eastern ally kept up enthusiasm for new campaigns among rulers who were otherwise losing interest.

The Kalachakra’s own history shows the problem from the other side. No Buddhist leader or master of the period actually campaigned to bring Hindus and Muslims into the vajra-caste, and no one gave the initiation with that aim. Some Hindu and Muslim groups resented the call for unity all the same, and named the future king of Shambhala as the false messiah of their own texts.

Berzin draws a general point from this. When neighbouring religions each expect a true messiah to defeat a false one, they can go one of two ways. They can unite against a common enemy by declaring that they await the same true messiah. Or each can decide that the other’s true messiah is its own predicted deceiver. Both roads have ended in distrust and conflict.

The pattern repeats in every case. The inner reading, which every commentarial tradition here ranks higher, is set aside, and the outer reading gets a date, an enemy and a flag. Berzin’s caution cuts both ways. Judging Buddhism by the people who conscripted Shambhala would be unjust, and the same is true of Islam and those who have claimed the Mahdi’s name.

Conclusion

Read alone, the Kalachakra looks like a Buddhist text that feared Islam. Read with its neighbours, it looks like a text that could not stop engaging with Islam. It listed the Abrahamic prophets and set its calendar by the Prophet’s era. It borrowed its saviour and his birthplace from Hindu scripture, and answered the Hindu claim on the Buddha with a claim of its own. It came out of a frontier where Buddhists, Hindus and Sunni Muslims shared one fear of an Isma’ili Mahdi, and it looked toward the same Central Asian horizon where Latin Christians would later place their hopes.

Al-Biruni’s claim that the Indians believed nothing his own people believed was as incomplete as the Kalachakra’s portrait of Islam. Both authors knew more of the other than their sharpest lines admit.

None of this makes the traditions interchangeable. The Mahdi is not Raudrachakrin, and Jabulqa is not Shambhala. The Sufi’s struggle with the nafs assumes a self and a God that Shantideva’s analysis does not. The differences are substantive, and a comparison that erased them would be of little use to anyone who holds either faith.

What the material does show is a handful of convictions held in common beneath very different doctrines. Ages decline and are renewed. Something essential is kept out of sight while the world forgets it. A restorer will come. And the battle that matters most is the one inside the person.

The last of these has been the hardest to misuse. Every outer form of the prophecy has at some point been drafted into someone’s war. The inner form has only ever had one combatant, and it remains what al-Ghazali pictured: a king recovering his own city.

Works consulted

• ‘Abd al-Qadir, Hamid. Budha al-akbar: hayatuhu wa-falsafatuhu. 1957.
• Almond, Philip C. “The Buddha of Christendom: A Review of the Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat.” Religious Studies 23 (1987).
• Arberry, A. J. “Bistamiana.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 25 (1962).
• Asín Palacios, Miguel. La escatología musulmana en la Divina Comedia. Madrid, 1919.
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