The War Within and the Kings Who Wait

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 sentence about the Indians he had spent years studying, and he meant it. It is also a sentence his own book quietly disproves, since few medieval authors took another civilisation’s beliefs as seriously as he did. The tension in it is a useful place to begin.

In a short essay of 2002, Alexander Berzin examined the prophecy of Shambhala in the Kalachakra Tantra, an eleventh-century Buddhist text that foresees a final war between a hidden northern kingdom and a foreign religion founded in Mecca. His argument was careful. The commentarial tradition, he showed, reads the war on two levels: as an inward battle of awareness against ignorance and hatred, and as a defensive conflict permitted only under ethical constraint. He then set this beside Islamic teaching on sacred struggle and found the same two levels, the same defensive limit, and a comparable history of rulers enlisting sacred language for worldly ends.

This essay takes Berzin’s comparison as a starting point and follows the threads outward. The Kalachakra’s picture of Islam turns out to be more informed than its polemic suggests, and its central images, the hidden sanctuary, the king who returns at the close of an age, the war fought within the body, recur across Islamic, Zoroastrian, Hindu and Christian material with a regularity that invites attention.

A note on method is owed before going further. Resemblance between traditions can arise in three quite different ways: by direct borrowing, by prolonged contact that leaves no single moment of transmission, or by independent reflection on a shared human situation. Where the evidence for borrowing is good, it is stated as such. Where it is not, a parallel is offered as a parallel, and the reader is left to weigh it. Several of the connections below remain open questions in the scholarship, and they are presented that way.

Two registers of struggle

The traditions considered here agree on very little about the nature of the self, yet most of them describe its discipline in the language of war, and most place that inner campaign above any outer one.

In the Islamic material the best known expression is a report in which the Prophet, returning from an expedition, tells his companions that they have come back from the lesser struggle to the greater, and identifies the greater as the servant’s struggle against his own desire. The report is widely loved and weakly transmitted. Al-Bayhaqi, who preserved it in his Kitab al-zuhd al-kabir, noted the weakness of its chain himself, and Ibn Hajar later concurred. The idea it expresses did not depend on that chain, however. The Qur’an promises that “those who strive in Us, We shall surely guide in Our ways” (29:69), and Ibn al-Qayyim, without using the language of greater and lesser, described the struggle against the ego, desire, Satan and attachment to the world as the most binding of all obligations of striving.

Al-Ghazali gave the inner campaign an administrative form. In the Kimiya-yi sa’adat he describes the body as a city whose king is the heart, with the intellect as vizier and desire and anger as officials who serve well only while they remain obedient. The book on the marvels of the heart in his Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din extends the image into an account of the heart’s armies. Rumi compressed the same teaching in the first book of the Masnavi, where the warrior who breaks the enemy’s ranks is said to have done the easy thing, and the true lion is the one who breaks himself.

The Buddhist parallel is close in image and distant in metaphysics. Shantideva’s Bodhicaryavatara, composed in the eighth century, treats anger, craving and confusion as enemies more dangerous than any external foe, because they occupy the mind itself and cannot be fled. The Tibetan rendering of arhat, the liberated one, as dgra bcom pa, “one who has vanquished the foe”, carries the same conception into the vocabulary of attainment. The Kalachakra’s own commentary, the Vimalaprabha attributed to the Second Kalki Pundarika, states that the war with the foreign army is not in truth a war, since the real battle takes place within the body.

That last phrase is meant literally. The Kalachakra belongs to a family of Indian systems that locate spiritual transformation in a subtle anatomy of channels, winds and centres. Muslim contemplatives encountered comparable material in the Amrtakunda, a lost Indian yoga text translated into Arabic as Hawd al-hayat, of which Carl Ernst has counted some forty-five manuscripts, many of them 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 the use of his own disciples. Ernst is careful to describe this as the integration of yogic technique into an existing Sufi practice, and not as a source from which Sufism derived. The distinction matters, and it is kept here.

The pattern extends beyond the two traditions Berzin compared. Gandhi read the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Bhagavad Gita as an allegory of the human heart, in which Arjuna’s kinsmen stand for the loyalties and passions that divide the self. Paul wrote to the Ephesians that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood” (6:12, KJV) and described an armour made of truth, righteousness and faith. The enemy is named differently in each case, as the lower self, the afflictions, ignorance or the powers of darkness, and those differences are real. The shared conviction is that the decisive engagement is interior, and that it is fought without witnesses.

What the Kalachakra knew of Islam

It would be easy to assume that a text predicting war with a foreign faith knew little about it. John Newman, whose studies of the Kalachakra remain the most careful in English, concluded the opposite: within Sanskrit literature the tantra is unusual in offering a fairly comprehensive and largely accurate account of Islamic belief and practice (Newman 1998). Its authors knew that the newcomers slaughtered animals while pronouncing the name of their God, practised circumcision, veiled their women and prayed five times a day facing their holy land.

A list of prophets

The most striking evidence is a single verse. The Abridged Kalachakra Tantra (I.153) names the teachers of the foreign dharma: Adam, Noah and Abraham, followed by Moses, Jesus, “the White-Clad One”, Muhammad and the Mahdi. Earlier Western readings rendered some of the names differently, as Enoch in place of Noah and “Mathani” for the last figure. Berzin prefers a reading that keeps Noah and the Mahdi and identifies the White-Clad One with Mani, founder of Manichaeism. Setting Mani aside, the sequence corresponds closely to the Isma’ili enumeration of seven law-bringing prophets, and Berzin has argued on that basis that the “foreigners” the tantra had most in view were the Isma’ili rulers of Multan in the tenth century, and not Islam in its entirety (Berzin 2010). The hypothesis is not beyond dispute, but it accounts for details that a more general reading does not.

The placement of the verse deserves attention. It follows directly on a list of the eight descents of Vishnu, and Berzin has suggested that the number eight was chosen to echo it. The effect, whatever its intention, is to present the prophets of one tradition in the structural position of the avatars of another, as successive manifestations sent to successive ages. The tantra’s evaluation of those prophets is unfavourable; it associates them with tamas, the quality of darkness and inertia in Indian philosophy. The form of the presentation, however, is one a Muslim reader would recognise. The Qur’an holds that every community has been sent a messenger (10:47) and states plainly that not all of them have been named (40:78).

A calendar counted from the Hijra

The tantra also dates itself by reference to Islam. It states that the sixty-year astronomical cycle began 403 years after the era of “the lord of the mlecchas”, that is, of Muhammad. Tibetan scholars rendered the figure in the 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, and Tibetan almanacs continue to number their cycles from it; the seventeenth began in 1987. The Kalachakra’s prediction of the final war, in 2424, is likewise reckoned as eighteen centuries after the same epoch. A tradition that regarded Islam as its principal adversary nonetheless fixed its own time by the Prophet’s era.

A response in kind

Berzin’s account of the prophecy contains one further detail that is easily passed over. The First Kalki, Manjushri Yashas, is said to have foreseen that the brahmins’ disunity and neglect of their own scriptures would lead many to accept the new religion. His remedy was to unite the people of Shambhala into a single “vajra-caste” through the Kalachakra initiation, dissolving the divisions of birth. It is difficult not to observe that this answer resembles the appeal of the faith it was meant to resist, which also offered a single community undivided by caste. Whether the resemblance was deliberate cannot be known from the text. It suggests, at least, that the tantra’s authors understood what made Islam attractive, and responded by offering something comparable from within their own tradition.

Sanctuaries at the edge of the world

Shambhala is imagined as a kingdom encircled by snow mountains, its territory often described as an eight-petalled lotus, where the teaching is preserved intact while the world beyond declines (Bernbaum 1980). Its kings are not absent so much as withheld, waiting for the moment when they are needed. The idea of such a guarded remnant is not confined to Buddhism.

Jabulqa and Jabulsa

Shi’i tradition speaks of two cities at the extremities of the world, Jabulqa in the east and Jabulsa in the west, set in darkness beside Mount Qaf, the mountain that encircles the earth in Islamic cosmography. In the Kitab al-haft wa’l-azilla, a text preserved among 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 dwell there. Later Twelver writers connected the cities with the legend of the Green Island, where the descendants of the Twelfth Imam are said to live during his occultation.

The philosophers then read these places as the Kalachakra’s commentators read Shambhala. Suhrawardi, in the Hikmat al-ishraq, placed Jabulqa, Jabarsa and Hurqalya in an “eighth climate”, a real world that lies beyond the seven geographical climates and is reached through purified inner perception, which Henry Corbin rendered as the mundus imaginalis (Corbin 1977). In the early nineteenth century Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa’i went further, teaching that the Hidden Imam lives in those cities within the subtle realm of Hurqalya, so that the whole account of his occultation belongs to that plane. The clergy of his day condemned the teaching. The comparison with the Vimalaprabha is instructive: both traditions arrived at an interior reading of a hidden kingdom without abandoning the claim that it is real.

The cosmic geography is also shared in outline. Qaf encircles the inhabited world; Meru stands at its centre; Shambhala is ringed by its own range. In each case the sacred mountain marks the boundary between the ordinary world and what it cannot reach unaided.

The enclosure of Yima

The oldest form of the idea may be Iranian. In the second chapter of the Zoroastrian Vendidad, Ahura Mazda warns Yima, the first king, that a destructive winter is coming. Yima builds an enclosure, the vara, and brings into it the finest specimens of people, animals and plants, who live there in happiness while the world outside is destroyed (Darmesteter 1880). Al-Mas’udi records that some authors placed the Flood in the reign of Jamshid, as Yima is called in later Persian tradition, and the resemblance to Noah’s ark has been noted since. Tibetan Buddhism preserves a related conception in the beyul, hidden valleys concealed by Padmasambhava and opened only when the times grow dark.

Prester John

Latin Christendom produced its own version, and in a form that bears directly on the Kalachakra’s world. In 1145 the chronicler Otto of Freising reported a Christian priest-king beyond Persia who had defeated the Muslim rulers of Iran and intended to come to the aid of Jerusalem. A letter in his name circulated from around 1165 and described a kingdom of fabulous virtue and wealth. The victory behind the rumour was historical: in 1141 the Seljuk sultan Sanjar was defeated at Qatwan by the Qara Khitai, a dynasty of Khitan origin whose rulers were not Christian and whose court appears to have been largely Buddhist.

Around 1220 the legend attached itself to Genghis Khan, presented as a Christian king named David. Mongol tradition would later regard Genghis as an emanation of Vajrapani, the bodhisattva whom it also recognised in Suchandra, the first king of Shambhala (Berzin 2002). For a period in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christian and Buddhist hopes were directed toward the same steppe, and toward rulers who belonged to neither faith in the way the hopes supposed.

The figure at the end of the age

Kalki and his borrowing

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, after which an age of truth returns. The Buddhist tantra adopted the place name and the royal title, and its first Kalki, Manjushri Yashas, bears a name that echoes the Puranic father’s. Scholars have generally treated this as a deliberate appropriation (Bernbaum 1980; Newman 1998). The Kalachakra’s final Kalki, Raudrachakrin, defeats the foreign army in 2424 and opens a golden age in which the teaching flourishes. A Hindu saviour, relocated into a Buddhist eschatology, was set against a foreign faith; the tantra also foresees Hindu gods fighting on his side.

The Mahdi and Jesus

Islamic eschatology has its own sequence. A figure from 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 preserved by Abu Dawud. Jesus descends near a white minaret east of Damascus and slays the Dajjal, the false messiah, in a report preserved by Muslim; in another report he declines to lead the prayer and defers to the community’s own leader. The two figures are distinct, and Sunni and Shi’i understandings of the Mahdi differ considerably, the Twelver tradition identifying him with the Twelfth Imam already in occultation. The Mahdi is a guided human ruler, not a descent of the divine, and that difference from Kalki is fundamental.

The Kalachakra’s list of foreign prophets ends with the Mahdi and describes the eighth teacher, in one rendering, as “the blinded one”. Berzin relates the epithet to the tantra’s association of these prophets with darkness. A Muslim reader may notice a different echo, since the hadith describe the Dajjal as blind in one eye. No relationship between the two is suggested here. The coincidence is recorded because it shows how the figure one tradition awaits can appear, from outside, in the colours that tradition reserves for its deceiver.

The Saoshyant and the bridge

The Zoroastrian Saoshyant is the eldest of these figures. The later tradition describes three saviours born at intervals from the seed of Zoroaster, preserved in a lake, and the last of them brings about the frashokereti, the renovation of the world and the raising of the dead. Zoroastrian eschatology also describes the Chinvat bridge, over which every soul must pass after death, broad for the righteous and narrow as a blade for the wicked. The resemblance to the sirat of Islamic tradition has been discussed for more than a century, and the question of dependence remains open.

The rider and the teacher

The Book of Revelation describes heaven opened and a rider on a white horse called Faithful and True, who judges and makes war in righteousness (19:11). The image of the white horse is shared with the Puranic Kalki, and it has invited comparison, though no line of transmission between them has been demonstrated. Buddhism’s more characteristic answer to the decline of the age is Maitreya, the next Buddha, who arrives when the teaching has been forgotten and restores it through instruction rather than conquest.

These figures differ in almost every theological respect: a descent of Vishnu, a guided descendant of the Prophet, a prophet who in Christian belief is also God, a saviour born of Zoroaster’s line, a future Buddha. What they share is a narrative shape. An age declines, a deceiver or an oppressive order prevails, a restorer appears, and a renewed order follows. The shape recurs; the meaning each tradition gives it does not transfer from one to another without loss.

Routes of transmission

The parallels above could be explained as convergence alone, were it not for a substantial record of actual contact. Stories, techniques and people moved between these traditions for centuries, often in directions that the polemical literature on either side would not lead one to expect.

Balkh

When Xuanzang passed through Balkh around 630, he reported roughly a hundred monasteries there. The greatest was the Nava Vihara, known in Arabic and Persian sources as Nawbahar, whose hereditary administrators bore the title pramukha, “chief”. The Arabic family name Barmak derives from it. After Balkh was garrisoned by Arab forces in 725, the family converted to Islam, and within two generations its members were viziers to the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad, where they sponsored the translation of Indian scientific works 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 it was Zoroastrian (van Bladel 2011).

Balkh also gave Sufism one of its founding legends. Ibrahim ibn Adham, remembered as a prince of Balkh who abandoned his throne for the life of a wandering ascetic, became a model of renunciation in Sufi literature, and Rumi, himself born in Balkh, retold his story in the Masnavi. Reynold Nicholson remarked in his commentary that the legend appears 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, which makes the resemblance more interesting rather than less: the city’s memory of an older renunciant may have shaped the way its Muslim saint was remembered.

From Baghdad to the calendar of saints

A Mahayana account of the Buddha’s early life passed through a Manichaean version into Arabic, where it circulated in Abbasid Baghdad as the Kitab Bilawhar wa Budhasaf. The prince’s title followed a traceable path: Sanskrit bodhisattva became Middle Persian bodisav, then Arabic Budhasaf; a single additional dot beneath the first letter produced Yudhasaf. Georgian monks recast the story as the Christian Balavariani in the tenth century, and a Greek version, long attributed to John of Damascus and now generally credited to Euthymius of Athos, 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. The Buddha was venerated as a Christian saint for several centuries, and his name reached the Church by way of Baghdad.

Scholars and princes

Muslim scholars also studied Indian religion directly. Al-Biruni’s work on India, completed around 1030, treats Indian philosophy with a patience that remains admirable. In the early fourteenth century Rashid al-Din included a life of the Buddha in his universal history for the Ilkhanid court, prepared with the assistance of a Kashmiri monk. The Mughal prince Dara Shikoh went furthest. His Majma’ al-bahrayn of 1655, “the meeting of the two seas”, a title taken from the Qur’an (18:60), set Sufi and Vedantic terms side by side, and in 1657 he sponsored a Persian translation of fifty Upanishads. That Persian text was rendered into Latin by Anquetil-Duperron in 1801 and 1802, and in that form it reached Schopenhauer. One of the principal routes by which the Upanishads entered modern European thought ran through a Muslim prince’s comparative project.

Not every proposed transmission has survived scrutiny. R. C. Zaehner argued that Bayazid Bistami absorbed Vedantic ideas from his teacher Abu ‘Ali al-Sindi (Zaehner 1960), and A. J. Arberry answered that the evidence was thin and that “Sind” might refer to a village in Khurasan (Arberry 1962). The question remains open.

The fig and the olive

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). Many commentators read the last three as places of revelation, the olive standing for Jerusalem and so for Jesus, Sinai for Moses, and the secure city for Mecca and the Prophet. The fig proved harder to place. Ibn Kathir records opinions that identify it with Damascus or with a mosque of Noah, and others took both fruits in their plain sense.

In the twentieth century a small number of Muslim scholars proposed another reading. Hamid ‘Abd al-Qadir, in a study of the Buddha’s life and philosophy, suggested that the fig points to the tree at Bodh Gaya under which the Buddha attained awakening, so that each of the four oaths would mark a place where a teacher received his calling (‘Abd al-Qadir 1957). He joined this to an identification of the Buddha with Dhu’l-Kifl, a prophet the Qur’an names twice without narrating 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 more recently argued for the reading of the fig.

The proposal should be stated together with its difficulties. The Bodhi tree is Ficus religiosa, the sacred fig of South Asia, while tin ordinarily names the common fig of the Mediterranean and Arabian world, 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 and cannot be demonstrated. It has nonetheless a coherence of its own. If every community has been sent a messenger, a sura that swears by the sites of revelation might be expected to reach beyond the Near East, and no tree in Asia is more closely bound to a moment of illumination than the one at Bodh Gaya.

The ascent and the comedy

The traffic also ran west. Narratives of the Prophet’s night journey and ascent were translated at the court of Alfonso X of Castile in 1264, 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 was controversial, and its reception changed when the Liber scalae itself was edited in 1949, showing that such material had in fact been available in Dante’s Europe. The extent of any influence is still debated.

Lhasa

The contact was not only literary. In the seventeenth century, famine in Kashmir drove Muslim families to Lhasa, where the Fifth Dalai Lama granted the community land for a mosque and a cemetery, the right to settle disputes among themselves according to the Shari’a through an elected council, exemption from certain taxes, and release from the meat prohibitions of the Buddhist holy month. Local tradition holds that 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 adversary also marked out ground for a mosque in its capital.

Restraint in war

Berzin’s reading holds that in both traditions the outer war is defensive, never a means of winning converts, and bound by ethical limits. The primary sources on each side state those limits with some precision, and they have counterparts elsewhere.

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

Qur’an 22:39

The verse that follows gives the reason in unexpectedly broad terms: had God not checked some people by means of others, monasteries, churches, synagogues and mosques, in which His name is often remembered, would have been pulled down (22:40). The first permission to fight in the Qur’an is justified by the preservation of houses of worship, and the mosque is named last among them. The same scripture instructs the believers to fight those who fight them without transgressing (2:190), and declares that there is no compulsion in religion (2:256).

The early caliphate translated these principles into instructions for the field. The directives attributed to Abu Bakr for the armies sent to Syria, preserved in Malik’s Muwatta’, forbid the killing of women, children and the aged and the cutting of fruit-bearing trees, and direct the soldiers to leave undisturbed those who have withdrawn into cloisters for the worship of God.

The Mahabharata sets comparable conventions before the war that the Gita opens: combat between equals, and no blow against one who is unarmed, in flight or has surrendered. Augustine, in the Contra Faustum, located the real evil of war in the love of violence, cruelty and the lust for domination, rather than in fighting as such. Buddhism supplies the figure of 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’s own condition is of the same kind. If peaceful means fail and force becomes necessary, it must proceed from compassion and a clear understanding of reality, and never from hatred. Berzin acknowledges that this is extremely difficult to maintain with soldiers who are not bodhisattvas, and the history of every tradition considered here would support him. That each of them nonetheless set the standard in writing says something about what they understood the purpose of such a war to be.

The appropriation of prophecy

Eschatological prophecy lends itself readily to political use, since it supplies what a recruiting officer most needs: a reason why this conflict, and why now. Each tradition discussed here has seen its end-time imagery attached to causes its commentators would not have recognised.

Berzin records three such 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 in order to draw 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 offers parallels. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad of Dongola proclaimed himself the Mahdi in the Sudan and led a movement that overthrew Egyptian rule. In November 1979 an armed group led by Juhayman al-‘Utaybi occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca, declared his brother-in-law Muhammad al-Qahtani to be the Mahdi, and held the sanctuary for about two weeks. The figure whose defining task, in the hadith, is to fill the earth with justice was invoked to turn the holiest site in Islam into a place of combat.

The legend of Prester John served a comparable function in Latin Christendom. It appeared shortly after the fall of Edessa in 1144, as the Crusader states were losing ground, and the hope of an eastern ally helped sustain enthusiasm for renewed campaigns among rulers who were otherwise losing interest.

The pattern in each case is similar. The inner reading, which every commentarial tradition discussed here ranks higher, is set aside, and the outer reading is given a date, an enemy and a flag. Berzin’s caution applies in both directions. To judge Buddhism by those who conscripted Shambhala would be unjust, and the same holds for Islam and those who have claimed the Mahdi’s name.

Conclusion

Read in isolation, the Kalachakra appears to be a Buddhist text that feared Islam. Read alongside its neighbours, it appears rather as a text that could not stop engaging with Islam. It listed the Abrahamic prophets, reckoned its calendar from the Prophet’s era, borrowed its saviour and his birthplace from Hindu scripture, and looked toward the same Central Asian horizon on which Latin Christians were placing their own hopes. Al-Biruni’s claim that the Indians believed nothing that his own people believed was, in its way, as incomplete as the Kalachakra’s portrait of Islam. Both authors knew more of the other than their sharpest statements admit.

None of this makes the traditions interchangeable, and the essay has tried not to suggest that it does. The Mahdi is not Raudrachakrin; Jabulqa is not Shambhala; the Sufi’s struggle with the nafs presupposes 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 suggest is a set of convictions held in common beneath very different doctrines: that ages decline and are renewed, that something essential is preserved out of sight while the world forgets it, that a restorer will come, and that the most consequential battle is the one within the person. Of these, the last has proved the most resistant to misuse. Every outer form of the prophecy has at some point been enlisted in 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.

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