[1] "These texts are intended primarily to describe the geographical location and religious history of pilgrimage places, sacred objects, and the hermitages of former Buddhist holy men. They are devoid of specific information on physical geography per se and are better understood when thought of as guide-books for pilgrims visiting unfamiliar places and things" (Wylie, 1965: 17; cf. 1970: xv; Vostrikov: 217).

[2] Chag lo'i rGya gar lam yig / Bal yul gyi lam yig Lha mthong lo tsā bas mdzad pa / rDo rje gdan gyi lam yig / O rgyan lam yig / Man lung gu ru dang / Chos rje 'byor ldan grags pa'i Sha mbha la'i lam yig / (DTGT: 20.4-5); cf. Vostrikov: 231. I am grateful to Dan Martin for drawing my attention to this passage.

[3] The Sanskrit Kālacakra literature spells this name sambhala; the Tibetans transliterated it as sham bha la. For the sake of consistency we follow the Sanskrit, except in the titles of Tibetan texts.

[4] Newman, 1987: 309. The Śītā is the northern river of the four great rivers of traditional Buddhist cosmography (Abhidharmakośabhāṣya 3.57). Hsüan-tsang (Beal: I.12-13 and s.v.), Man lung Guru (Laufer: 404; also, see below), and the bTsan po No mon han (Wylie, 1962: 58) all describe the Śītā in ways that correspond to the Tarim, and H.W. Bailey (5) concurs with this identification.

[5] ...boṭa lī ca cīnādideśesu...sambhalaviṣayāntam.... (Vimalaprabhā: 40a1-2).

[6] Indeed, the appearance of the Tibetan word li ("Khotan") in the Sanskrit text of the Vimalaprabhā (see note 9) indicates its author was familiar with, and perhaps had contact with, Tibetans. Other passages in the Vimalaprabhā also support this hypothesis: see, e.g., Newman, 1987: 362.

[7] The Tibetan itineraries to Sambhala have been extensively studied by Edwin Bernbaum (1980, 1985). The following discussion is indebted to his fine research, but our conclusions about the history and significance of Man lung's lam yig and the Kalāpāvatāra differ on several fundamental points, as noted below.

[8] The Blue Annals states that Man lungs pa was born in 1239, and went to Potala in 1300 (Roerich, 1974: 790-791).

[9]

Bernbaum (1985: 37-38), who discovered a manuscript of the text, refers to it as the Śambhala pa'i lam yig, and believes the entire text is the work of Man lung Guru. In fact the title page (1a1) and the final colophon (20a1-2) of this manuscript give the title as Śham bha la pa'i lam yig, which we might translate as "The Itinerary of the Man [Who Went to] Sambhala"—this no doubt refers to Man lung Guru's itinerary contained in the fourth chapter. However, this title appears nowhere else in the manuscript, and the colophons to all of the five chapters (11b5, 13b1, 15a2, 17a6, 19b1) give the title as rMi lam rdzun bshad sgyu ma'i sgra dbyangs chen mo, "The Great Melody of Illusion, the False Account of a Dream." (This title derives from the author-redactor's view that empirical reality is illusory—thus, even the factual geographical[page 495] information that makes up most of the text is, in some profound epistemological sense, false.) Also, Sambhala is not even mentioned in the other four chapters, which describe journeys to the East (China, chapter 1), the South (India and Potala, chapter 2), the West (Uḍḍiyāna, chapter 3), and the Center (Tibet, chapter 5). I believe rMi lam rdzun bshad sgyu ma'i sgra dbyangs chen mo is the main title of the text, and suspect Sham bha la pa'i lam yig is a subtitle affixed to call attention to the most rare or interesting itinerary it contains.

We can assume that Man lung Guru's lam yig forms the basis for the fourth chapter of MLDS because Paṇ chen Blo bzang dpal ldan ye shes refers to Man lung Guru's account in ways that correspond exactly to this chapter (NTBBN: 34a3-6; cf. 41b3-4; at 50a2 he refers to rJe Shambha la pa, apparently indicating Man lung Guru. See also LSGK: 5a3-5b1; NCKSML: 202b5-6).

However, the work as a whole is a synthesis of various travellers' accounts—it refers to journeys of Urgyan pa Rin chen dpal (1230-1309), 'Phags pa (1235-1280), and Red mda' ba gZhon nu blo gros (1349-1412). It also mentions the third Ming emperor of China, Yung-lo, who reigned early in the fifteenth century—thus it could not be the work of Man lung Guru. The name of the author-redactor is not given in the manuscript. However, dKon mchog bstan pa rab rgyas's linkage of Man lung Guru with Chos rje 'Byor ldan grags pa (see note 2) may suggest the latter's redaction of the text. This and a host of other issues raised by the MLDS await further study. For previous study of the Sambhala chapter of the text see Laufer: 402-407; and Bernbaum, 1985: 37-39.

[10] Our manuscript reads khu khom, Laufer's (404) has the form khom khom. I assume these are both variants of the apparently more common form kho khom: see Wylie, 1970: 13, n. 11; Kaschewsky: 435.

[11] yul 'di'i zhib rgyas 'tshad [read: 'chad] tshul ni / sa skya pa chos rgyal 'phags pas hor rgyal po la smras pa de zog 'tshong phyir yin par mngon no // (MLDS: 17a3).

[12]

For example, the lam yig reports that people in a large city south of the border of Sambhala reproduce in an unusual hermaphroditic fashion. All of the citizens possess male genitals in their right thighs, and female in their left. After a mere three months gestation, the child is born from the left thigh (MLDS: 15a5-15b1).

In his own lam yig Paṇ chen Blo bzang dpal ldan ye shes, obviously following Man lung Guru, merely avers that hermaphrodites dwell on the border of Sambhala (NTBBN: 41b3-4). Yet in his LSGK (5a3-5b1) he asserts that this feature of Man lung Guru's lam yig is bizarre, and does not appear in the authoritative (tshad ldan) sources such as the Kalāpāvatāra, which he claims to follow. Help in the resolution of this contradiction may be found in the editor's colophon to NTBBN (50a4-5). There it is reported that the Paṇ chen had said the NTBBN needed revision, but the revision had not been carried out. It is possible that the NTBBN was written first, and the LSGK represents the Paṇ chen's later view, which further devalues Man lung Guru's account.

[13]

Bernbaum believes that (1) the verse sections of the Kalāpāvatāra are interpolated into a older prose original; (2) it contains no clear reference to the[page 496] Kālacakra tradition existing in Sambhala; (3) it probably predates the Kālacakra tradition, perhaps even predating Islam; and (4) the KA itself probably influenced the primary texts of the Kālacakra tradition—the Śrī Kālacakra and the Vimalaprabhā (Bernbaum, 1985: 128-133; cf. 28, 80-81, 102, 115-116).

I see no evidence to support any of these hypotheses. (1) It is extremely problematic to attempt to stratify a Sanskrit text based solely on features of its Tibetan translation. In any case, the verse sections simply frame and elaborate on the prose narrative. This is common practice in Sanskrit literature—it provides no evidence for stratification. (2) The KA in fact refers to the Paramādibuddha-tantra (Dam pa dang po'i sangs rgyas rgyud)—the Kālacakra mūlatantra—as existing in Kalāpa, the capital of Sambhala (KA: 317a4-5; cf. Bernbaum, 1985: 93, n.140). (3) Thus, the KA could not predate the Kālacakra tradition. (Given its content, if the KA predated Islam we would have to entirely rewrite the history of late Indian Buddhism.) (4) There is no evidence that the KA influenced the Śri Kālacakra and the Vimalaprabhā; it is certainly simpler to assume the opposite to be true. (Cf. Newman, 1987: 195-206.)

Given the facts that the earlier Indo-Tibetan Kālacakra tradition exhibits no awareness of the KA, that it was not translated into Tibetan until the seventeenth century, and that Tāranātha specifies that it was translated from a Nepalese manuscript, it is possible that the KA is a product of medieval Newar Buddhism. Comparison of the deities and rituals of the KA with those of the Newars may support this hypothesis. On the other hand, the introduction to the KA (315b7-316a1) indicates that the legendary human audience of the sermon contained in the KA came from Kośala, Vaiśālī, Videha, and Mithilā. We know from manuscript colophons that vestiges of the Kālacakra tradition survived in this region at least into the fifteenth century, and it is possible that the KA originated there.

[14] For a complete translation of the KA see Bernbaum, 1985: 44-80.

[15] Although a few of the toponyms and geographical features of the KA's route may be correlated with real entities, I have the impression that most are the products of literary imagination. Bernbaum (1985: 181-194) has shown that a portion of the KA draws on the journey to Uttarakuru episode of the Rāmāyaṇa.

[16] See the full title of the Shambha la'i smon lam ("The Prayer [to be reborn] in Sambhala"): "The prayer to be reborn at the head of the entourage when in the future the supreme reverend lama himself [i.e., Paṇ chen Blo bzang dpal ldan ye shes] takes up the form of Raudra Cakrin in Sambhala and performs marvelous deeds"—rJe btsun bla ma mchog nyid ma 'ongs dus shambha lar drag po 'khor lo'i skur bzhengs nas ngo mtshar ba'i mdzad pa ston skabs 'khor gyi thog mar skye ba'i smon tshig (KTKMT). Chief among the "marvelous deeds" is the annihilation of the barbarian Muslims, as mentioned above.

[17] Some contemporary Tibetans have adopted similar strategies when confronted by modern geography. They have placed Sambhala under the Arctic ice, on another planet, or in the realm of invisibility (Bernbaum, 1980: 31-39).

[18] The lam yig section of the Paṇ chen's NTBBN is an exception to this rule, but even the NTBBN includes factual geographical information—obtained from British travellers in Tibet—elsewhere in the text (Vostrikov: 232).[page 497]