Sangje Dapo, the living Buddha, was dying. He was the twenty-third incarnation of the Buddha at Zatuo Monastery. He was ninety-eight years old, and after him there would be no successor. Sangje Dapo and I had been friends. I had come to write an article about him. When a religion as mysterious and as steeped in legend such as Lamaism fails to produce a successor to its many petty leaders, it declines. Those were my sentiments. Sangje Dapo thought otherwise. He shook his head at me, and his eyes took on a faraway look. “Sangbala,” he said slowly, “the battle of Sangbala has begun.” (Dawa, p. 14)
One more place in which the mythology of Shambhala has appeared is in modern Tibetan literature. Specifically, I wish to call attention to a fantastical, magical realist short story by Tashi Dawa called “A Soul in Bondage”. The premise is as follows: the narrator (a journalist) interviews the last living lama of a remote monastery as he is on his deathbed, with no apparent heir to take over. However, the lama tells the narrator that the end of his lineage is the sign of the coming of a prophecy, which would begin with a young couple travelling in search of the mystical kingdom of Sangbala. The narrator realizes that this is a story he had written himself a few years ago but had abandoned as he could not find an appropriate ending. While re-reading his manuscript, the narrator is transported into the world of fiction, and discovers that the male protagonist was fatally injured on the way to Sangbala. The abandoned journey of the couple and the protagonist’s injury are precisely due to the writer’s abandonment of his story as unfinished.
The point of magical realism is precisely to unsettle the everyday, weaving alternative logics into the commonplace to bring out the strange in the quotidian and the quotidian in the strange. It does not so much transcend the realm of reality as much as interact with it playfully and create a text that remains nebulous as a field open to interpretation, seen in Dawa’s purposeful enmeshment of many conflicting imageries across time and space (even referencing biblical imageries, Salvador Dali, and Thomas More’s Utopia). Dawa’s piece is highly self-referential, reflecting on the power of authorship and blurring the lines between fiction and reality. He transforms an absurd prophecy into a veritable literary narrative, making us question our belief systems with a detached irony. In the literary analysis of Wonkar Tso, it is claimed that “his own decentered presence melding within the multiple narrative reveals his growing obsession with the creative process of producing literature” (40). The representation of the subject itself is also troubled in this work of post-modernism, characterized by its intertextuality.
The original short story (translated into English by David Kwan) is worth a read and a discussion. This is yet another example that I managed to find of modern Tibetan employment of Shambhala imagery, this time with an additional and demonstrative self-awareness not only of the origins of this imagery but of the very history of its representations as well.