Volume 1

Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet : being a narrative of three years' travel in eastern high Asia / by Lieut.-Colonel N. Prejevalsky .. ; translated by E. Delmar Morgan ... with introduction and notes by Colonel Henry Yule.

Nikolay Przhevalsky

Date:: 1876

Credit: Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet : being a narrative of three years' travel in eastern high Asia / by Lieut.-Colonel N. Prejevalsky .. ; translated by E. Delmar Morgan ... with introduction and notes by Colonel Henry Yule. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$might have been confounded by Pliny with another system of dumb bargaining, related of many uncivilised nations, and have given rise to that strange statement of his about the Seres.—[Y.] SHAMBALING. P. 253- Shambhala; called in Tibetan hdcA\byung, vulgo de- jung (‘ origin of happiness ’), is a fabulous country in the north, the capital of which was Kalapa, a very splendid city, and the residence of many illustrious kings of Sham- bhala. It was situated beyond the Sita River, and the augmentation of the length of the days from the vernal equinox to midsummer amounted to twelve Indian hours (gParis), or four hours forty-eight minutes. The Sita is one of the four mighty rivers of the Hindu mythological geography, into which the Ganges breaks after falling upon earth. It is regarded in the Vishnu Purana as flowing eastward, and would find its actual representative in the Tarim, continued to the ocean in the Hoang-ho ; and the Chinese traveller Hwen-thsang does identify it thus. Csoma de Koros, however, interprets it in the Tibetan legend as the Jaxartes, and calculates the lati- tude of Kalapa as between 450 and 50° According to some of the Tibetan books, Dazung, a king of Shambhala, visited Sakya Muni, and the latter foretold to him a great series of the kings to succeed him, followed by the rise of Mahommedanism, and then by the general re-establishment and diffusion of Buddhism, a prophecy which one is sometimes tempted to think is receiving its accomplishment in modern Europe. Some of the Tantrika doctrines were said in Tibet to have come from Shambhala.1 Sambhala is in Plindu mythology the place where 1 See Csoma Kbrost, in J. As. Soc. Bengal, ii. 57 &c. ; As. Re- searches, XX. 488.$