Are You Willing To Be Surprised?

THE SHAMBALA WARRIOR

Joanna Macy

From a talk given by Joanna Macy at Manzanita Village on July 21, 1995 during a weekend workshop she led. Manzanita Village has been living inside me, an important part of my interior landscape. It holds down southern California in my geography. The desert. The sky. The plant beings. The stars. The fragrances. Have you noticed how wonderful this feels at night? Sitting here by lamp light, the light on the warm colors of the floor, the low ceiling, the brown earthen walls. This room reminds me of the Buddhist cave temples and western ghats of India. They are among the earliest places of Dharma practice. They're carved out of the living rock. Along the front are great figures and pillars. Inside could be a space like this. Sitting here I feel how ancient the heritage is that we are part of. The heritage of the Buddha Dharma, of our ancestors who practiced the spiritual discipline to awaken to the sacredness of life. To serve the sacredness of life. To be awake. To see connection.

We come out of different places and walkways of our world in the closing years of the twentieth century. Out of the tumult and hectic pace of cities and towns. You don't even need to be in a city to feel driven in this culture of ours. We come from lives of responsibility. Now we take distance from our daily life. In order, perhaps, to see it more clearly, to embrace it more lovingly, to find inspiration for its deeper, larger meaning. And so that we can feel held by our world, our real world, our living planet.

In this time, when the life of our planet and all beings are endangered, I feel honored to be here with you, with Christopher and Michele and the kangaroo rats. And also with the feelings of the ancestors, those who walked this part of Turtle Island, those who tended the living earth of our planet. In this shadowy room, I can imagine other beings among us. They would include beings of the future. One of my teachers, Rosealie Bertells, says all the beings that are ever going to be born on planet Earth are present on planet Earth now. They are present in our DNA. In the stuff of our living organism that we pass on. Just as we have been present, in that sense, from the beginning.

So I imagine and I call on the presence of the future ones to be with us. I do that a lot in my life - for courage, for endurance, for joy. This is so critical a moment, this time of turning, at the end of the twentieth century, at the end of this millennium. How dicey things are for us now, for life on Earth, for complex forms of life. Part of the reason for our being here this weekend is to find guidance and inspiration, ways of being present to our world that can help us take part in healing our world.

I am going to tell a story. A story that accompanies me into most workshops because it has been for me so deep an inspiration for the kind of work that we do - to prepare to be part of the self-healing of our world. It comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. It's twelve centuries old. It is not a story as much as a prophecy.

In 1980, I was in northwest India. I heard people referring to the Kingdom of Shambhala. They said it's prophesied in the Kalachakra-Tantra. It caught my interest because it was talking about a time of great hardships and difficulties. I had been working on issues around nuclear power and nuclear energy, and feeling very much the critical nature of the dangers we faced militarily, ecologically, politically. So I was very curious about this prophecy.

They said that it prophecies a hard time, and although it was made twelve centuries ago, it has to do with this twenty to forty year period, now, in this generation, in which we are living. I got three different versions. In the first, the coming of the Kingdom of Shambhala was internal and had to do with our own awakening, our own inner spiritual journey. That didn't interest me all that much.

The second version was almost the opposite; it was governed by what was happening externally. It didn't matter what our role was. A Lama wanted to know why I wasn't ready to go into a three-year retreat in a cave. I said I couldn't because I had to stop nuclear war. I knew I couldn't do it alone, but I felt I needed to participate in the effort. And he said, "Joanna, don't you know that the Kingdom of Shambhala is coming?" As if it could come independently of anything we do, and we could therefore just lie back.

Then I talked with my dear Dharma-brother, friend, and teacher, Chujow-Rinpoche. He recounted to me the third version that has had such an impact on my life. These are pretty much his words:

"There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. At this time great powers have arisen, barbarian powers. Although these powers have wasted their wealth in preparing to annihilate each other, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable devastation and technologies that lay waste to the world. It is just at this point, when the future of all beings seems to be hanging by the frailest of threads, that the Kingdom of Shambhala emerges." "You cannot go there," he said, "because it's not a geopolitical entity. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala Warriors." That is the word he used, 'warriors.'

"You can't recognize a Shambhala Warrior by looking at him or her," he said, "because they don't wear uniforms - no insignias. They wave no banners, they don't even have barricades on which to climb to threaten the enemy or hide behind to rest or to regroup. They don't have any home turf. Ever and always they move on the terrain of the barbarian powers."

"Great courage is required of the Shambhala Warrior. Moral courage and physical courage. Because the Warriors are going right into the heart of the barbarian powers to dismantle the weapons. They're going into the citadels and the pits and pockets where the weapons are stored. Weapons, in every sense of the word. They're going into the corridors of power where decisions are made, in order to dismantle the weapons that threaten all life on Earth."

"The Shambhala Warriors are able to do this because they know these weapons are mind-made. The dangers that confront us in this time are not visited upon us by some extraterrestrial force, or some satanic deity, or even by a preordained fate. They arise out of our choices, our relationships, our life styles. Made by the human mind they can be unmade by the human mind. In this time the Shambhala Warriors go into training."

Well, as you can imagine, I asked Chujow how they train. And he said, "they train in the use of two weapons." That is the term he used, 'weapons.'

"What are they?" I asked. He said, "One is compassion, and the other is insight into the interdependence of all phenomena."

"You need both," he said. "Compassion, because it provides the fuel that is the motive power. That is what moves you to engage, to take part in the healing of the world. That openness to the pain of our world is essential. Not to be afraid of it. But by itself it is not enough. By itself it can just burn you up, burn you out. You need the other, you need that insight into the interdependence of all beings and all things. With that you know that the battles we face are not battles between good and evil, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. Insight by itself is a cool knowledge; it must be married with the heat of compassion."

This prophecy is an insight into our true nature, into our interconnectedness, into our deep ecology. It is good to share it while sitting below the figures of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. They represent the two powers, the two resources, the two weapons of the Shambhala Warrior.

Brothers and Sisters, lovers of our world, you have come from so many different journeys and such different lives to visit Manzanita Village in the chaparral-covered hills of southern California, of planet Earth. Our coming together is in service to the sacred life of this planet. We have come for our own spiritual growth but also in service to the larger whole, to our people. In our practice we can discover how to fit together our personal pain and the planet's pain, our personal healing and the planet's healing - a deeper integration which brings a release of intentions, energy and insight. Be willing to hear the Earth speaking through you and to each other. Be willing to be surprised, especially to be surprised by what you hear from within yourself.

Copyright © Joanna Macy