The master

In August 1980, in France, at the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of Kagyu Ling, in the Château de Plaige, I met Kalu Kempo Rimpoché, one of the great masters of the Kagyupa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He received me in his private quarters. Three times he asked me whether I knew him, and three times I answered no. Then he said: “We are old friends.”

He performed an initiation ceremony for me and gave me a Tibetan name: Sonam Gyatso. Then he handed me three sacred objects, a thangka, a bronze Buddha and a dorje, for me to keep and to have always with me. They were objects of power, so that the Kagyupa lineage would enter Europe and spread.

That autumn I travelled to his monastery at Sonada, in the mountains of Darjeeling. There I entered into the science of the Kalachakra, the “Wisdom of Fire”, and the secret symbolism of Buddhism, and I witnessed ceremonies of which I still cannot speak today. There began for me a path that has not yet ended.

The Path of the Sun

On my return I compared the Tibetan traditions with those of the ancient Indo-European, Eastern and pre-Columbian cultures, and I came to a conclusion: the ancient texts and accounts that speak of an Original Mythical Land had never been thoroughly investigated or accurately interpreted.

In Villefranche-sur-Mer I bought a sailing boat built in the shipyards of Auray, in French Brittany: the Bohic Ruz. With a small group of friends we sailed her across the Mediterranean to Gibraltar and the Canaries, and on 6 January 1982 we set sail for America, carried by the trade winds. I decided to follow the path of the Sun, from east to west, convinced that in that direction I would find the traces that would lead me to the very gates of that Terra Incognita, the land of a Primordial Mother Culture that left its mark on Egypt, Sumer, India, Greece, Mexico and Peru.

We crossed the Caribbean and the Panama Canal to the coast of Peru. It was a journey of ports and dates, but also an inner journey. Along the way there were very hard trials, which I lived as an initiation and which I keep to myself.

The Navel of the World

In Paracas Bay the Candelabra was waiting for me, the Tree of the World drawn facing the sea. In deciphering its meaning I found the first clues to that Mother Culture. From there I travelled thousands of kilometres: the Nazca desert, Pachacamac, Lake Titicaca, Tiwanaku, Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu and the forest of the Upper Amazon. And in Cusco, the Navel of the World, I entered the Chinkana for the first time, beneath the ancient Temple of the Sun.

The two Shambhalas

In October 1983 I returned to Sonada with Francesc Serrat, who had been the captain of the Bohic Ruz. For years I had been studying the tradition of Shambhala, the hidden kingdom of the Tibetan texts, and I wanted to organize an expedition to Central Asia to search for it. I asked Rimpoché. At first he would tell me almost nothing. I insisted, and he answered that it was impossible. Then he entrusted me with a secret:

“In truth, there are two Shambhalas: one terrestrial, located in a remote region of Central Asia and described in our most secret and sacred texts; and another, celestial, located in a place utterly foreign to our world and inaccessible to our humanity, far from Tibet, beyond the Great Ocean.”

Over the years I understood that it was not so. The Great Ocean is the Pacific Ocean, and the celestial Shambhala is a real land, far from Tibet: the Mythical Land that the ancient maps drew as the Dragon’s Tail, which I describe in Umbilicus Mundi. Rimpoché did not help me search for Shambhala in Central Asia, because with those words he was pointing me to another path: the one I had already travelled, following the Sun, without knowing it.

As in the Odyssey, it was a voyage by sea to the gates of the underworld, the Ukhu Pacha of the Andes. Everything I have researched since was born of that voyage.

Anselm Pi Rambla

Umbilicus Mundi →