http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/12/15/sm_shambhala.xml
According to Tibetan Buddhist teachings, paradise exists in the shape of Shambhala,
a lost kingdom somewhere in central Asia.
Armed with directions gleaned from ancient texts and Google Earth,
Patrick Symmes embarked on a quest to find it.
But everyone, from learned scholars of Buddhism to this crafty monk in saffron robes, was telling me to give it a rest, to stay home, to meditate more on an inner journey to Shambhala, and not to travel in search of a real, historical, archaeological one. 'Don't go,' the monk said, and went to sleep.
Brahm was part of a noble tradition of Westerners seeking revelation in Shambhala, one that ran back to the 1620s, when Jesuit missionaries climbed up from India, chasing reports of a powerful kingdom they called 'Xambala'. By 1880 the seekers had hit New York, in the person of Madame Helena Blavatsky, a Russian spiritualist claiming to be in secret communication with the kings of Shambhala. Her disciple Nicholas Roerich, an eccentric painter, went looking for Shambhala in the 1920s and 1930s, driving up from India, training in from Mongolia, spotting UFOs, and eventually declaring a mountain in Kazakhstan to be Shambhala.