#Strange story tibet mystifies movie#

Then, to its amazement, he reappeared two years later, informing a stunned Watson, 'I traveled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhasa.' Nothing has been known of those mis In 1891, the British public was horrified to learn that Sherlock Holmes had perished in a deadly struggle with the archcriminal Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Shambala is a magic land, unlike any place on earth, and rests in the shadow of a magnificent white mountain.In 1891, the British public was horrified to learn that Sherlock Holmes had perished in a deadly struggle with the archcriminal Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. In Shambala, the people lived in peace and harmony, faithful to the principles of Buddhism, and the concepts of war and sorrow were unknown. (Curiously, although the tale is known now as a Tibetan myth, it seems that it was first recorded in AD 966 in India.) The Buddhist Kalachakra tale tells of a land behind the Himalayas, ruled by a gracious King Sucandra, who was the first to learn the Kalachakra doctrine from Buddha Sakyamuni himself. In this doctrine, the place named Shambala appears as a mystical conception, a spiritual rather than a geographical goal. The Kalachakra doctrine belongs to the highest level of Buddhist Mahayana teaching, and those who follow it can reach enlightenment in just a number of years rather than a whole lifetime. The name Shambala first appears in a text known as the Kalachakra tantra - or Wheel of Time teaching.

This idea of a lost kingdom somewhere in the Himalayas has also circulated in Tibetan Buddhist teaching for centuries, and may well itself have been told at the court of Akbar. It was republished in 1926 under the title Discovery of Tibet, and Hilton's Lost Horizon obviously owes much to this work. The terrain soon became hostile, but Andrade did eventually find an impressive and wealthy kingdom - although no Christians lived there - and his account of his adventurous journey was rediscovered in Calcutta in the 19th century. But his successor, a Portuguese Jesuit missionary named Antonio Andrade, was galvanised by the tale, and determined to go in search of these people.ДЄndrade set out from Akbar's court, armed with the map, and at first followed yogis and wandering pilgrims on the road across the mountains.

The priest who penned the map was old, and incapable of undertaking a dangerous mission across high mountain passes in search of an obscure community of Christians. On his map the area of Tibet is depicted as a great white blank, except for one place, labelled 'Manasarovar lacus' (Lake Manasarovar), with next to it a tantalising scribbled note saying, 'Here it is said Christians live'. One visiting Jesuit priest summarised the strange stories he heard at the court of Akbar in an essay, and sketched an accompanying map. This was the moment when Westerners first heard accounts of what lay beyond the Himalayan mountains, the very first time that Tibet entered the consciousness of Europeans. Thus in his court congregated Hindus, Yogis and Sadhus from all corners of his empire, as well as visiting Christian monks and pilgrims from western lands. Nowadays, of course, the choice of the location of the tale seems all the more poignant, given what happened in Tibet some years after the book was published, with the Chinese invasion of 1949, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. And Tibet in the 1930s was still a land of mystery, one of the last unmapped places, a forbidden and insular country. In the increasingly pessimistic 1930s, when Western civilisation seemed bent on a path to self-destruction - and when, as Carl Jung put it, 'the smell of burning was in the air' - the story of a kind of earthly paradise had an irresistible appeal. These days, the name is part of the language, used everywhere from Nepali airlines and Chinese hotel chains to holiday cottages in Florida and Torquay.

#Strange story tibet mystifies movie#

And when the novel was turned into a Hollywood movie by Frank Capra, it was an instant success. The book enjoyed great popularity, and even the retreat of the US president at Camp David was called Shangri-La, after the paradise described in it. All the wisdom of the human race is contained in this place, in the cultural treasures stored, and in the minds of the people who have gathered here in the face of an imminent catastrophe. Set in the troubled years before World War Two, the book tells of a community in a lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan lamas), in the lost Tibetan valley of Shangri-La, cut off from the world and from time. The story of Shangri-La itself is a modern one, told by the English novelist James Hilton in his novel Lost Horizon (1933).