Page:Mongolia, the Tangut country, and the solitudes of northern Tibet vol 1 (1876).djvu/357

 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.]

Shambhala; called in Tibetan bdé-hbyung, vulgo de-jung ('origin of happiness'), is a fabulous country in the north, the capital of which was Kálapa, a very splendid city, and the residence of many illustrious kings of Shambhala. 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 (gharis), or four hours forty-eight minutes.

The Sita is one of the four mighty rivers of the Hindú mythological geography, into which the Ganges breaks after falling upon earth. It is regarded in the Vishnu Purána 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 Körős, however, interprets it in the Tibetan legend as the Jaxartes, and calculates the latitude of Kálapa as between 45° and 50°.

According to some of the Tibetan books, Dazung, a king of Shambhala, visited Sákya 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.

Sambhala is in Hindú mythology the place where