The Calendar, Shambhala and the Public Initiation

The Kalachakra's astronomy is not an ornament on the system. The Tibetan calendar in use today derives from it, and the sixty year cycle by which Tibetan years are reckoned is counted from the eleventh century date the tradition assigns to the tantra's arrival. Svante Janson's technical study of Tibetan calendar mathematics sets out how the calculations work and how they descend from the tantra's own tables. A body of religious literature that also functions as the civil timekeeping of a society is an unusual thing, and it is one of the reasons the Kalachakra's influence reaches well beyond those who practise it.

Shambhala, the kingdom described in the tantra and its commentary and ruled by a line of kings who preserve the teaching, has had a long career of its own. It was taken up in European and American esoteric writing from the nineteenth century onward and reworked at some distance from the Buddhist material, a process examined in Donald Lopez's work on Western reception of Tibetan Buddhism.

The initiation is the other unusual feature. Tantric empowerments are ordinarily given to small numbers of prepared practitioners under conditions of secrecy. The Kalachakra initiation has been conferred publicly on audiences of many thousands, including outside Asia, in a practice associated particularly with the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and the departure from the usual pattern is deliberate rather than accidental.