Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Mukpo
ISBN 978-0-7704-3743-5
eISBN 978-0-7704-3744-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
cr eating
enlightened society
beginnings
teachers had told him that the world they knew and loved
was coming to an end, and that it was up to him to trans-
mit the essence of Tibet’s wisdom—that people and soci-
ety are good—beyond the parameters of Buddhism, or any
religion. He saw that the best way to do this was to assume
his role as an earth protector, protecting the goodness by
awakening others to it.
I asked myself, Why would such a brilliant individual
highlight as simple a message as basic goodness?
My father was a great believer in humanity. In both
the East and the West, he was always synthesizing the
knowledge that he had gained, seeking to understand and
compare not only what the Buddha had taught, but also
the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, and those of Juda-
ism and Islam, as well as the great minds of China—Lao
Tzu and Confucius. He particularly respected India’s great
ruler King Ashoka, as well as Dogen of the Zen tradition
and Shotoku Taishi of Japan. As diverse as these tradi-
tions are, each of them could be reduced in size but con-
centrated in intensity, to encapsulate two simple ideas:
Humanity is good, and good is the nature of society.
It was through study and reflection that I began to
sense an inner shift in my understanding that the Sham-
bhala principle is an underlying universal theme that
exists throughout obvious and not-so-obvious threads of
human thought. This universality is not a watering down
of any tradition; it is the nucleus at the heart of all tra-