Kalachakra

Kalachakra is organised around a correspondence in three registers, and the tradition names them plainly. The outer wheel is the cosmos: its structure, its measurements and the cycles of the heavens. The inner wheel is the human body: its channels, its winds and the rhythms of breath and of the lunar month within it. The third, which the texts call the other or the alternative wheel, is the practice, the mandala and the deity through which the first two are worked upon.

The logic is that the outer and inner are the same system at two scales, so that operating on the body operates on the cosmos and the practice is what makes the operation possible. The tantra develops this at unusual length, which is why it is often described as the most systematic of the Indian Buddhist tantras rather than merely the last.

It is also the most self contained. The Kalachakra carries its own cosmology, its own astronomy and calendar and its own account of the kingdom of Shambhala and its line of kings, material that other tantras leave to separate literatures. David Snellgrove's survey of Indo Tibetan Buddhism and John Powers's introduction to Tibetan Buddhism both set it in relation to the wider tantric corpus, where its distinctiveness on all three counts is what stands out.

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.