Beijing-based Laurence Brahm is a film director and founder of Shambhala Studio. He has brought the message of Padmasambhava to young people across China through his documentaries and films. He is a certified lineage holder of several Tibetan Buddhist practices that he has been authorized to teach internationally. In this extended conversation we discussed his new rock band, Shambhala, and how his strategy of bringing Dharma to younger Chinese audiences is informed by a holistic philosophy concerning the role of Buddhism in our lives today.
BDG: Laurence, you recently put together a new rock band called Shambhala, whose young and energetic members have been performing in Beijing and elsewhere in China. What was the reasoning behind this?
Laurence Brahm: I was very inspired by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s “Kashmir.” They did a concert with the theme being the story of Shangri-La, based on their travel experiences. Our rock band is a combination of traditional instruments with electronic bass, guitar, drums, and a DJ. We are also using the purbhas, bells, and other crossovers. We have traditional singers, doing very traditional chanting, and then. . . I tell a story. I’m not singing it. I’m just telling you the story of Shambhala, how the Lotus-Born Master will come back in this age of degeneration, and how he is going to open the gates of Shambhala. It really is a teaching, but entirely coded in a performance. Audiences seem to like it so far.
I think music is another way of approaching young people, and reaching beyond the Buddhist community. We’re talking to ourselves a lot of the time. Let’s go and talk to people who don’t have a point of reference for Buddhism. And rather than trying to push something on them with a lot of cultural symbolism, we bring them to traditional Himalayan wisdom traditions that are actually containing encrypted knowledge, which is the cutting edge of where technology and science should go. And we’re now talking about AI and the nature of mind and consciousness.
BDG: How do you talk to people who are younger and not interested in more of the traditional ways?
Vajrayana has good answers and very clear pathways. But young people don’t buy the idea that they have to see a lama in the mountains and defer to his authority. They really want something that’s accessible and can be applied to their daily lives. They want skills to overcome the many frustrations that they’re facing today, which are more severe than those of their parents’ generation. You don’t have so many economic opportunities, and you are riddled with distractions of absolute garbage on the Internet and social media. How do you cut through all of that? That’s what the Lotus-Born Master’s teachings are all about and that’s what we’re doing.
By using “tech” language or contemporary language, we find that it’s easier for people to grasp the concepts and understand. This makes sense from the perspective of linguistic evolution. If we read Beowulf or Shakespeare today, we won’t understand it because we don’t use Old English or Elizabethan English anymore. And a lot of the sutras that we are reading originated with much older languages. It could even be said to be irrelevant to our daily vocabulary.
Therefore, we realized that we have to use a different language to reach people. For example, Cham dances need to be preserved and sustained, but not everybody can understand the meaning behind the art. So we can use new ways to present the same meaning in a way that can quickly be downloaded and received by young people.
BDG: How is music, apart from it being a very sensory-engaging thing for young people, able to connect to Dharma in both the medium and the message?
LB: Well, one of the Rinpoches in Bhutan was asking me the same thing this morning. He was saying: “When are you going to stop your work?” And I replied: “I’m never going to stop working,” because every time we do a sadhana or prayer or practice, we always say this is not just for myself, but for all sentient beings. But how do you really actualize that beyond a thought or a positive intention? And right now, what I see is a huge gap between young people, under the age of thirty or even twenty, and their parents, who are thirty-five and over, or forty and over. The two groups’ perspectives on Buddhism are very different.
Younger people don’t buy into their parents’ more traditional approach, and at the same time, young people are overwhelmed by social media and distractions. As Guru Padmasambhava described in one of his prophecies, this is the time of degeneration, the age of Kali. Men will be ruled by anger, women by jealousy, and the youth will be distracted, unable to focus. There’s a lot of manic depression and drug use. And so what I’ve found is when I reach out to young people and get them interested in the practices of Guru Padmasambhava and the Shambhala journey, they really open up and begin to do some practice. Their lives change dramatically. They become very focused. They become very disinterested in the social media distractions. They get off of drugs. They get into fitness, health, and healthy eating.
I’ve had a number of young people who’ve come to me to learn. One of them recently came back from overseas, where we’ve been communicating by video. I’ve been teaching him different practices, and he was a drug user, and now he’s off of it. And now he’s into fitness and spiritual practice. The new metal group, Korn, did a rendition of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” They added a line, which is, “I don’t need any drugs to calm my mind.” And I think that this is how we can practice now.
Padmasambhava was very punk rock. He was pushing the boundaries of Buddhist practice at the time. Right. Tantrism was really cutting edge. He was breaking the rules, and this is one of the reasons why Tibetans love this personality so much. Because Tibetans are actually very free-thinking, very easy-going, and very fun-loving. And Padmasambhava broke the regimen and challenged the system. He is at the Dzogchen level, which states that there’s no right or wrong, no good or bad. . . there are no points of reference. You know, his consort becomes a tiger and he rides it. He goes into the nunnery and teaches the nuns Tantra. I mean, all of these things are intrusive technologies. They are disrupting people’s comfort zone, and in terms of doing that, getting you to look at the nature of reality, the nature of your own mind, and really break through.
If you’re dwelling in the moment, and you can convert the anger and jealousy and desire and other frustrations into positive things, then your negativity becomes the vajra or power that can cut through obstacles. That desire becomes the lotus energy that actually magnetizes compassion and love. The greed becomes the source of benefit and wealth for everybody. In truth, you’re converting constantly, and in realizing that in the conversion, it becomes just how you see things. It’s a question of perspective.
The entire rock movement is sort of just breaking out of all dualities and oppositional categories: good, evil, Republican, Democrat, West, East. . . So in many ways, Vajrakilaya is the ultimate metallic power. And when we think about mantra, we really mean the vibrational frequencies that we’re using to change the algorithm and reset it around us. . . take the sounds and convert them into very positive energy fields, get people to wake up and change their perspective of how things can be. Potentiality is unlimited if you simply are in that field, in the ground, if you’re able to get into that space and change everything. And I think that’s what we can do right now, and that’s how we can reach many people, regardless of whether they’re Buddhist or not Buddhist.
BDG: Rock represented a fundamentally anti-establishment counterculture to, at least in the context of the American, the American experience. How do you pay respects to traditional systems of hierarchy, while preserving the message of rebellion and renewal for young people?
I’m getting very positive feedback from many of the Rinpoches. We had our exhibit in Chengdu, Sichuan in March, April, and May. We screened our films. We also performed our inaugural rock concert. And the Rinpoches came out and said: “This is great because you’re able to reach young people in a way that we can’t right now.”
While I’m the first to support the continuation of all these traditions in their original traditional form, we have to realize that very few people are going to do what I did, and go up into the mountains, to these places, and find these Rinpoches and learn from them. Guru Rinpoche was a rock star. And, you know, it was Shakyamuni Buddha who was enlightened, and it was later on that institutions and scholarship realized how great he was. Guru Padmasambhava said, “You can become realized in one second this lifetime.” And I think that’s what we’re trying to bring out there in this world. If you’re able to get everybody to really come into that space of realization, we’re in Shambhala, we can avoid this age of Kali destruction.
And so how do we take the essential and bring it to the world, especially in this age of Kali? Guru Padmasambhava gave a hint. He had all of these prophecies and sadhanas that he hid as termas. They are actually quite short, so they can be done by people in a way that converges with a busy lifestyle. This actually helps them to achieve realization, rather than putting them into some kind of rigorous system where they become disengaged from their lives and the people they must work and live with, such as their families and friends.
If you can get control over your emotions right this second and you can convert that greed, anger, and ignorance into the powers of love, compassion, and removing obstacles, then nothing else matters. You are in the present. You are, right now, able to move in enlightened space. That’s where you want to be and not worry so much about the rest, including the dogma. I think for younger people, this approach makes a lot of sense. It helps them to realize who they are in what is right now a very confused world.
BDG: The tantric practitioner of medieval India looked very different to the Tantric practitioner of Tibet. What do you envision the young Tantric practitioner of the future to be like? Will they be in many different guises? Will they be a little bit punkster?
LB: Ancient Tantric practitioners had long hair and earrings. . . and some practitioners today still have long hair and earrings. Some things don’t change. The point is that in many cases, the practitioners were not in the monastery. They were outside of the institutions. Shakyamuni Buddha said, “You got eighty-four thousand doors into Nirvana,” and there are many approaches, and some people prefer a rigid institutional approach. It gives them direction, it gives them framework, it gives them, reference points, and they’re very comfortable with that. Others are into, “Okay, I’m going to be in the space. I’m going to be in nature. I want to be free, or I want to live my life, and through my own experiences, realize who I am and who, what, what this world is all about.”
One of the things we’ve tried to do is after making the initial trilogy of Searching for the Lotus-Born Master, Return of the Lotus-Born Master, and Dakini Code, we went on to make science fiction movies. We made three: Lotus-Born Master: Shambhala Access Code, Lotus-Born Master: Algorithm of Karma, and Lotus-Born Master: Journey to the Other Side of the Black Hole. And we used science fiction because it was a way of bringing people into what’s happening right now today, to be able to look at the crises, the craziness of our world, and to be able to see through the illusions and understand how these practices can actually be applied today, and how they’re connected to the issues that we’re facing as the human race.
In our first trilogy, we asked, “Is the Lotus-Born Master the father of quantum physics?” And a lot of Buddhists are saying, “Wow! Look, you’ve got science people verifying what we’ve always believed in.” If you flip it around for the scientists, it’s the ancient Himalayan wisdom that is decoding where we’ve gone, but we can’t figure out the rest. There’s a kind of symbiotic understanding there.
As of a few months ago, we shut our cameras down, having filmed our fourth science fiction movie: Lotus-Born Master: Punksters and Magicians. Punksters and Magicians is really celebrating this very rebellious instinct that young people have, and then in turn, taking back the power of our own mind from AI, from social media, and other channels capturing your information and feeding you certain sets of information that it wants you to be glued to. That results in you running up your screen time, which is a way of creating a valuation for a company that’s being listed or that’s being traded somewhere. And really, you’re just being used as a digit.
One of the Rinpoches was saying to me the other day, that my contemporary storytelling is really what human beings were doing hundreds of years ago. People would gather around the fire, young people would come together, and the shaman or the tulku or the yogi master would tell a story. A lot of the Buddhist stories, like Guru Rinpoche’s adventures, are told in a way that is almost Disney-esque. You have demons, magic, princesses, and so much more. But what is the deeper meaning behind all of these images?
What we’re doing might look to be way out there, but in many ways, it could be very traditional. So I come back to this: maybe what we’re doing with the long hair and earrings is actually what the yogis did in the old days. Is there something that might just be very ancient in what looks like a new approach? It all comes full circle, and what looks like rebellion is actually renewal.
BDG: Wonderful. Thank you very much for your time, Laurence.
LB: Thank you, and may the force of the Guru be with all of you.
Related features from BDG
Book Review: The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies
Decoding the Mountains and the Wind: A Pilgrimage on the Trail of The Dakini Code
Padmasambhava’s Buddha-field of Tantric Dances: Re-establishing Dance in the Narrative of Guru Rinpoche
