Milarepa's Revenge & Redemption

The Black Magician

Milarepa — "the cotton-clad one" — began, by his own account, as a murderer. Born in eleventh-century Tibet to a well-off family, he saw his world collapse when his father died and the greedy relatives took the inheritance, leaving his mother and sister in poverty and shame. His mother, in the telling of the Life, fed her grief into a single demand: learn sorcery, and avenge us.

He obeyed. After years of training he loosed a spell that collapsed a house upon a wedding feast, killing thirty-five people — the relatives who had wronged them. Then, the biographies say, his teacher's conscience turned, and Milarepa looked at what he had done. The darkness he had sent out came home to him, and it was absolute. He would spend the rest of his life paying it back — not to the dead, who could not be returned, but to the truth.

The Stone Towers

He sought out Marpa the Translator, a householder-guru famous and fearsome. What followed is the most famous account of guru-discipline in Tibetan tradition. Marpa made him build a stone tower alone, then told him to tear it down and build it again — three times, with different shapes — and still withheld the teachings. He was mocked, beaten, refused. At the lowest point Marpa's wife, Damema, secretly helped him — and even that, in the story, had to be paid for. The trials were not cruelty for its own sake: Marpa was burning out the karma of the thirty-five dead, using work and humiliation as the fire.

At last Marpa revealed that the whole ordeal had been a purifying device, and gave him the complete transmission — the initiation, the instructions of the inner-heat practice (tummo), and the parting blessing of the Mahāmudrā lineage.

The Cotton-Clad One

Milarepa spent the rest of his life in caves and on snow-mountains, clothed only in a thin cotton cloth even in the Himalayan winter — warmed, the tradition says, by the inner heat of his practice. He sang his realization instead of writing it: the Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, the dohās of a man talking to deer and hunters, students and snowstorms, in the plainest words — songs about impermanence, about the teachers' kindness, about the mind's own radiance.

His chief disciple Rechungpa and, later, the physician-yogi Gampopa carried the lineage forward; through Gampopa it became the Kagyü tradition, one of the great rivers of Tibetan Buddhism. But the story's first gift is simpler, and it is why it has never stopped being told: a man who had done the worst thing he could imagine did not deny it, did not drown in it, and did not run. He carried it to a teacher, put it on the fire, and sang while it burned.