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Milarepa

རྗེ་བཙུན་མི་ལ་རས་པ། · rje btsun mi la ras pa

c. 1052 – c. 1135Historically documented person

Eleventh-century Tibetan yogi, hermit and poet, a founding figure of the Kagyu lineage. According to his hagiography he avenged his family through sorcery, expiated his crimes under the trials set by Marpa the Translator and reached awakening in a life of retreat in Himalayan caves, clad only in cotton and fed on nettles. His “hundred thousand songs” of realisation, fixed by Tsangnyön Heruka in 1488, are Tibet's best-loved book.

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Tangka butanés de Milarepa, finales del s. XIX – principios del XX

Tangka butanés de Milarepa, finales del s. XIX – principios del XX · Public domain

In their words

«Seeing this Life, one is freed from the eight worldly concerns. Hearing it, faith arises of itself. Recollecting it, entanglements are severed at the root.»

Versos de cierre del Namthar; son palabras del compilador Tsangnyön Heruka sobre el libro, no de Milarepa, y así deben presentarse. Quintman (2010), pp. 233–234, citado en Quintman (2023)

The Life of Milarepa (Namthar) — Milarepa

Their central idea

A single human life, however grave the guilt, suffices to reach awakening: Milarepa's story exists to show that a killer can become a buddha “in one body and one lifetime”, the promise of the tantric path as against the aeons of the gradual path.

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Biography

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What is known and what is told

About Milarepa, Tibet's best-loved yogi, almost nothing can be stated with historical certainty. That he existed, that he was a disciple of Marpa the Translator and the teacher of Gampopa, that he lived as a hermit in the mountains along the Nepalese border and taught by singing, is admitted by the whole tradition and accepted by modern scholarship. But the life everyone knows—the revenge, the towers, the nettles, the poison—comes from a single book, the Namthar or “complete liberation” composed in 1488 by Tsangnyön Heruka, the “Madman of Tsang”, three and a half centuries after the events, on the basis of older biographies now partly recovered. Not even the dates are safe: the dominant tradition says 1052–1135; the Kagyu scholars of the eighteenth century preferred 1028–1111; much current scholarship, 1040–1123. This entry follows the chronology of the Namthar and flags it for what it is: hagiography, that is, a life written to serve as a model.

The son of Mila

He was born, according to that account, at Kya Ngatsa in the Gungthang valley, at the far south-western edge of Tibet, into a family of prosperous traders of the Mila clan. His father, Sherab Gyaltsen, named him Thöpaga, “delightful to hear”, because the boy sang well. When the father died Thöpaga was seven; the will entrusted the estate to the paternal uncle and aunt until the heir came of age, and they made it their own. The widow, Nyangtsa Kargyen, and her two children, Thöpaga and Peta, became servants in what had been their house. When the boy turned fifteen his mother gathered what little she had for a feast at which she publicly claimed the inheritance; the uncle and aunt humiliated her before the village. She then sold her last field to send her son to learn sorcery.

What follows is the part of the story the tradition has never wished to soften: Thöpaga learned, and what he learned worked. During the wedding of the uncle's eldest son the house collapsed and thirty-five people died; the uncle and aunt were spared so that they might see what they had lost. When the village sought revenge, his mother demanded more and the son sent hail upon the harvest. The Namthar does not play down the crimes because it needs them: Tibet's saint is, before anything else, a killer.

Marpa and the towers

Remorse came slowly, as fear of death and of rebirth in the hells. Thöpaga sought a teacher; a lama of the Great Perfection told him that his teaching liberated without effort, and the disciple, taking him at his word, went to sleep. The lama then sent him to Lhodrak, to Marpa Chökyi Lodrö, the translator who had travelled three times to India to bring back the teachings of Nāropa. Marpa, a man of great learning and short temper, knew in a dream who was coming, but received him as a labourer: he made him build a tower, tear it down, build another elsewhere, tear that down too, return every stone to its place, and at last raise the nine-storey tower of Sekhar Gutok, which still stands. Meanwhile he refused him the initiations, drove him with blows from the ceremonies other disciples attended, and left his back raw. Marpa's wife, Dagmema, took pity on him and sent him with a forged letter to another master, Ngokpa; when the deception was discovered, Marpa, weeping, explained that each trial had been meant to purify one crime, that had Milarepa completed them all he would never again have needed to be reborn, and that what remained would be purified by meditation. He was thirty-eight when he reached Lhodrak and forty-four when he left, with the initiation name Zhepa Dorje and the instructions on inner heat, tummo, and the Great Seal, mahāmudrā.

The cotton-clad one

He returned to his village and found the house in ruins and, inside, his mother's bones. That night, the text says, he understood all at once the impermanence he had spent years studying, and went to the mountains never to return. In the cave of Drakar Taso, the “White Rock Horse Tooth”, he meditated for whole years with no food but the nettles growing at the entrance, until his skin turned green and his hair too; when his sister Peta found him she thought she saw a ghost and reproached him for a life that seemed to her worse than a beggar's. Milarepa answered her in song. Peta's shame at his nakedness, the thieves who enter the cave at night and find nothing to steal, the curd the yogi, by the power of tummo, does not need: each episode is a teaching in the form of a scene. Clad only in a cotton cloth he became the repa, “the cotton-clad one”, and by that name the Himalaya knew him.

From there the biography turns into geography: Lapchi, Chuwar, Mount Kailash—where, according to the Mgur 'bum, he defeated the Bön priest Naro Bönchung in a contest of powers by reaching the summit riding a ray of sunlight—and caves in Nepal and western Tibet that are still visited. He taught whoever approached him, shepherds, hunters, demons, a learned geshe, and did so in improvised songs, the mgur, which the tradition gathered into a collection of “a hundred thousand”. Among his disciples two shaped the future: Rechungpa, the “heart son”, who came as a boy and returned from India with the oral transmissions; and Gampopa, the physician-monk trained in the Kadam school, who cast the yogi's experience in a monastic mould and from whose students the four great Kagyu branches, including that of the Karmapas, were born.

The poison and the gold

He died, still according to the Namthar, at eighty-four, at Chuwar in the Drin valley. An envious geshe, Tsakpuwa, sent him poisoned curd through a concubine to whom he promised a turquoise; Milarepa, who knew, took it anyway because his time had come, and before dying made the geshe himself feel in his own body the pain he had caused, forgave him and converted him. He gathered his disciples, gave them his final instructions—renounce the eight worldly concerns, meditate in solitude—and told them there was gold beneath the hearth. When they looked they found a scrap of cloth, a knife, a lump of sugar and a note: whoever said that Milarepa had owned gold should fill his mouth with excrement. The body, it is said, vanished from the pyre, carried off by the dakinis, and the disciples quarrelled over relics that did not exist.

The making of a saint

None of this is verifiable, and what is interesting is how much we now know about how it was built. The first biographies were written in the twelfth century by direct disciples such as Gampopa and Ngendzong Repa; in the following centuries they were compiled into cycles—the Twelve Great Disciples, the Karmapas' Black Treasury—that enlarged the story with songs. Tsangnyön Heruka rewrote it as a life of the Buddha in a Tibetan key, divided it into two books, Life and Hundred Thousand Songs, and, decisively, had them woodblock-printed at a time when printing was still a novelty in central Tibet: hence their ubiquity. The Gungthang reprints of 1538, 1540 and 1550–1555—partly preserved in the Wellcome Collection and the British Library—also fixed his image: seated, right hand to his ear, singing. Jacques Bacot translated him into French in 1925 and Evans-Wentz published him in English in 1928; Garma C. C. Chang rendered the songs in 1962, Lobsang Lhalungpa the life in 1977 and Andrew Quintman, who has reconstructed this whole process, translated it afresh in 2010. What remains, in the end, is not a verifiable life but something rarer: a model of a life that nine centuries of readers have found credible.

Sources: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227. · Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Lobsang P. Lhalungpa. Nueva York: E. P. Dutton, 1977; Boston: Shambhala, 1985. ISBN 9780877732815. · Chang, Garma C. C. (trad. y anot.). The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. 2 vols. New Hyde Park (NY): University Books / Oriental Studies Foundation, 1962; reed. Boulder: Shambhala, 1977 y 1999 (ISBN 9781570624766). Vol. 1 digitalizado en Wikimedia Commons. · Quintman, Andrew. The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa. Nueva York: Columbia University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780231164153. · Evans-Wentz, W. Y. (ed.). Tibet's Great Yogī Milarepa: A Biography from the Tibetan. Trad. Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup. Londres: Oxford University Press, 1928. Digitalizado en Internet Archive.

Timeline

A life, year by year

Each point is a documented event. Click to read it, with its source and degree of certainty.

  1. c. 1052 · age 0

    Birth of Mila Thöpaga

    According to the Namthar he is born in a water-dragon year to a prosperous family of the Mila clan; his father, Mila Sherab Gyaltsen, names him Thöpaga, “delightful to hear”. The dominant tradition says 1052; other sources give 1040 or 1028.

    Tradition

  2. c. 1059 · age 7

    Death of his father and ruin of the family

    His father dies leaving the estate in the care of the paternal uncle and aunt, who seize it and reduce the widow Nyangtsa Kargyen, Mila and his sister Peta to servitude.

    Tradition

  3. c. 1067 · age 15

    Apprenticeship in sorcery and the revenge

    At his mother's urging he learns black magic and the art of hail-casting; he brings down his uncle's house during a wedding, killing thirty-five people, and destroys the village harvest with hail.

    Tradition

  4. c. 1090 – 1096 · age 38

    Marpa's disciple: the towers

    Repentant, he seeks the Dharma; after a Dzogchen teacher who does him no good he reaches Marpa Chökyi Lodrö, who refuses to teach him and makes him build and tear down several stone towers before raising the nine-storey tower of Sekhar Gutok. Only then does he receive initiations and instructions (tummo, mahāmudrā, the oral transmissions).

    Tradition

  5. c. 1096 – 1108 · age 44

    The retreat years

    After returning to his village and finding his mother's bones, he withdraws to the cave of Drakar Taso (“White Rock Horse Tooth”), where he meditates for years living on nettles until his skin turns green. He then wanders the mountains as a repa, “cotton-clad one”, and attains realisation.

    Tradition

  6. c. 1110 · age 58

    Meeting with Gampopa

    The monk and physician Gampopa (1079–1153), trained in the Kadam school, becomes his chief disciple; from him the four great Kagyu branches will descend. Rechungpa (1085–1161), his “heart disciple”, has accompanied him since youth.

    Tradition

  7. c. 1135 · age 84

    Death by poisoning

    The Namthar relates that the envious geshe Tsakpuwa sent him poisoned curd through a concubine; Milarepa, knowing what he did, took it, gave his final teachings and died aged eighty-four. His testament revealed that the “gold” he claimed to keep was a scrap of cloth and a lump of sugar.

    Tradition

  8. 1488

    Tsangnyön Heruka composes the Namthar and the Mgur 'bum

    The “Madman of Tsang” (1452–1507) fixes the canonical version of the life and songs from earlier biographies (Gampopa, Ngendzong Repa, the Twelve Great Disciples, the Black Treasury cycle) and has it woodblock-printed: the origin of the saint's universal fame.

    Documented

  9. 1538 – 1555

    The earliest surviving reprints

    Printing of the Namthar at Ron Wosel Puk (1538) under Tokden Chökyi Gyatso; of the Mgur 'bum at Lende Langpuk (1540, folio in the Wellcome Collection) and at Drakar Taso (1550–1555, folio in the British Library, OPB 19999a3), which fixes Milarepa's iconography with his hand to his ear.

    Documented

  10. 1928

    Arrival in the West: Bacot (1925) and Evans-Wentz (1928)

    Jacques Bacot publishes in French the first European translation of the Namthar; three years later Oxford University Press issues Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English version edited by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, which for half a century was Western readers' gateway.

    Documented

  11. 1962

    Garma C. C. Chang translates the Hundred Thousand Songs

    First complete translation of the Mgur 'bum into a Western language (University Books, 2 vols.), reissued by Shambhala in 1977 and 1999; the basis of nearly all versions into other languages until Christopher Stagg's new translation (2017).

    Documented

  12. 2010 – 2014

    Quintman: new translation and study of the biographical corpus

    Andrew Quintman publishes the Penguin Classics translation (2010) and The Yogin and the Madman (2014), the first systematic study of the biographies prior to Tsangnyön; with him the figure passes from devotional tale to the history of its own construction.

    Documented

Works

Essential works

The works without which their legacy cannot be understood.

The Life of Milarepa (Namthar) — Milarepa

Traditional attribution · 1488

The Life of Milarepa (Namthar)

རྗེ་བཙུན་མི་ལ་རས་པའི་རྣམ་ཐར། (rje btsun mi la ras pa'i rnam thar)

The canonical biography, divided into twelve chapters between “worldly deeds” (birth, ruin, revenge by sorcery) and “supreme deeds” (the trials with Marpa, the retreat at Drakar Taso, the teaching and the death by poison). Written as a life of the Buddha in a Tibetan key, it is at once a novel of formation, a practice manual and Tibet's most widely read book; its woodblock circulation from the late fifteenth century explains the figure's ubiquity.

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10 editions · amazon.com

Complete works (7)

Quotations

Quotations located in a specific work. Each carries its provenance and its level of confidence.

Whoever says that Milarepa possessed gold, let him fill his mouth with excrement.

(tibetano; traducción libre del investigador a partir de Lhalungpa 1977 y Quintman 2010)

ProbableNamthar (Tsangnyön Heruka, 1488), capítulo final («Nirvana»): la nota hallada bajo el hogar junto a un trozo de tela, un cuchillo y un terrón de azúcar, tras anunciar a los discípulos que allí había oro

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Essential ideas (editorial summary)

Out of respect for copyright, these ideas are summarised in our own words and are not presented as literal quotations.

  • A single human life, however grave the guilt, suffices to reach awakening: Milarepa's story exists to show that a killer can become a buddha “in one body and one lifetime”, the promise of the tantric path as against the aeons of the gradual path.
  • The suffering imposed by the teacher is not cruelty but purification: each tower raised and razed for Marpa corresponds to a crime, and the devotion that endures the trial is the true initiation, prior to any ritual.
  • Mountain solitude is the place of practice, not an escape: in the cave one finds what village, monastery and books do not give, and voluntary poverty—a cloth, a staff, nettles—is freedom, not lack.
  • Death is certain and its hour uncertain; therefore every delay is a loss. The songs return again and again to impermanence not as consolation but as a goad: there is no time for the affairs of the world.
  • Realisation is taught by singing: the improvised song (mgur) does not embellish doctrine, it embodies it, because what has been understood in the body comes out in verse and in plain speech, within reach of shepherds and hunters.
  • Inner heat (tummo) and the Great Seal (mahāmudrā) are two faces of one experience: the body that needs no shelter and the mind that recognises its own nature; the cotton-clad repa in the snow is the visible proof of the invisible.
Apocryphal quotes or disputed attributions (3)

  • «My religion is to live and die without regret.»

    Milarepa's most quoted sentence in the West, used as an epigraph by Shambhala and on countless pages, could not be located in that wording either in the Namthar (Lhalungpa, Quintman) or in the Mgur 'bum (Chang). It faithfully conveys the sense of his final teaching but is recorded as unverified.

  • «In the beginning nothing comes, in the middle nothing stays, at the end nothing goes.»

    Circulates as a Milarepa song on the nature of mind; it could not be found in the Chang or Stagg translations. It may derive from genuine Mgur 'bum verses on the mind as “unborn, unabiding and unceasing”, reworded in popular literature.

  • «Hasten slowly and you shall soon arrive.»

    Attributed to Milarepa in quotation anthologies; it is a variant of the Latin adage “festina lente”. Not found in any Tibetan source consulted.

Last words

Traditional attribution

«Do as I have done: give up the eight worldly concerns, homeland and kin, and meditate in the solitude of the mountains until realisation is firm. That is my final instruction; I have no other.»

Hagiographic, not historical. The final chapter of Tsangnyön Heruka's Namthar (1488) has Milarepa, at Chuwar and already poisoned, deliver a last discourse and a last song to his disciples: he asks them to give up worldly concerns and practise in solitude, and declares that his only possessions are his cotton robe, his staff and a cup; then he enters meditation and dies. What is offered here is a free rendering of the sense of that instruction, written by the researcher from the Lhalungpa and Quintman translations, not a literal quotation from either. The Namthar was composed three and a half centuries after the events on the basis of earlier biographies; there is no contemporary testimony.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

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What their work answers

Twelve great human questions and what their texts allow us to answer, with references. We never put words in their mouth.

  • What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

    He seeks no creator: the ultimate is the nature of one's own mind

    No creator GodInferred from their doctrine

    In the sources on Milarepa — the biography (namthar) and the Hundred Thousand Songs compiled by Tsangnyön Heruka in the fifteenth century — the question of a creator God does not arise as a problem. The horizon is tantric Buddhism of the Kagyü school: what must be recognised is the nature of mind, empty and luminous, which the songs describe again and again as impossible to grasp with concepts, without centre or limit. The meditation deities and dakinis who people his songs are not creators of the world but presences and manifestations on the path, and in the logic of Mahamudra they do not exist apart from mind. Liberation depends not on the grace of a God but on practice in solitude, devotion to the master Marpa and direct recognition. His work therefore falls within the non-theistic field.

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  • Who am I? Is there a true self?

    Sought for, the self is not found: mind is empty and luminous

    There is no permanent selfInferred from their doctrine

    The songs attributed to Milarepa in Tsangnyön Heruka's compilation return again and again to the search for mind and self: examined, they are found neither inside nor outside, and have no shape, colour or location. What follows is not nothingness but the nature of mind according to the Mahamudra of the Kagyü school: empty of a substantial self and at the same time clear and aware. Attachment to a self, by contrast, is the root of the passions and of the cycle of rebirth that Milarepa's biography narrates starkly, from his youthful crimes to his purification. Spiritual work consists in recognising this absence of self in one's own experience, in solitude and under the master's guidance, until the idea of a solid self no longer governs one's life.

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  • Why do we suffer?

    Evil done returns: his trials under Marpa purified a terrible karma

    Karma and the soul's learningStated explicitly

    Milarepa's biography is itself a lesson on the origin of suffering. According to the namthar compiled by Tsangnyön Heruka, as a young man, urged by his mother to take revenge on the relatives who had dispossessed them, he learned black magic and caused the deaths of many people. Remorse and fear of the karmic consequences of those acts led him to seek the dharma. His master Marpa subjected him to very harsh trials — building and tearing down stone towers again and again — which the tradition interprets as purification of that karma. In the songs, Milarepa insistently recalls impermanence, the imminence of death and the sufferings of samsara as reasons to practise without delay. Pain is the fruit of past acts and, at the same time, the spur that drives towards liberation.

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  • What happens after death?

    Fear of a bad rebirth drove him to liberation in a single life

    Rebirth according to karmaStated explicitly

    In the Life of Milarepa, composed by Tsangnyön Heruka in the fifteenth century, rebirth according to karma is the engine of the whole narrative. Having caused deaths through black magic out of revenge, Milarepa is terrified at the prospect of rebirth in the hells, and that fear leads him to Marpa, to the trials of the tower and to years of solitary meditation. The songs of the tradition insist on impermanence: death comes without warning, the body is borrowed, and the only thing that accompanies the dead are their deeds; whoever does not practise now will be reborn dragged along by them. At the same time, the narrative presents Milarepa as proof that liberation is possible in a single life through Mahamudra and the yogas of Naropa, which include preparation for the intermediate state (bardo). For the realised yogi, dying is an occasion to recognise the nature of mind.

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  • How is liberation or salvation attained?

    Extreme purification under the master and years of solitary meditation: liberation in one lifetime

    Through disciplined practiceStated explicitly

    According to the Life of Milarepa compiled by Tsangnyön Heruka in the fifteenth century, Milarepa's path begins with heavy negative karma (the killings committed through black magic) and passes through two phases. First, purification: his master Marpa makes him build and demolish towers for years before transmitting the instructions. Then meditation in high mountain caves, with extreme asceticism, until realisation. The biography thus presents liberation as possible in a single life for whoever combines the transmission of a lineage, faith in the master and uncompromising perseverance. The songs gathered in The Hundred Thousand Songs insist on the same: renounce worldly concerns and practise without delay in the face of the certainty of death.

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  • Is a teacher necessary?

    Without Marpa and his transmission no liberation: faith in the guru sustains everything

    IndispensableStated explicitly

    The Life of Milarepa is, to a large extent, the story of a relationship of discipleship. After a first teacher who cannot help him, Milarepa is sent to Marpa the Translator, who for years subjects him to apparently arbitrary trials, such as building and demolishing towers, and withholds teaching. The hagiography presents those humiliations as the necessary purification of his bad karma, and Milarepa's unshakeable obedience and faith as the condition for receiving the lineage's instructions. Only with that transmission can he then meditate fruitfully in solitude. The work thus reflects the Vajrayana conception of the guru as the source of blessings and of the efficacy of practice: without him, the path does not open.

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  • Is the world real?

    Appearances are like a dream or a magical illusion: empty and luminous

    A web of causes without substanceInferred from their doctrine

    In the songs attributed to Milarepa, the nature of the world is approached from the meditative experience of the Mahamudra tradition. Appearances are compared to a dream, a mirage or a magical illusion: they appear vividly but lack inherent existence. That emptiness is not presented as nothingness but as inseparable from the clarity of mind: appearance and emptiness are a unity. For Milarepa the error is not that there are phenomena but clinging to them as solid and pursuing worldly occupations as though they were lasting. Impermanence and death, constant themes in his songs, show that nothing in the world can be held on to, and therefore invite practice.

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  • What is love?

    Breaking the bonds of worldly affection so that compassion for all may arise

    Boundless compassionStated explicitly

    The Life of Milarepa shows two kinds of love in tension. On the one hand, family affection: the love for his mother, which drove him to revenge, and that of his sister Peta, who visits him in the cave and reproaches him for his poverty. When he returns to his village and finds the house in ruins and his mother's bones, Milarepa experiences that attachment as a source of pain and decides to renounce everything. On the other hand, the songs present him cultivating bodhicitta, the mind of awakening that seeks to free all beings, as the root of practice: compassion towards beings, whom the Tibetan tradition teaches one to see as former mothers, replaces attachment to one's own. Towards his persecutors, such as the lama Tsakpuhwa who ends up poisoning him, the tradition credits him with compassion rather than resentment.

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  • Are we free, or is everything determined?

    The repentant murderer who purifies his karma in a single lifetime

    Karma and choiceStated explicitly

    In Tibetan tradition Milarepa's life is the supreme example that karma conditions but does not condemn. According to the *Namthar*, the young Thöpaga learns black magic to avenge his mother and causes the death of dozens of people; terrified by the consequences of those acts, he seeks the Dharma. Marpa makes him build and tear down towers again and again, trials the tradition reads as purification of the evil committed, and only then gives him the instructions. Milarepa attains realisation in that same life through years of retreat. The story does not deny the law of karma —fear of its fruits is what moves him— but shows that present action, sustained with extreme effort, can change its course.

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  • Why meditate or pray?

    Meditating in the cave because death comes: recognising the nature of mind

    Seeing reality as it isStated explicitly

    According to the *Namthar* and the *Hundred Thousand Songs*, Milarepa's meditation has an explicit driver: awareness of impermanence and death, which makes any worldly occupation a waste of time. After receiving the instructions from Marpa, he withdraws for years to high caves, lives on nettles and practises inner heat (*tummo*) and meditation on the nature of mind, in the line the Kagyu tradition would call *mahāmudrā*. His songs to disciples and visitors insist on two ideas: everything compounded falls apart, and the mind, looked at directly, is empty and luminous. To meditate is to see reality as it is until that seeing becomes continuous.

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  • Can reason know the ultimate?

    The cave yogi against the scholar: practice, not books

    The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly

    Milarepa's tradition often contrasts the meditator's realisation with bookish learning. In the *Namthar*, one of the last episodes pits the yogi against the scholar Geshe Tsakpuhwa, who tries to humiliate him with questions of logic and doctrine and, envious of his prestige, ends up having him poisoned. The *Hundred Thousand Songs* contain several answers to monks and scholars in which Milarepa declares that he has forgotten the words of the texts because he has become familiar with their meaning, and that the nature of mind is reached not by reasoning but by direct experience received from the master and matured in meditation. The ultimate is not proven: it is recognised.

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  • Withdraw from the world or transform it?

    The cave and total renunciation, without house, goods or family

    Withdraw in order to findStated explicitly

    Milarepa is the model of the solitary yogi in Tibetan Buddhism. According to his Life, after completing the trials imposed by Marpa he withdrew for years to Himalayan caves, living on nettles until his skin turned greenish, without possessions and declining the offers of marriage or a comfortable life made to him. When his sister Peta reproaches him for his poverty and asks him to live like decent people, he answers with songs that set the eight worldly concerns — gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and disrepute — against the freedom of the practitioner. The tradition presents this renunciation as the condition of awakening in a single life. Yet it is not a fruitless isolation: in his maturity Milarepa receives disciples, such as Gampopa and Rechungpa, and teaches in song to herders, hunters and villagers.

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Affinities & tensions

Affinities and tensions

Calculated question by question from their positions. The reason for each agreement or clash, on click.

They clash onApparent contradiction

Milarepa · The 14th Dalai Lama (Tenzin Gyatso)

Total obedience in the cave or critical discernment in the world: the guru in Tibet

The Life of Milarepa makes unconditional obedience to Marpa the condition of everything: years of seemingly arbitrary trials, towers built and torn down, teaching withheld, until the lineage transmission allows fruitful meditation in the caves, without home, possessions or family. The Dalai Lama, monk and statesman, asks instead that the master be examined at length before being accepted, and that instructions contrary to ethics not be followed even if they come from him (The Path to Bliss), and he understands compassion as a universal responsibility that obliges one to act in the world (Ethics for the New Millennium). On the surface one stands for absolute surrender and withdrawal; the other for discernment and public engagement. Yet both belong to the same Vajrayana tradition, which requires a guru for tantra and reveres Milarepa as a model.

Why: The contradiction is apparent for two reasons. The first is genre: the Life of Milarepa is a fifteenth-century hagiography composed to exalt the Kagyu lineage, and its portrait of the perfect disciple is not a manual for choosing a master; the Dalai Lama speaks in public teachings, before global audiences exposed to unscrupulous teachers. The second is stage: the Tibetan tradition itself asks that the master be examined before acceptance and fully trusted afterwards, so the Dalai Lama's advice precedes the moment the Life recounts. Withdrawal and engagement, for their part, answer to different vocations, and Milarepa himself ended up teaching herdsmen, hunters and villagers.

They agree on

Milarepa · Teresa of Ávila

Suffering that purifies: Marpa's towers and the trials of the sixth dwelling places

Both read their own suffering as preparation. According to the Life of Milarepa, Marpa makes him build and tear down stone towers for years and withholds teaching, and the tradition interprets those trials as purification of the karma of his youthful crimes. Teresa of Ávila lists in the sixth dwelling places of the Interior Castle the inner and outer trials that precede the spiritual marriage, gossip, illnesses, fears of being deceived, and presents them as a disposition of the soul. In both, perseverance is decisive: the uncompromising asceticism of Milarepa's caves; the very determined determination not to stop that Teresa asks for in The Way of Perfection (ch. 21). And in both pain is not an end but the threshold of a transformation the subject does not produce alone.

Why: The affinity is comparative: there is no relation between the eleventh-century Tibetan yogi and the sixteenth-century Castilian Carmelite. They converge because their traditions share an ascetic anthropology: the human being is bound by something that must be undone, and that undoing hurts. The explanation of pain, however, differs. In the Life of Milarepa suffering is the fruit of past actions and is exhausted through purification under a master; in Teresa it is participation in the cross of Christ and preparation for a union that God grants by grace. It should also be remembered that the Life is a fifteenth-century hagiography, whereas Teresa writes in the first person about what she lived.

Anecdotes and stories

Anecdotes and stories

Hagiographic accountc. 1067

The house that collapsed at the wedding

When Thöpaga turned fifteen his mother, Nyangtsa Kargyen, sold what little she had to give a feast, and before the whole village she read the father's will and claimed the estate. The uncle and aunt replied that they had lent it, not received it, and that the debt was the orphans'; they beat the mother and told them that if they wanted war they could have it. She decided she would, and sent her son to a master of black magic, threatening to kill herself if he came back without powers. Thöpaga learned the art of spells in Ü-Tsang and returned home in time for the wedding of his uncle's eldest son. While the guests were drinking on the upper floor the young sorcerer released the forces he had summoned: the house fell and thirty-five people died, the bridegroom among them. The Namthar specifies that the uncle and aunt were deliberately spared, so that they might see what they had lost, and that the mother, up on the roof, shouted to the village that at last she had her revenge. When the neighbours tried to kill her she asked her son for hail, and the harvest of three valleys was flattened. This is the saint's founding crime: the tradition has never hidden it, because without it there would be no story of redemption to tell.

Origin of the story: Tsangnyön Heruka's Namthar (1488), chapter 3 (“worldly deeds”); the episode already appears in the earlier biographies of the Twelve Great Disciples cycle.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Hagiographic accountc. 1090–1096

Marpa's towers

Marpa the Translator knew in a dream the night before that a destined disciple was coming; but when Milarepa arrived at Lhodrak and offered him body, speech and mind in exchange for food, clothing and Dharma, Marpa replied that he could not give all three: he must choose. Milarepa chose the Dharma, and Marpa ordered him to build a round tower on a hill crest. Half-finished, he told him to tear it down and return every stone to its place: he had ordered it, he said, without thinking. Then a crescent-shaped tower on another crest, and again to tear it down; then a triangular one, demolished too. The sores on the disciple's back opened into three wounds, and Marpa, seeing them, called him Great Magician and told him to bandage them, but gave him no teaching. At last a square tower of nine storeys, that of Sekhar Gutok, “the son's tower”, which Marpa promised as the final condition; when it was finished the master again drove him with blows from the initiation. Dagmema, Marpa's wife, then helped him flee with a letter and some stolen sacred objects to Lama Ngokpa, and when the fraud came to light Marpa wept, at last gave him the initiations and explained that each trial had been meant to purify one crime; that had Milarepa completed nine whole trials he would never have had to be reborn, and that Dagmema's compassion had cut short the ninth. The Sekhar Gutok tower survives in Lhodrak and holds, according to Quintman, the yogi's oldest mural portrait.

Origin of the story: Namthar, chapters 5–6 (Quintman, 2010); the tower is a documented real building (photograph by H. E. Richardson, 1950, on Commons), and Quintman's essay (2023) describes it with its 1200–1250 mural.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Hagiographic accountc. 1096–1105

The nettles of Drakar Taso

After taking leave of Marpa, Milarepa went back to Kya Ngatsa and found the family house in ruins, the field overgrown and, on the floor of what had been the kitchen, a heap of bones: his mother's, whom no one had buried. He slept one night on them, his head resting on the skull, and by dawn, the text says, his decision was made: to go to the mountains and not return. He settled in the cave of Drakar Taso, the “White Rock Horse Tooth”, above the Gungthang valley, and vowed not to go down while he had not attained realisation. He ate boiled nettles for years, until his body turned green, his bones showed through his skin and his hair turned green too; when his salt ran out he ate nettles with nettles. A party of hunters who entered the cave took him for a ghost; thieves who came at night left laughing because there was nothing to steal. His sister Peta, arriving with beer and meat, wept at the sight of him and suggested he beg like other monks; he answered her with a song on the happiness of one who has nothing to lose. Drakar Taso later became a monastery, then a nunnery and, in 1550–1555, the printery of the Hundred Thousand Songs; it remains a place of pilgrimage.

Origin of the story: Namthar, chapters 9–10; Quintman's essay (2023) confirms the site's identification and its later history as a printery.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Hagiographic accountc. 1100–1120

The hunter, the doe and the dog

Milarepa was meditating in a cave at Nyishang, on the Nepalese border, when a terrified doe ran in and, hearing him sing, lay down at his feet; behind her came a furious red hunting bitch which, after another song, lay down on the yogi's other side, and the two animals, hunter and prey, stayed together listening. At last the hunter appeared, Khyira Gonpo Dorje, who seeing the scene took the green, naked man for a demon who had bewitched his animals and shot an arrow at him. The arrow, the story says, did not strike him; Milarepa then sang him “the hunter's song”: that a man with a human body and a demon's face was chasing a deer to feed a body that would die anyway, and that hunting his own mind would bring him more. Gonpo Dorje sat down, listened, looked at a cave in which there was nothing to eat and understood that this man possessed something he lacked. He became one of his best-loved disciples and the tradition remembers him as the hunter who hung up his bow. The episode is among the most painted in the saint's iconography: Milarepa with the doe, the dog and the archer appears in thangkas and, as early as 1613, in a painting by the Tenth Karmapa.

Origin of the story: Mgur 'bum (Tsangnyön Heruka), chapter “Milarepa and the hunter” (Chang, 1962, vol. 1, ch. 26, “The Hunter and the Deer”). The painting by Chöying Dorje, Tenth Karmapa (1613), is on Commons described as “Milarepa, Gonpo Dorje, the deer and the dog”.

Source: Chang, Garma C. C. (trad. y anot.). The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. 2 vols. New Hyde Park (NY): University Books / Oriental Studies Foundation, 1962; reed. Boulder: Shambhala, 1977 y 1999 (ISBN 9781570624766). Vol. 1 digitalizado en Wikimedia Commons.

Hagiographic accountc. 1100–1120

The contest on Kailash

When Milarepa reached Mount Kailash the Bön priest Naro Bönchung confronted him: the mountain, he said, belonged to his religion, and if the yogi wished to stay he would have to defeat him in a test of powers. According to the Mgur 'bum they competed several times—the Bön priest spread himself over Lake Manasarovar and Milarepa sat over the whole lake without the lake growing larger or he smaller; they hurled rocks and strode across the mountain—with neither yielding, and agreed that whoever reached the summit first on the fifteenth of the month would own Kailash. At dawn Naro Bönchung climbed beating his drum, riding upon it, while Milarepa slept; his anxious disciples woke him and he, unhurried, waited for the sun to rise and ascended to the summit riding its first ray. The Bön priest, seeing him above, fell and his drum rolled down the mountain leaving a vertical scar which, the tradition says, is still visible on the south face. Milarepa granted him a neighbouring mountain so that he would not be left without a place to practise. The story, which celebrates the victory of Buddhism over Tibet's old religion, explains why Kailash has since been sacred to Buddhists too, and it is the Kailash scene that the c. 1500 thangka at the Art Institute of Chicago depicts.

Origin of the story: Mgur 'bum, chapter “Milarepa's meeting with Naro Bönchung on Kailash” (Chang, 1962, vol. 1). A religious-polemical narrative with no verifiable historical basis.

Source: Chang, Garma C. C. (trad. y anot.). The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. 2 vols. New Hyde Park (NY): University Books / Oriental Studies Foundation, 1962; reed. Boulder: Shambhala, 1977 y 1999 (ISBN 9781570624766). Vol. 1 digitalizado en Wikimedia Commons.

Hagiographic accountc. 1110–1112

The last teaching to Gampopa

Gampopa, the physician from Dakpo, had come to Milarepa already an ordained monk trained in the Kadam school, and having received his instructions asked leave to depart. Milarepa walked with him as far as a bridge and said goodbye. When Gampopa was already walking away the master called him back: he had, he said, a secret and profound instruction he had given no one, too precious to hand over lightly, but which he, as heart disciple, deserved to receive. Gampopa ran back and prostrated. Milarepa lifted his cotton cloth and showed him his buttocks, covered in calluses as hard as hooves from the years of sitting in meditation on rock. That, he told him, was the deepest teaching he had: there is no other but to persevere. The anecdote, recorded in the Mgur 'bum chapter devoted to Gampopa, condenses the spirit of the Kagyu practice tradition, whose name is sometimes rendered “lineage of oral instruction” and sometimes “lineage of practice”. Gampopa later founded the monastery of Daklha Gampo and wrote the Jewel Ornament of Liberation, uniting the gradual Kadam path with Milarepa's mahāmudrā; from his disciples the four great Kagyu schools were born.

Origin of the story: Mgur 'bum, chapter “Milarepa's meeting with Gampopa” (Chang, 1962, vol. 2, ch. 41, “The Meeting with Gampopa”); also in Gampopa's own biography.

Source: Chang, Garma C. C. (trad. y anot.). The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. 2 vols. New Hyde Park (NY): University Books / Oriental Studies Foundation, 1962; reed. Boulder: Shambhala, 1977 y 1999 (ISBN 9781570624766). Vol. 1 digitalizado en Wikimedia Commons.

Hagiographic accountc. 1135

The geshe's poison and the gold that did not exist

At Drin a rich and learned geshe named Tsakpuwa, who received the offerings of the district, saw the fame of the ragged yogi stealing his devotees. He challenged him publicly to a debate in logic; Milarepa answered that his logic consisted in having tamed his mind, and the geshe was made to look foolish. He then resolved to kill him: he offered one of his concubines a turquoise in exchange for bringing the yogi poisoned curd. Milarepa, who had understood from the woman's bearing what she carried, told her to come back later, for it was not yet time; on her second visit, when he was clear that his work was done and that, if he did not take it, the woman would not get her turquoise, he drank. He then summoned disciples and patrons to Chuwar, gave his final teachings and made Tsakpuwa himself, that he might believe, feel in his own body for an instant the pain he had caused; the geshe prostrated, confessed and became a disciple. Before dying Milarepa told his followers that he had gold hidden under the hearth and that they should share it. After the cremation—from which, the story says, the body vanished, carried off by dakinis, and during which the disciples quarrelled over non-existent relics—they dug and found a scrap of cotton cloth, a knife, a lump of sugar and a note: that the cloth and sugar would never run out if shared, and that whoever said Milarepa had owned gold should fill his mouth with excrement. It is the coda of the Namthar and the yogi's last lesson on poverty.

Origin of the story: Namthar, chapter 12 (“Nirvana”); also summarised in Lion's Roar (m14) from Quintman. No contemporary source for the death exists.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Teachings

Teachings

The notions that structure their thought, explained in context.

Songs of realisation (mgur)mgur
The mgur is a Tibetan genre of sung poetry, pre-Buddhist and courtly in origin, which Milarepa turned into the vehicle par excellence for teaching from experience. Unlike the scholastic treatise, the song is improvised in a situation—a demon attacking, a sister weeping, a hunter taking aim—and answers it from the singer's realisation; hence its colloquial diction, simple metre and images drawn from the herder and the farmer: the yak, hail, the cave, the cotton cloth. Formally it inherits the dohā of the Indian mahāsiddhas (Saraha, Tilopa) that Marpa had brought from India, but it makes them wholly Tibetan. The collection attributed to Milarepa, the Mgur 'bum or “hundred thousand songs”, was fixed by Tsangnyön Heruka in 1488 and it cannot be known which verses go back to the yogi himself; what is certain is that the genre became identified with him to the point that iconography shows him with his hand to his ear, in the singer's gesture. Milarepa thus inaugurates a tradition—the songs of Drukpa Kunley, Kalden Gyatso, Shabkar—in which poetry does not illustrate doctrine but is its proof.

Indian tantric poetry (dohā) and the Tibetan song tradition; Kagyu literature.

Source: Chang, Garma C. C. (trad. y anot.). The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. 2 vols. New Hyde Park (NY): University Books / Oriental Studies Foundation, 1962; reed. Boulder: Shambhala, 1977 y 1999 (ISBN 9781570624766). Vol. 1 digitalizado en Wikimedia Commons.

Mahāmudrā (phyag rgya chen po), the Great Sealmahamudra
The central Kagyu teaching on the nature of mind: mind is in itself empty, luminous and unobstructed, and realisation consists in recognising this directly, without fabricating anything, letting thoughts arise and dissolve like waves on the sea. Milarepa received it from Marpa, who had it from Nāropa and, through him, from the tradition of the mahāsiddhas (Saraha, Tilopa). In the songs it appears again and again as “the mind that is unborn, unabiding and unceasing”, and as the point where the practices of the path—visualisations, tummo, the yogas of Nāropa—flow in and become unnecessary. The tradition distinguishes sūtra mahāmudrā (gradual, meditative) from tantra mahāmudrā (tied to initiations and inner heat); Milarepa embodies the latter, and Gampopa, his disciple, would systematise the former for monks. Its orthodoxy was contested: Sakya Paṇḍita, in the thirteenth century, attacked Kagyu mahāmudrā as Chinese Chan in disguise, and the polemic runs through Tibetan doctrinal history. For the hagiography, Milarepa's mahāmudrā is the demonstration that complete realisation fits within one lifetime.

Vajrayāna; Kagyu lineage (Tilopa–Nāropa–Marpa–Milarepa–Gampopa); Indian mahāsiddhas.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Tummo (gtum mo), inner heattummo
The first of the six yogas of Nāropa, tummo is a completion-stage tantric practice which, through breathing, visualisation of the subtle channels and concentration on the “fire” below the navel, generates real physical heat and, inwardly, melts the “drops” and gives rise to the experience of bliss-emptiness. It is the practice that explains the figure of the repa: the yogi clad in a single cotton cloth who survives Himalayan winters at four and five thousand metres. In the Namthar Marpa transmits it to Milarepa together with mahāmudrā, and in the songs it is heat—not clothing—that lets him disdain gifts of furs and tell his sister that he is not cold. The Kagyu tradition regards it as the most direct experiential access to mahāmudrā: when heat and bliss stabilise the mind, its nature is recognised effortlessly. Since the 1980s it has been the subject of physiological studies (Herbert Benson at Harvard) documenting rises in peripheral temperature in practitioners; none of this, obviously, says anything about Milarepa, but it explains why his image has so fascinated the West.

Six yogas of Nāropa; Hevajra and Cakrasaṃvara tantras; completion stage of Anuttarayoga.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Guru devotion and purification through trialdevocion-al-guru
The story of the towers fixes for the whole Tibetan tradition the principle that the tantric master may impose seemingly cruel trials and that the devotion which passes through them is the true initiation. Marpa explains at the end that each tower raised and razed purified one of Milarepa's crimes—“negative karma” accumulated through sorcery—and that, had he completed nine trials, the disciple would never have needed to be reborn again. The idea rests on the doctrine of karma (every action bears fruit) and on the tantric view that the guru is the Buddha in person, so that his instruction, however absurd it seems, is the path. Milarepa does not rebel, but neither does he submit without pain: the text records his sores, his suicidal thoughts and his flight with a forged letter, and precisely that humanity makes the lesson credible. For the hagiography, devotion is also what binds the lineage: the Kagyu transmission is a chain of masters and disciples (Tilopa–Nāropa–Marpa–Milarepa–Gampopa) in which the personal relationship, not the text, guarantees authenticity. Modern critics have pointed to the risk of abuse this doctrine carries; the tradition answers that Marpa wept when he explained what he had done.

Vajrayāna guru-yoga; doctrine of karma; oral-transmission lineages (bka' brgyud).

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Mountain retreat (ri khrod) and the life of the repari-khrod
Milarepa is the Tibetan archetype of the mountain hermit: after finding his mother's bones he vows not to descend to the valley until he attains realisation, and spends the rest of his life in caves—Drakar Taso, Lapchi, Chuwar, Kailash—that are places of pilgrimage today. Solitude is not an escape but the place where tantric practice can be carried to its end; the songs repeat that the eight worldly concerns (gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and obscurity, praise and blame) do not climb the mountain, and that poverty—a cloth, a staff, a bowl, nettles—is a form of freedom. The term repa (ras pa, “cotton-clad”) names the lay practitioner of tummo who lives thus, as against the robed monk with his monastery; the tension between the two models runs through Kagyu history, and Gampopa resolved it by bringing the yogi's experience into the cloister. Milarepa founded no monastery; his institutional legacy was built by others. On the other hand, the three-year, three-month, three-day retreat practised by the Kagyu, and the figure of the holy “madman” (Tsangnyön Heruka, Drukpa Kunley) who lives outside every institution, claim descent from him.

Tantric asceticism; the mahāsiddha tradition; Kagyu hermitages of the Himalaya.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Awakening “in one body and one lifetime”una-vida-un-cuerpo
The specific promise of the tantric path as against the gradual bodhisattva path, which requires three incalculable aeons: with the guru's instructions and unreserved practice, complete awakening is attainable in this very existence. Milarepa is its canonical demonstration, and doubly so, because he starts from the lowest point: a killer of thirty-five people who, according to the Namthar, fears the hells and reaches buddhahood while remaining a layman, poor and without office. Donald Lopez has noted that Tsangnyön Heruka deliberately built the narrative on the mould of Śākyamuni's life—birth, renunciation, extreme asceticism, awakening, teaching, death—to present Milarepa as a Buddha “born and enlightened in Tibet”; the country that had received the Dharma from India thus produced its own buddha. Hence the songs' insistence on impermanence and urgency: if liberation fits within one life, every lost day counts. The idea had practical consequences—the model of lifelong retreat, the prestige of the lay yogi over the scholar—and a literary one: the genre of the namthar or “complete liberation”, biography as a map of the path.

Vajrayāna versus gradual Mahāyāna; Tibetan hagiography (rnam thar); Lopez, introduction to Quintman 2010.

Source: Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.

Retreats

Retreats and centres

Places and gatherings linked to their teaching. We put you in touch with the organisers.

  • Woodstock, Nueva York · Estados Unidos

    Karma Triyana Dharmachakra (KTD), Woodstock

    Karma Triyana Dharmachakra

    Karma Triyana Dharmachakra is a traditional Tibetan monastery in the Catskill Mountains above Woodstock and the North American seat of the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje. It keeps daily practices, a weekly meditation class and retreats ranging from one-day calm-abiding sessions to eight-day retreats and Nyungne fasting practices; it also accepts personal retreats of up to two weeks and runs online study groups. Like every Kagyu centre, it regards itself as heir to the chain of transmission that runs through Tilopa, Naropa, Marpa and Milarepa, whose songs of realisation are recited and taught in the tradition.

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  • Eskdalemuir, Dumfries and Galloway · Reino Unido

    Kagyu Samye Ling, Scotland

    Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre

    Samye Ling, founded in 1967 in the hills of southern Scotland, was the first Tibetan Buddhist centre in the West and is one of the great monasteries of the Kagyu lineage outside Tibet. That lineage, known as the lineage of oral transmission, descends directly from Marpa the Translator and his disciple Milarepa, whose songs and life of retreat in Himalayan caves remain the model of Kagyu practice. The centre offers meditation courses, teachings by masters of the tradition and retreats, along with a Tibetan-style temple and a monastic community that keeps up daily practice.

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  • Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère, Dordoña · Francia

    Dhagpo Kagyu Ling, Dordogne

    Dhagpo Kagyu Ling

    Dhagpo Kagyu Ling is the European seat of the Karma Kagyu lineage, in the Vézère valley in the French Dordogne, under the spiritual direction of the 17th Karmapa Thaye Dorje. It describes itself as a place to understand and live Buddhism, with teachings, retreats, a progressive cycle of study and meditation, regular practices and activities for young people, both in person and online. The Kagyu lineage counts Milarepa among its founding fathers: his life, from guilt to realisation through effort and devotion to his teacher Marpa, is one of the stories most often studied within the tradition.

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Videos

Videos

Recordings, interviews and documentaries. Videos play from YouTube; they are not hosted here.

  • Andrew Quintman: The Yogin and the Madman

    Lecture· EN

    Yale University

  • The Making of Milarepa: Reading & Writing the Life of Tibet's Great Saint

    Lecture· EN

    CU Boulder Libraries

  • The Making of Milarepa with Andrew Quintman

    Lecture· EN

    Shantideva Center, FPMT

  • Andrew Quintman, Judy Lief, Tenzing Lamsang, Nikko Odiseos | Milarepa: The Master and His Teachings

    Analysis· EN

    Jaipur Literature Festival

  • The Life of Jetsun Milarepa

    Lecture· EN

    LamaJampaThaye

  • Songs of Milarepa: Session 1

    Lecture· EN

    Kagyu Samye Dzong Edinburgh

  • H.E. Sangye Nyenpa Rinpoche sings the Milarepa's Aspiration Song

    Original recording· BO

    Benchen Library

  • Jetsün MILARÉPA – Une Vie, une Œuvre : Un voyage de la magie à l'illumination (France Culture, 1993)

    Documentary· FR· 1993

    ÉCLAIR BRUT

  • Milarépa // Entretien avec Matthieu Ricard

    Interview· FR

    Jupiter Films

  • Vida de Milarepa. El gran Yogui del Tibet. Escuela de Filosofía Nueva Acrópolis

    Lecture· ES

    Nueva Acrópolis España

  • Carla Gianotti: "Vita di Milarepa"

    Lecture· IT

    JAMTSE LING Centro Rimé

Gallery

Gallery

Images with verified licences. Each keeps its authorship and attribution.

Manuscripts

Manuscripts

Manuscript witnesses and ancient texts, with their custodian and conditions of access.

  • BO · Tibetano (dbu can), xilografía · 1488

    rje btsun mi la ras pa'i rnam thar

    Surviving witness
    Impresión xilográfica de 1538, Ron Wosel Puk (Gungthang): la edición impresa más antigua conservada del Namthar; folios de 8 × 44 cm con ilustraciones marginales de Milarepa, Rechungpa, Gampopa y Zhiwa Ö
    Custodian
    No indicado en la fuente (reproducido en el catálogo «Bod kyi shing spar lag rtsal gyi byung rim mdor bsdus», Lhasa, 2013)

  • BO · Tibetano (dbu can), xilografía · c. 1488

    rje btsun mi la ras pa'i rnam thar rgyas par phye ba mgur 'bum

    Surviving witness
    Primer folio de la impresión de Lende Langpuk, 1540 (3½ × 19 in.), con Milarepa en gesto de cantar, la mano izquierda alzada
    Custodian
    Wellcome Collection, Londres · Imagen L0025571 (signatura del objeto no localizada; véase pending)
    Digitisation
    commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tibetan_Manuscri…

  • BO · Tibetano (dbu can), xilografía · c. 1488

    mi la ras pa'i mgur 'bum

    Surviving witness
    Impresión de Drakar Taso, 1550–1555; primer folio (4⅛ × 20 in.) con Milarepa en la postura que se haría canónica: mano derecha en la oreja, cráneo-copa en la izquierda
    Custodian
    British Library, Londres · OPB 19999a3

  • BO · Tibetano (dbu can), xilografía en bloque · c. 1488 (impresión posterior)

    mi la ras pa'i mgur 'bum

    Surviving witness
    Xilografía de Pekín, 342 folios, en un volumen
    Custodian
    Biblioteca Nacional de Mongolia (Ulán Bator); escaneo del Asian Classics Input Project y BDRC · BDRC bdr:MW1KG1252 (obra bdr:WA1KG1252; escaneo bdr:W1KG1252, volumen bdr:I1KG1274)
    Digitisation
    library.bdrc.io/show/bdr:MW1KG1252…

  • BO · Tibetano (dbu can), manuscrito con ilustraciones · Siglos XIII–XV (copia de los siglos XVII–XVIII)

    Biografía ilustrada de Milarepa (ciclo del Tesoro Negro / Doce Grandes Discípulos)

    Surviving witness
    Manuscrito de 245 folios (4 × 23 in.), tinta y colores sobre papel, con personajes que recorren el texto
    Custodian
    Newark Museum of Art (Nueva Jersey) · 36.280.1.1–245

  • BO · Tibetano (dbu can), manuscrito ilustrado · Siglo XVI (copia)

    Manuscrito del Tesoro Negro (mdzod nag ma): el Sueño de los Cuatro Pilares

    Surviving witness
    Folios de 8 × 42,5 cm, tinta y pigmentos sobre papel; Milarepa ante Marpa relatando la visión profética de los cuatro pilares
    Custodian
    Tibet Museum / Fondation Alain Bordier, Gruyères (Suiza) · ABS 039
Manuscripts →

Connections

Connections

Influences, discipleships and affinities. Documented relations are distinguished from similarities identified by analysis.

  • Disciple of

    Marpa Chökyi Lodrö (Marpa el Traductor)

    His root guru according to the whole tradition; the trials of the towers and the transmission of tummo and mahāmudrā are the core of the Namthar.

    Documented relation

  • Teacher of

    Gampopa (Dakpo Lhaje, 1079–1153)

    His chief disciple, from whose students the four great Kagyu branches descend; author of one of the oldest biographies of Milarepa.

    Documented relation

  • Teacher of

    Rechungpa Dorje Drakpa (1085–1161)

    The “heart disciple”, the narrative addressee of the Namthar and bearer of the oral transmissions brought from India.

    Documented relation

  • Ideas akin to

    Padmasambhava

    Both figures, according to Quintman, transformed the sacred geography of the Himalaya through their life stories; there is no historical relation (Padmasambhava belongs to the eighth century) nor a direct doctrinal one.

    Similarity identified by analysis

  • Ideas akin to

    Francis of Assisi

    Radical voluntary poverty, preaching to animals (the hunter's doe and dog; the wolf of Gubbio) and teaching in song; both born to merchant families. A parallel identified by the researcher, with no historical relation.

    Similarity identified by analysis

  • Ideas akin to

    Kabir

    Religious poetry sung in the vernacular, outside institutions and addressed to ordinary people; in both cases the corpus was fixed centuries later and mixes voices.

    Similarity identified by analysis

  • Ideas akin to

    John of the Cross

    Mysticism expressed in verse and later commented on; night and mountain as places of the path. A typological, not historical, parallel.

    Similarity identified by analysis

Linked from other profiles

Sources

Sources

Bibliography and catalogues consulted for this profile.

  1. Wikidata, «Milarepa», QID Q58431 (VIAF 173200978; LCCN n80034328); BDRC bdr:P1853; Treasury of Lives P1853.
  2. Quintman, Andrew. «A Tibetan Liberation Tale Illustrated in Print and Manuscript: Earliest Extant Printed Edition of Milarepa's Life Story (Ron Wosel Puk, Gungtang, 1538)». Project Himalayan Art, Rubin Museum of Art, 2023.
  3. Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Andrew Quintman; introducción de Donald S. Lopez Jr. Nueva York: Penguin Classics, 2010. ISBN 9780143106227.
  4. Tsangnyön Heruka. The Life of Milarepa. Trad. Lobsang P. Lhalungpa. Nueva York: E. P. Dutton, 1977; Boston: Shambhala, 1985. ISBN 9780877732815.
  5. Chang, Garma C. C. (trad. y anot.). The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa. 2 vols. New Hyde Park (NY): University Books / Oriental Studies Foundation, 1962; reed. Boulder: Shambhala, 1977 y 1999 (ISBN 9781570624766). Vol. 1 digitalizado en Wikimedia Commons.
  6. Quintman, Andrew. The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa. Nueva York: Columbia University Press, 2014. ISBN 9780231164153.
  7. Quintman, Andrew. «Wrinkles in Time: On the Vagaries of Mi la ras pa's Dates». Acta Orientalia 74 (2013): 3–26.
  8. Quintman, Andrew. «Milarepa». The Treasury of Lives (biografía académica en línea), P1853.
  9. Wikipedia (en). «Milarepa». Usada como índice de ediciones y de la bibliografía secundaria; contrastada con m2, m3 y m6.
  10. Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC). «mi la ras pa'i mgur 'bum» (rje btsun mi la ras pa'i rnam thar rgyas par phye ba mgur 'bum), obra bdr:WA1KG1252; xilografía de Pekín bdr:MW1KG1252, 342 ff., escaneada en la Biblioteca Nacional de Mongolia (bdr:W1KG1252).
  11. Evans-Wentz, W. Y. (ed.). Tibet's Great Yogī Milarepa: A Biography from the Tibetan. Trad. Lāma Kazi Dawa-Samdup. Londres: Oxford University Press, 1928. Digitalizado en Internet Archive.
  12. Wikimedia Commons, API imageinfo (licencia, autor, fecha y descripción de cada fichero citado en images[]).
  13. Open Library (Internet Archive). Registros de ISBN de cada edición citada en works[].
  14. Lion's Roar staff. «The Life of Milarepa» (adaptado de Buddhadharma, invierno de 2010; cita las traducciones de Quintman y Lhalungpa).
  15. Tsangnyön Heruka. The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa: A New Translation. Trad. Christopher Stagg (Nitartha Translation Network), bajo la dirección de Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche. Boulder: Shambhala, 2017. ISBN 9781559394482.
  16. Bacot, Jacques (trad.). Le poète tibétain Milarépa: ses crimes, ses épreuves, son nirvāna. París: Bossard, 1925 (reed. Fayard, 1971). Trad. española: Vida de Milarepa, Palma: José J. de Olañeta, 2013, ISBN 9788497166492.
  17. Sernesi, Marta. «A Continuous Stream of Merit: The Early Reprints of gTsang smyon Heruka's Hagiographical Works». Zentralasiatische Studien 40 (2011): 179–237.
  18. Wellcome Collection, Londres. Xilografía tibetana «rje btsun mi la ras pa'i rnam thar… mgur 'bum» (primer folio, impresión de Lende Langpuk, 1540), imagen L0025571, CC BY 4.0, vía Wikimedia Commons.
  19. Preciado Idoeta, Iñaki (trad.). Vida de Milarepa. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1994 (col. Argumentos). ISBN 9788433906564.
  20. YouTube: conferencias de Andrew Quintman (Yale University, CU Boulder Libraries, Shantideva Center FPMT, Jaipur Literature Festival) y canales de centros Kagyu (Kagyu Samye Dzong Edinburgh, Benchen Library, Lama Jampa Thaye); verificados por oEmbed el 2026-10-22.
Rights holder
Obra original en dominio público (siglos XI–XV). Las traducciones modernas tienen derechos propios: Penguin Random House (Quintman 2010; Lhalungpa 1977/1984), Shambhala Publications (Chang 1962/1999, Stagg 2017, Trungpa 2017), Wisdom Publications (Kunga Rinpoche y Cutillo 1978), Anagrama (Preciado 1994), José J. de Olañeta (Bacot), Fayard (Lamothe), Yug (Cantos de Milarepa), Dover.

Pending confirmation

What this profile has not yet been able to settle. We would rather say so than fill it in.

  • Las fechas 1052–1135 son las de la tradición hagiográfica dominante (Tsangnyön Heruka); los eruditos Kagyu de los siglos XVIII (Situ Panchen, Katok Tsewang Norbu) y Quintman (2023) usan c. 1028–1111, y buena parte de la erudición moderna 1040–1123. Ninguna es verificable; revisar si el Atlas decide unificar criterio.
  • Custodio actual y signatura de los folios de la impresión de 1538 (Ron Wosel Puk): el ensayo de Quintman los reproduce a partir de un catálogo tibetano de 2013 (Bod kyi shing spar lag rtsal gyi byung rim mdor bsdus) sin indicar institución.
  • Signatura (shelfmark) de la xilografía de 1540 en la Wellcome Collection: Commons solo da el número de imagen L0025571; el catálogo de Wellcome responde 403 a clientes automáticos.
  • No se localizó en catálogo abierto ISBN de ediciones italianas modernas de los cantos (p. ej. «I centomila canti di Milarepa») ni de la edición de Diederichs en alemán; solo se incluyen las verificadas (Adelphi 1991; Norbu 2014).
  • Las citas de Milarepa están en dominio público, pero las traducciones inglesas (Chang, Lhalungpa, Quintman, Stagg) no: las versiones en es/en de quotes[] son traducciones propias del investigador a partir del sentido del texto; revisar contra el tibetano antes de publicarlas como literales.
  • Duraciones de los vídeos: la API oEmbed no las devuelve; quedan en null.
  • Treasury of Lives (m8) devolvió 403 a las peticiones automáticas; su contenido se ha usado a través de las citas que hacen de él Wikipedia y el ensayo del Rubin, no por lectura directa.
  • Sala de lectura (2026-10-25): «Tibet's Great Yogī Milarepa» (Evans-Wentz, 1928) NO se registra: la traducción de Kazi Dawa-Samdup (m. 1922) es libre, pero el libro lleva la edición, introducción y notas de W. Y. Evans-Wentz (m. 1965), protegidas en la UE hasta 2035 y en España hasta 2045 (solo es libre en EE. UU.). Lo mismo vale para Jacques Bacot (1925; m. 1965). Chang (1962), Lhalungpa (1977) y Quintman (2010) tienen derechos vigentes. No se ha encontrado el texto tibetano en Wikisource; existe en BDRC, que el importador no lee.
  • Sala de lectura: comprobar si «Aus den Geschichten und Liedern des Milaraspa» (Berthold Laufer, Viena, Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902) está digitalizado con OCR limpio; sería otro texto libre en todas partes.

Researched on 2026-10-22