Milarepa

One afternoon, a small child was leafing through an old book on the grandfather's shelf, and stopped at pages printed with the songs of a hermit from Tibet. The child murmured a few lines, then looked up and asked why the hermit's songs were so sad and yet so beautiful. The grandfather set down his cup of tea and drew the child close. He would tell the story of the man who sang those songs. His name was Milarepa.

That hermit lived about 900 years ago, among the snowy peaks of Tibet. His life, as Buddhist tradition tells it, is one of the strangest and most moving stories in Buddhism. For he was not a good man from the start. He had done some of the gravest wrongs of all, and yet in the end he found the light.

According to his life story, as a boy he lived in a comfortable home, with gentle parents and a peaceful childhood. Then his father died while Milarepa was still young. An uncle seized all the family property and left mother and son to live in poverty and shame.

His mother was heartbroken, and her bitterness would not fade. She told her son to go and learn sorcery, a dark kind of magic, to take revenge on the uncle's family.

This is the saddest part of the story. Full of grief and anger, the young man did as his mother asked. He mastered the magic, then used it to bring great disaster on many people. These were wrongs he would regret for the rest of his life. The grandfather did not tell the details, because they were deeply sorrowful things. He said only that when the anger passed, the young man looked back in shock at what he had done, and a deep remorse rose in his heart.

That remorse is what saved him.

He resolved to set out once more. But this time it was not for revenge. This time he went in search of the spiritual path, a way to wash away his wrongs and be free of suffering. He heard of a great teacher named Marpa, a famous translator, and made a long, hard trek to ask to study with him.

But Marpa did not teach him right away.

Instead of passing on the teachings, the master gave Milarepa nothing but heavy and strange tasks. He told him to carry stones by himself and build a great tower on the mountainside. Milarepa toiled away until it was done. The master came to look, shook his head, and told him to take it all down and return every stone to where it had come from. Each stone he had hauled up on his own back, he now had to carry down again with his own hands. Then the master told him to build another tower, in another place. And then to tear that one down too.

So it went, year after year. Milarepa's back bled from carrying stones. Some books say he endured this for about six years. He could not understand why his teacher made him do work that seemed so pointless. Many times he felt so hurt and miserable that he nearly gave up hope and wanted only to leave. But he stayed. He gritted his teeth and kept carrying the stones up the mountain, one by one.

The grandfather explained why Marpa acted this way. The teacher did not dislike Milarepa at all. On the contrary, he loved him dearly. He knew that this student's heart still carried the weight of old wrongs. As the tradition tells it, those years of building and tearing down were the master's way of helping him wash away his old karma. Carrying stones until his shoulders grew calloused also tempered his heart, until it was strong and clear. Only when Marpa saw that his student was ripe did he embrace him. Then he passed on the most precious teaching he had, whole and complete.

Having received the teachings, Milarepa took leave of his master and went alone up into the towering Himalayas.

He sought out remote, freezing caves of rock, and stayed there to practice. Year after year he lived alone among the clouds and snow, with only a single thin cloth robe. When his food ran out, he picked nettle leaves in the forest and ate them to get by. He ate nothing but those leaves for so long that his body wasted away to skin and bones, and his skin slowly turned green. People say that his disciples later called him, with affection, the green-skinned hermit.

It sounds like hardship, and yet, strangely, it was the most beautiful time of his life.

In the perfect stillness of the snow mountains, Milarepa's heart grew brighter each day. All the anger, fear and regret of the old days melted away like morning mist. And out of the deep peace and joy within him, songs simply poured forth. He made them up as he sang, songs of the spiritual path, right at the mouth of his cave, out in the wind. He needed no paper or pen, and nothing written beforehand. He sang the way a stream flows, the way a bird sings.

Later his disciples wrote these songs down and gathered them into a great book of poems. People call it the Hundred Thousand Songs. Today the collection has been translated into many languages around the world. The grandfather asked whether the child had ever wondered why songs sung from a cold stone cave were so sad and yet so beautiful.

He thought it was because they were so true. Milarepa did not hide the dark part of his past. He sang of his wrongs, of his pain, of the long nights in a cold cave. But he also sang of the joy of a lightened heart, and of the light he found after so many years. The songs were sad because he dared to look his own wrongs in the face. They were beautiful because, from that dark place, he had made his way out into the light.

His story has been translated into Vietnamese, and many Vietnamese Buddhists read it. People treasure it for the warm message it carries. However grave the wrongs a person has done, the road back to goodness always stays open. No one who truly wants to step out of the dark is left there forever.

When the grandfather finished, the child sat in silence, looking down at the page again. Then the child softly read one line from the book, about sitting still and looking into one's own heart.