Quick Answer
Tibet's most loved religious figure began as a mass murderer, and the tradition has never tried to hide it. These are the songs Milarepa is said to have improvised in caves, in response to whoever turned up: hunters, demons, sceptical scholars, his own sister telling him he was a disgrace. They are plain, funny, frequently rude, and unlike anything else in Buddhist literature. They were also compiled four hundred years after he died by an editor with a strong hand.
Key Takeaways
- The tradition kept the murders in, which is the most interesting decision in Tibetan hagiography.
- The songs are improvised responses, not doctrine, and they read like it.
- Marpa's training methods are genuinely disturbing and should not be softened.
- Compiled in the fifteenth century by an editor who shaped the material heavily.
- The most readable major text in the tradition. Self-contained episodes, any order.
🕑 16 min read
What This Book Is
The Hundred Thousand Songs, in Tibetan the Mila Grubum, is a collection of roughly sixty episodes from the later life of the yogi Milarepa. Each follows a similar shape: someone arrives at the cave where he is living, an exchange occurs, and Milarepa sings.
The songs are the substance. They are not hymns and not doctrinal expositions; they are improvised responses to a specific person in a specific situation, and they are frequently sharp.
The visitors vary enormously. Hunters, herders, merchants, robbers, women who want to argue, learned monks who want to test him, local spirits, his own family, and a long procession of people who become his students.
The number in the title is conventional and means a great many rather than a count.
Two books, one project. The compiler produced both this and a biography usually translated as The Life of Milarepa. The biography covers the crimes and the training under Marpa; the songs cover the decades afterwards. Read the biography first or the songs will be missing their foundation.
The Life Behind It
Milarepa is placed roughly between 1052 and 1135, in the Tibetan region near the Nepalese border.
The story begins with dispossession. His father died when he was young, an uncle and aunt seized the family property, and his mother and sister were reduced to labouring for relatives who had taken what was theirs.
His mother, in the traditional account, is a considerable figure: bitter, relentless, and the engine of everything that follows. She sent her son away to learn destructive magic, with instructions to use it.
What He Did
He learned it, and he used it.
The account says he brought down the house where the family of his uncle was holding a wedding, killing a large number of people, and afterwards destroyed the barley harvest of the village with a hailstorm.
The tradition does not minimise this. The number given is substantial. The victims include people who had done nothing to him. And the story is told at length, in detail, as the foundation of everything that follows rather than as an embarrassment to be handled quickly.
What happens next is the interesting part. He is not forgiven, absolved or told it was a misunderstanding. He is told that the consequences are enormous and that exhausting them will require everything he has, and the remainder of his life is presented as that work.
Consider what an unusual decision this is for a religious tradition. Almost every founding figure is presented as exceptional from birth, with early signs, wisdom in childhood, and any faults minor and instructive. Tibetan Buddhism's most beloved saint is a murderer, and the tradition has told the story that way for nine hundred years without attempting to sand it down. The reason given is doctrinal, that a person is not fixed and that even this can be worked through, and the effect on a reader is something else entirely: it removes the excuse that you began too badly.
Marpa and the Towers
He sought out Marpa the Translator, who had travelled to India, received the teachings and brought them back, and who is the second ancestor of the lineage.
Marpa refused to teach him. Instead he set him to build a stone tower, alone, carrying the stones himself. When it was nearly finished Marpa told him it was in the wrong place and to take it down and return every stone to where it had been found. Then another tower. Then another.
The account describes open sores on his back that would not heal, exhaustion, humiliation in front of other students, and repeated refusals when he asked for teaching. At one point he attempted to obtain instruction through Marpa's wife and was thrown out for the deception. He came close to suicide.
The traditional reading is that Marpa knew exactly what he was doing, that the ordeal was purifying the consequences of the murders in this life rather than over many, that he wept privately over what he was inflicting, and that nothing gentler would have worked.
A modern reader is entitled to a second reaction and should not suppress it. Years of pointless labour, systematic humiliation, and the withholding of what the student came for, administered by a teacher whose reasons cannot be questioned, is a description that fits abuse as readily as it fits training. The tradition's account depends entirely on Marpa having been right about what was needed, and that is exactly the claim no student is in a position to evaluate.
Both things can be held. It is a powerful story about the cost of transformation, and it is also the template for every teacher who has ever justified cruelty as method.
The Years in Caves
After Marpa finally transmitted the teachings, Milarepa went into the mountains and stayed there.
The accounts describe decades of solitary practice in caves at high altitude, sustained on nettle soup until his skin took on a greenish cast, wearing a single cotton cloth through Himalayan winters, and refusing repeated invitations to come down and take a position.
This is the period the songs come from. He was not seeking students and acquired them anyway, as people found him and would not leave.
The physical detail is consistent and unglamorous throughout: cold, hunger, sores, and the practical difficulty of being visited by people who expect food when you have nettles.
Who Actually Made This Book
The material worth knowing before you treat any of it as historical.
Both the biography and this collection were compiled in the late fifteenth century, roughly three and a half centuries after Milarepa's death, by a figure known as the Mad Yogi of Tsang, himself a practitioner in the crazy-wisdom style who wandered, provoked and lived outside monastic institutions.
He worked from earlier written materials and from oral tradition, and he did not merely transmit them. He selected, arranged, gave the whole a narrative shape, and produced two books that read as literature in a way his sources apparently did not.
Scholars examining the earlier strata have found that Milarepa material existed in various forms before him and that his versions became dominant precisely because they were better made.
The consequence for a reader: some of these songs may descend from an eleventh-century yogi, and the collection you are holding is a fifteenth-century literary achievement by an editor with a strong sense of what a story should do.
That is not a reason to value it less. It is a reason to stop treating the details as reportage.
The Song Tradition
The form has a history and it explains why these songs sound the way they do.
In India, tantric adepts had produced a genre of spontaneous spiritual song, expressing realisation in improvised verse using deliberately ordinary imagery: boatmen, hunters, weavers, wine, the marketplace. The point was to say something that could not be said in technical vocabulary, by refusing the technical vocabulary.
The tradition reached Tibet with the teachings, and Milarepa is its greatest flowering there.
The characteristic features are all present in his songs. Everyday imagery drawn from whatever is in front of him. Direct address to the person present. A structure that borrows the form of a folk song rather than a liturgy. And an absence of scholastic terminology, which is deliberate rather than a sign of lack of learning.
How an Episode Works
The pattern is consistent and worth having in mind, because it is what makes the book readable.
A situation is established, usually in a paragraph. Milarepa is in a particular cave. Someone arrives with a particular problem or challenge.
An exchange follows in prose, often argumentative.
Then the song, which does not summarise the argument but reframes it, usually by taking an image from the visitor's own situation and turning it.
Then a response, sometimes another song, sometimes the visitor's capitulation, occasionally the visitor leaving unconvinced.
The self-contained structure means the book can be opened anywhere, which is how most people read it and how it seems designed to be read.
The Hunter and the Deer
The most famous episode and a good demonstration of the method.
A deer arrives at Milarepa's cave, terrified, pursued. He sings to it and it settles beside him. Then the dog arrives, in a fury, and he sings to the dog, which also settles. Then the hunter arrives, finds his quarry and his dog sitting peacefully with an emaciated man in a cave, and is enraged.
He shoots at Milarepa. The arrow misses.
The song Milarepa sings to him takes the hunter's own vocabulary, the chase, the weapon, the kill, and turns each element into an account of what the hunter is actually pursuing and what is actually hunting him.
The hunter becomes a student.
The episode is doing several things at once: demonstrating the taming of aggression by refusing to meet it, illustrating the doha method of using the listener's own imagery, and making a point about killing that lands harder coming from someone with his history.
Negotiating With Demons
Several episodes involve hostile non-human beings, and the pattern in them is the most quoted material in the book.
Milarepa is disturbed by demons. In the earlier episodes he attempts to drive them out by force, by ritual, by wrathful means, and it does not work; the harder he resists the more solidly they are present.
What works is the opposite. He stops treating them as enemies. In one well-known episode he invites them to eat him if that is what they want, and offers his body without reservation. At that point the beings lose their power over him entirely and submit.
The tradition reads this at two levels. Literally, as encounters with actual beings, which the tradition takes seriously. And psychologically, as an account of how obstruction works: that resistance supplies the energy which the obstruction runs on, and that genuine willingness to be undone removes the fuel.
The second reading is what most modern readers take, and it is worth noting that the text supports both and does not choose.
His Sister
The episodes involving Peta, his sister, are the least like religious literature and the best.
She finds him naked in a cave, filthy, greenish from nettles, with no possessions, and she is not impressed. She tells him he is a disgrace, that he has humiliated the family, that even a beggar has clothes, and that whatever he thinks he is doing, it looks to everyone else like a man who has lost his mind.
She is not presented as a foil to be corrected. Her objections are given in full and they are reasonable. She brings him cloth. She keeps returning. She continues to think he is wasting his life.
Milarepa's songs to her do not win the argument so much as decline it, and the relationship stays unresolved across several episodes.
This is unusual and it is why the book feels human. The saint's own family thought he was ridiculous, said so repeatedly, and the tradition preserved their side of it.
The Comedy
Worth its own mention because almost nothing else in Buddhist canonical literature is funny.
Milarepa is a mocker. He teases learned monks about the uselessness of their study, sings insulting verses at people who deserve them, and is repeatedly rude to visitors with a good opinion of themselves.
There is a running joke about his appearance. People arrive expecting a great master and find an unwashed skeleton in a cave, and their disappointment is recorded with evident enjoyment.
The humour is doing work rather than decorating. A tradition that had become heavily scholastic and institutional produced, in this figure, a permanent standing joke at its own expense, and the joke was preserved by the institution it was aimed at.
Inner Heat and the Six Yogas
The practical background readers frequently want.
The lineage transmitted through Marpa carries a set of practices known as the six yogas, and the one associated with Milarepa above all is inner heat: a combination of breath retention, physical technique and visualisation of heat at a point below the navel.
The tradition holds that this is how he survived winters in unheated caves in a single cotton cloth, and the name given to practitioners of this style refers to that cloth.
Physiological studies of Tibetan practitioners have documented measurable increases in peripheral body temperature during such practice, which is genuinely interesting and considerably more modest than the traditional claims.
These are not practices to attempt from a book. The six yogas involve forceful breath retention, physical pressure techniques and prolonged practice, are traditionally taught only after extensive preliminaries and only within a transmission lineage, and can produce real physical and psychological harm when improvised. Anyone with cardiac, respiratory or blood-pressure conditions, epilepsy, or a psychiatric history should treat forceful breath-retention practice as medically significant. Reading about inner heat is not the same as being taught it, and no responsible teacher in this lineage would transmit it to someone who had simply read Milarepa.
What to Hold at a Distance
Three things, stated plainly.
The miracles. Flying, leaving handprints in rock, appearing in several places at once, multiplying his body. These are throughout, presented as fact. A reader can regard them as literary convention, as later accretion, or as reports, and should notice which they are doing.
The training model. Marpa's methods are held up as exemplary, and the lesson drawn is that the student should endure whatever the teacher imposes without question. That lesson has been used, in this tradition and others, to justify a great deal of harm to people who had no way to evaluate what was being done to them.
The renunciation. Milarepa's path involved abandoning family obligation entirely, and the text presents this as straightforwardly correct. His sister's objection, that he had responsibilities, is treated as an obstacle to be sung past. It is not obviously wrong.
Which Edition
Garma Chang's complete translation, first published in the 1960s, remains the standard and is the version most people own. It contains everything, it reads well, and its scholarly apparatus is dated.
More recent translations of parts of the corpus exist with better annotation and closer attention to the Tibetan, and specialists prefer them.
For a first reading, the complete version is the right choice, because the value of this book lies in its accumulation. Sixty encounters build a picture that six do not.
Read The Life of Milarepa alongside it, in one of the good modern translations, since it supplies everything the songs assume.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want Tibetan Buddhism as a life rather than as doctrine, which is what this book supplies and almost nothing else does.
Read it if you are drawn to the solitary contemplative life and want an account that includes the cold, the nettles, the sores and the sister who thinks you are an idiot.
Read it if you find religious literature too smooth. This is the least smooth thing the tradition produced.
Read it alongside Shantideva for the contrast between systematic argument and improvised song, and alongside Trungpa for a modern voice from the same lineage.
Do not read it as history, do not take Marpa's methods as a model, and do not attempt the practices it describes on the strength of having admired them.
The thing worth taking from Milarepa is not the caves or the nettles, neither of which is available to you and neither of which was the point. It is the demon episodes, and specifically the discovery that the harder he fought what obstructed him the more solid it became, and that what dissolved it was genuine willingness to be undone by it. Whatever you think demons are, that mechanism is observable in ordinary life: the anxiety that grows under attention, the resentment that strengthens each time it is argued with, the fear that recedes only when you stop negotiating with it. He tried force for years first. That part is usually left out of the summary and it is the most useful detail in the book.
A murderer, a cave, and sixty encounters with whoever turned up.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our cautions about the training model and about the practices described are set out above and are independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa?
A collection of around sixty episodes from the life of the eleventh-century Tibetan yogi Milarepa, each containing songs he is said to have improvised in response to a situation, compiled in the fifteenth century by an editor known as the Mad Yogi of Tsang.
Who was Milarepa?
A Tibetan yogi of roughly 1052 to 1135, remembered as the most beloved figure in Tibetan Buddhism. His life story runs from murder through extreme penance to solitary practice in mountain caves, and he is the central ancestor of the Kagyu lineage.
Did he really kill people?
The traditional biography says he learned destructive magic to avenge his family's dispossession and killed a large number of people at a wedding gathering, then spent the rest of his life working to exhaust the consequences. Whether it is historical is unknown.
What was Marpa's treatment of him?
His teacher Marpa made him build stone towers alone by hand and then tear them down, repeatedly, over years, refusing teaching each time. The tradition reads this as purification of his karma; a modern reader is entitled to find it disturbing.
Are these songs authentic?
The collection was compiled roughly four centuries after Milarepa's death from oral and written traditions, and the compiler shaped the material considerably. Some songs may descend from him; the collection as we have it is a fifteenth-century literary work.
What is the doha tradition?
A genre of spontaneous spiritual song associated with the Indian tantric adepts, in which realisation is expressed in improvised verse using ordinary imagery rather than technical vocabulary. Milarepa's songs belong to this tradition and are its greatest Tibetan flowering.
What is tummo?
The inner heat practice, using breath, visualisation and physical technique, which Milarepa is said to have used to survive winters in unheated caves wearing only cotton. It is one of the six yogas transmitted through his lineage.
Is the book readable?
Yes, unusually so for Tibetan literature. The episodes are self-contained, the settings are concrete, and the songs are plain rather than technical. It is the most accessible major work in the tradition and can be read in any order.
Which translation should you read?
Garma Chang's complete translation is the standard and the one most people own. Newer partial translations exist with better scholarly apparatus. For a first reading the complete version is the right choice despite its age.
What is the demon negotiation about?
Several episodes involve Milarepa encountering hostile spirits and defeating them not by force but by refusing to treat them as enemies, at which point they submit and become protectors. It is among the most quoted material in the collection.
How does it relate to the Life of Milarepa?
They are companion volumes by the same compiler. The Life is the biography, covering the murders, the penance and the training. The Songs cover the years afterwards, when he was already realised and teaching. Read the Life first.
Who should read it?
Anyone interested in Tibetan Buddhism who wants something other than doctrine, anyone drawn to the solitary contemplative life, and anyone who finds religious literature too polished. This is the least polished major text the tradition produced.
Nobody's starting point disqualifies them
The reason this figure is loved rather than merely revered is that the tradition refused to clean him up. He killed people. His family thought he was a fool. He spent years being humiliated by a teacher who would not explain himself, came close to killing himself, and lived the rest of his life cold and hungry in caves being visited by hunters who tried to shoot him. Whatever he found, he found from there. That is a different proposition from the usual one, in which the saint was always going to be a saint and you are reading about someone unlike you. He was not unlike you at the beginning. That is the whole point of keeping the murders in.
Sources & References
- Mila Grubum, the Hundred Thousand Songs, compiled fifteenth century.
- Chang, Garma C. C. The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, complete translation.
- The Life of Milarepa, the companion biography by the same compiler.
- Scholarship on Tsangnyon Heruka and his shaping of the Milarepa corpus.
- Studies of the Indian doha tradition and its Tibetan reception.
- Physiological research on inner heat practice in Tibetan practitioners.