Milarepa's Trials- Tibetan EventEvent"The Trials of the Great Yogi"

The Sorcerer

Milarepa was born Mila Thöpaga into a prosperous family in Gungthang, western Tibet. When his father died, his uncle and aunt seized the family's wealth, reduced Milarepa, his mother, and his sister to servants in their own household. They fed them scraps and dressed them in rags. When his mother demanded the property back at Milarepa's coming of age, the uncle refused and humiliated them publicly.

His mother sent him to a sorcerer named Yungton Trogyal. Milarepa proved a devastating student. At his mother's urging, he performed a rite during a wedding feast at his uncle's house. The building collapsed. Thirty-five people died. Then he conjured hailstorms that destroyed the village's barley harvest. The vengeance was complete, and so was the karmic debt. Overcome with horror at what he had done, Milarepa went looking for a way to purify thirty-five deaths. He was directed to Marpa Lotsāwa.

The First Three Towers

Marpa did not teach him. Instead, he ordered Milarepa to build a round tower on the eastern ridge of his property. Milarepa quarried stones and carried them up the hillside with his bare hands, raising the structure alone over weeks. When it was half finished, Marpa inspected it and said he had been drunk when he gave the instructions. He ordered Milarepa to demolish the tower and return every stone to the place where he had found it.

Marpa then ordered a crescent-shaped tower on a western ridge. Milarepa built it. Marpa demolished it. A third tower, triangular, on another site. Demolished again. Each time Marpa offered a different excuse. Each time Milarepa obeyed.

Sekhar Guthok

The fourth tower was the real one. Marpa ordered a nine-story square structure on a rocky outcrop. The labor nearly killed Milarepa. Tsangnyön Heruka's biography describes open sores forming on his back from carrying stones, hardening into calluses that broke open again, his hands raw and bleeding. Fellow students wept watching him work. Marpa denied him any teachings, berated him when he asked, and sometimes struck him. The tower rose, stone by stone, nine stories tall. It would become known as Sekhar Guthok, the Single-Staff Fortress.

Dakmema

Marpa's wife, Dakmema, took pity on Milarepa throughout the years of building. She tended his wounds, fed him, and spoke kindly when her husband raged. She pleaded with Marpa to relent. He refused and threatened her too.

When Milarepa reached the edge of suicide, Dakmema acted. She forged a letter bearing Marpa's seal and sent Milarepa to study with Lama Ngogdun Chudor, one of Marpa's senior students. But Milarepa could not meditate. Nothing moved. Nothing opened. When the deception was discovered, Ngogdun Chudor explained: without Marpa's genuine blessing, no practice would take hold. Milarepa went back.

The Transmission

He returned to Marpa in complete defeat. Years of labor, constant rejection, the failed escape, the inability to practice without his teacher's authorization. His ego had been ground to nothing. He was ready to die.

Marpa wept. He told Milarepa that everything had been deliberate. Had he built and demolished twelve towers without interruption, his karma would have been entirely purified and he could have reached enlightenment without further suffering. Dakmema's intervention, though born of compassion, had broken the sequence. Some residual karma remained. Milarepa would have to burn it off himself, in practice.

Then Marpa gave him everything: the Mahāmudrā teachings from Nāropa and Maitrīpa, the Six Yogas of Nāropa, the practice of inner heat called tummo.

The Cotton-Clad One

Milarepa took the teachings into the mountains and stayed there. He lived in caves at extreme altitude, wore a single cotton cloth through Himalayan winters, and survived on nettle soup so meager that his skin turned green. The cotton cloth gave him his name: Repa, the cotton-clad one. Through years of solitary practice, he attained complete enlightenment in a single lifetime. His realization poured out as songs, hundreds of spontaneous verses composed in caves and on mountainsides, collected as the Hundred Thousand Songs. They are still studied and sung across every school of Tibetan Buddhism.