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This chapter examines the standard versions of the Life and Songs of Milarepa in the context of the life of their author, Tsangnyön Heruka, during the late fifteenth century. It first provides an overview of Tsangnyön's own early life and his role in defining a new form of Buddhism in Tibet—that of the religious madman, the nyönpa. It then considers the influences and inspirations that led to Tsangnyön's writing of Jetsun Milarepa's life story. It also discusses the traditional descriptions of Tsangnyön's activities in reimagining and recrafting the biographical texts as well as their execution, production, and distribution, including his use of woodblock printing and his commissioning of related painted and ritual materials. The chapter concludes by reflecting on Tsangnyön's contributions to the biographical tradition while also reframing the yogin's portrait, in part by reinventing the genre of life writing.

This chapter examines a comprehensive form of life writing: the biographical compendia, which takes on the finely grained, lifelike quality that would later appear in the standard version by Tsangnyön Heruka. The compendia stand as the mature versions of the proto-works on Jetsun Milarepa's life story mentioned in the previous chapter; they combine structured and well-crafted biographical narratives from the early life with extensive song collections, and conclude with elaborate descriptions of the yogin's death. The chapter begins with a discussion of the text known as The Twelve Great Disciples before turning to the mysterious tradition of extended biographical works known as The Black Treasury. These materials flowed directly from The Twelve Great Disciples and were closely connected to the influential Karma Kagyu hierarchs known as the Karmapas.

This chapter considers a form of life writing known as “proto-Life/Songs,” signifying the basic literary structure that influenced the writing of Jetsun Milarepa's life story for centuries to come. Milarepa's earliest biography, established by the yogin's own disciples, had achieved a life of its own within a single generation as students of his direct pupils began to adapt, expand, and promulgate accounts of his religious career. The spread of the yogin's teachings in the century or so following his death created a need for new forms of literature to authorize those transmissions within specific communities and institutions. Among these are the so-called “golden rosary collections” to which many of the proto-texts belong. This chapter discusses six proto-Life/Songs narratives that span several centuries and are drawn from various sources: The Kagyu Rosary, Bank of Blessings, Lama Zhang's Life of Lama Milarepa, Dönmo Ripa's Life of Jetsün Milarepa, Sangyé Bum's Life of Milarepa, and Gyaltangpa's King of Jetsüns.

This chapter focuses on the ascendance of Tsangnyön Heruka's standard version of Jetsun Milarepa's life story, with particular emphasis on his relationship to the yogin. It suggests that Tsangnyön maintained a close relationship with the yogin throughout his life, and on several occasions explicitly claimed to be Milarepa's reembodiment. Tsangnyön's early biography uses the madman's own words to recognize explicitly his status as Milarepa's incarnation. Tsangnyön's followers continued to promote actively this association after his death. The chapter discusses the changes this brings to the authorial voice of Tsangnyön's work as well as the reasons for the ascendance and continued popularity of his literary works. It also examines how the madman shifted the Life and Songs of Milarepa's perspective from third to first person, effectively creating a fictionalized autobiography.

This book traces the literary transformations of the life story of Jetsun Milarepa, Tibet's eleventh-century Lord of Yogins, from its fragmentary origins to the standard version published nearly 400 years later. Milarepa's life is a narrative that has become ingrained within the Tibetan religious and cultural landscape. The principal themes associated with his life story—purification of past misdeeds, faith and devotion to the guru, ardor in meditation, and the possibility of attaining liberation in a single lifetime—have had a profound impact on the development of Buddhism across the region. This book examines the various forms in which Milarepa's life story has been reimagined and rewritten, together with the broader historical and religious conditions that allowed for such forms of literary production. It focuses on works written in the period up to 1488, including a version of Milarepa's life and collected songs written by the iconoclastic tantric master Tsangnyön Heruka, the self-proclaimed “Madman of Western Tibet”.

This chapter focuses on the earliest biographical fragments and narratives recording Jetsun Milarepa's life; in some cases these writings are referred to as a “life” or biography. The chapter describes a biographical birth that took place at the moment of the yogin's death and identifies the elements that would begin to form a rudimentary life story. The chapter first considers a purported autobiographical voice associated mainly with the standard version of Tsangnyön Heruka, but also found in earlier works. It then examines the works attributed to two of Milarepa's earliest biographers, Ngendzong Repa and Gampopa, from their own personal experiences. The first examples of narrative fragments also address the relationship between life writing and the recording and transmission of specific doctrinal cycles of tantric instructions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what might be called a “rhetoric of orality”.

This book has investigated the life of Jetsun Milarepa, set against a shifting religious, political, and social terrain, in hopes of broadening the way the yogin's life story, and Tibetan life writing more generally, have been studied. To that end, the book has examined how lives are recorded and transmitted, how their structures and functions transform over time, and how their changing forms affect the reading of their content. It has highlighted the literary qualities of the Life and Songs of Milarepa as well as its production, dissemination, reception, and intertextual relationships. The book has shown that Tsangnyön Heruka's biography of the yogin can be read, in part, as his own life story, an autobiographical biography that derives its legitimacy from his direct relationship to his subject.

This epilogue reflects on the nature of Tsangnyön Heruka's biography of Jetsun Milarepa and suggests that the yogin remains a presence for the multitude of individuals who read his life story. What is unnatural about the Life and Songs of Milarepa is precisely that it appears so natural, so real. It seems so close to its subject, to the point of being its subject, even if it was composed centuries after the yogin's death. Milarepa's life now serves as a component of children's Tibetan-language textbooks in contemporary Tibet, sanctioned by the Chinese authorities. For centuries after his death, authors have reimagined and rewritten versions of the yogin's life story; those stories form the corpus of narratives that embody his life both as an individual who traversed the Buddhist path to enlightenment and as an exemplar of how that might be accomplished. The Milarepa corpus embodied in Tsangnyön's work certainly lives on.