Milarepa Sings at the Moment of Death

The curd is sweet and the bowl is generous and Milarepa, who has eaten almost nothing but nettles for decades, accepts it with gratitude.

Geshe Tsakpuhwa has been jealous of him for years. The Geshe is a learned man — a scholar, a holder of formal titles, a man whose students pay him respect proportional to the degrees he has accumulated. Milarepa has no formal titles. He never completed the monastic curriculum. He was, for years, a murderer who ate weeds in a cave. But the people who come to teachings come to Milarepa. The Geshe watches his own students leave for the cave-yogi. He does what jealousy sometimes produces: he acts.

The poison in the curd is slow. Milarepa feels it that evening. He does not accuse the Geshe — that is not his way, and besides, the biographers record that he had foreseen this death in visions. He gathers his students around him. He sends word to Rechungpa, who is the disciple he most needs to see before the end.

He begins to sing.

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The songs of the dying period are among the most technically accomplished in the entire corpus. The reason is not despite the circumstances but because of them: pain, when a practitioner of Milarepa’s development encounters it, becomes a kind of clarifier. The songs go to the center of things without the circling that earlier, more comfortable songs sometimes permit.

His students beg him to accept treatment. A respected physician arrives. Milarepa declines. He explains, in terms that are simultaneously doctrinal and personal: the body has done its work. To extend it artificially would be to cling to it, and clinging is precisely the habit he has spent sixty years learning not to do. The body that turned green from nettles, that carried stones until the back bled, that sat in unheated caves through Tibetan winters — this body has been a vehicle, not a home. It is time to leave it.

He is not without pain. The songs do not pretend otherwise. Several of them describe the physical sensations directly: burning, pressure, the way the body’s protests become louder as it weakens. What is notable is that the songs treat these sensations as information, not as cause for negotiation.

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On the final night, something happens that witnesses describe in different ways.

Some say a light filled the cave. Some say the dying man’s face, which had been contracted with pain, suddenly opened — the way a fist opens when the hand finally relaxes — and what remained was an expression of complete ease. Some say they heard music that had no visible source.

The accounts agree on the following: Milarepa died with full awareness. He did not lose consciousness first and die in unconsciousness, as most deaths proceed. He remained present through the dissolution of each of the elements, narrating the process in songs until the breath stopped.

The Geshe Tsakpuhwa, in the accounts, eventually comes forward. He confesses. He is broken by what he has done, but also broken by what he witnessed: the man he poisoned dying with more freedom and grace than the Geshe has ever managed in his most disciplined moments. The poison became purification — not only for Milarepa, who needed nothing purified, but for the Geshe himself, who spent the remainder of his life as Milarepa’s most remorseful student.

The body is small when the students prepare it. The decades of austerity have left it exactly that — small, light, marked by weather and practice. They build the funeral pyre. When the smoke rises, the accounts say that the smoke itself has a quality that is difficult to name: not the heavy smoke of ordinary wood, but something thinner, something that disperses into the mountain air with unusual speed, as though whatever was left to burn had already, mostly, been burned before the pyre was lit.

The songs continue. They are still being sung, nine centuries later, in the same mountains.