The Biographies of Rechungpa: The Evolution of a Tibetan ...

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THE EVOLUTION OF
MILAREPA’S BIOGRAPHY
Tsangnyön Heruka’s The Life of Milarepa and
The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa (1488)
Tsangnyön Heruka’s (1452–1507) The Life of Milarepa has proved to be the most
accessible work of Tibetan literature for other cultures. As early as the 1920s it was
translated into English 1 and French. 2 It has so far inspired an Italian movie, 3 a comic-strip
book, 4 a novelisation 5 and a French play. 6 Milarepa even served as a recondite ingredient
for Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize winning novel The Sea, the Sea in 1978, in which the
narrator searches in vain amongst Italian poets to find the songs of ‘Milarepa’, while the
reader is tacitly assumed to know the identity of this ‘poet’. 7 This Tibetan classic has
also, inevitably, been the subject of doctoral theses. 8
Tsangnyön Heruka made the lengthy account of Milarepa’s life as a teacher into The
Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, 9 primarily composed of songs within the setting
of short prose narratives as a companion volume to The Life of Milarepa. 10 Thus the
biography itself jumps from Milarepa’s first years of solitude in the mountains, when he
has overcome all his major obstacles, directly to his death and cremation, which
demonstrate that he has achieved his goal—Buddhahood. Thus, unlike other
hagiographies, the dramatic tension of the principal character’s struggle to attain his goal
moves directly to its dramatic resolution. Tsangnyön also transformed the third-person
narrative of the earlier biographies into a first-person account, giving the narrative greater
impact and an impression of authenticity.
Although it is under the above titles that the two volumes have become generally
known in English, The Life of Milarepa is a free translation of the shortened Tibetan title
Mi-la’i rNam-thar, which, as discussed in the introductory chapter literally means The
Liberation of Milarepa. As for The Hundred Thousand Songs, this is, in contrast, an
overly literal translation. The term ‘hundred thousand’ (‘bum) is frequently used in
Tibetan to designate the collected works of an author, as in Kabum (bKa’-‘bum) or
Sungbum (gSungs-‘bum), which could both be literally rendered as ‘The Hundred
Thousand Teachings of…’ but really means ‘The Collected Works of…’ If the collection
is comprised solely of songs, then the title Gurbum (mGur-‘bum) is invariably used. This
term could be freely and more accurately translated as ‘The Collected Songs of…’ or
simply The Songs of Milarepa. Nevertheless, because of the ubiquity of the translation of
this particular text as The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, it will be referred to
here by that name.