His father had died young and left the family's property to his uncle. The uncle took everything — the land, the house, the possessions — and made Milarepa's mother and her children work as servants in what had been their own home. His mother endured this for years. When Milarepa was old enough to travel, she sent him to learn sorcery.
He learned. He came back. He used hailstorms to destroy the uncle's harvest. He used black magic to kill the guests at his cousin's wedding — thirty-five people — and to destroy the house. His mother was triumphant. The revenge was complete.
And Milarepa looked at what he had done and could not continue living in the same relationship to himself. He had killed thirty-five people. They were not innocent — they were complicit in the family's dispossession — but they were human beings and they were dead by his hand. He could not undo it. He could not manage it into something more acceptable than it was. He had done a terrible thing and now he had to decide what to do with having done it.
He found a teacher — the fierce, difficult, demanding Marpa — and spent years in conditions of extreme hardship as part of his training. Marpa made him build towers and then tear them down, made him carry stones until his back bled, made him the recipient of the specific cruelty that a teacher deploys when they understand that the student's guilt is so profound that only equivalent suffering will allow them to continue. Milarepa accepted all of it. He was not being punished. He was being metabolised.
The Tibetan Buddhist concept of Purification — Jangchub — is not the erasure of what was done. It is the transformation of the energy of what was done into something that serves rather than destroys. The thirty-five deaths became the specific ferocity of Milarepa's practice — the same energy that had gone into the act of destruction turned completely toward the act of liberation. Not as compensation. Not as atonement in the sense of making the account even. As the recognition that the same force that had been used in the worst way available was also, redirected, the force that could push the practice further than anyone whose motivation was less absolute. The worst thing Milarepa had done became, handled with complete honesty and complete dedication, the fuel for the greatest thing he would do.
He spent years in a cave above the Tibetan plateau, meditating, writing songs, turning green from the nettles he ate because there was nothing else. Students came. He taught in songs — the Milarepa songs are the most beautiful poetry in the Tibetan language. He became, in the Tibetan tradition, the supreme example of what is possible in a single lifetime — the murderer who became the saint, not through the erasure of what he had done but through the complete honest inhabiting of it.
The cave was not a punishment. It was where the transformation happened — in the specific solitude that the enormity of what he had done required, in the absolute commitment of a person who had nothing left to protect because the worst had already happened by his own hand.
You are not Milarepa. The worst thing you have done is almost certainly not thirty-five deaths. But the structure of what the story offers is available in proportion: the thing you have done that you cannot manage into something more acceptable — the cost that landed on someone else through your action — is not smaller than you can bear. It is, if you are willing to inhabit it completely rather than manage it carefully, exactly the size of what it can become.
The cave is inside. The nettles are whatever the honest encounter requires. The song is what comes out the other side.