Milarepa is remembered as a murderer before he is remembered as a saint, and the painting does not hide that. Around the seated central figure, meditating in his mountain cave with one hand cupped to his ear in the pose Tibetan art uses to mark him instantly, small narrative scenes circle outward, and the earliest of them shows a young man learning black magic well enough to kill relatives who had wronged his family.
What follows in the surrounding scenes is the part that made him famous. Consumed by guilt, he sought out the teacher Marpa, who put him through years of brutal, seemingly pointless physical labor, building and demolishing stone towers on Marpa's order, before finally transmitting the teachings Milarepa had come for. The cave meditation at the painting's center is the destination of that story, not its beginning, the hard won result of the labor and instruction pictured around its edges.
A single thangka compressing an entire biography into one image is a specific Tibetan convention, and this circa 1500 example uses it with unusual clarity: a viewer who already knows the story can trace it scene by scene around the border without a caption anywhere on the cloth. That density is exactly what LACMA's own catalogue record preserves, a devotional object built to teach as much as to be venerated.