Milarepa (traditionally 1052-1135) is one of the most beloved figures of Tibetan Buddhism, a yogi and poet whose life story is among the most widely read of all Tibetan works. As his celebrated biography tells it, he began in darkness: to avenge his family's mistreatment at the hands of relatives he learned black magic and killed a number of people, and the rest of his life became the working-out of that karmic debt.
Seeking liberation, he came to the translator-teacher Marpa, who put him through years of harsh trials, most famously making him build and demolish stone towers again and again, before at last granting him the teachings he sought. The version of Milarepa's life most widely read today, in Tibetan and in translation, was not written by a contemporary but composed by the Tibetan yogi and biographer Tsangnyon Heruka, who completed his Life of Milarepa in 1488, roughly three and a half centuries after Milarepa's own death, and who was also the first to compile and print the associated Hundred Thousand Songs; the vivid, novelistic detail of the received story, including the towers Marpa ordered built and demolished, is therefore the work of a fifteenth century hagiographer working from and reshaping earlier oral and written material, not a contemporary record.