Vajrayana

As Tibetan tradition tells it, King Trisong Detsen invited the Indian master Padmasambhava to help found Samye, Tibet's first monastery, in the 8th century. Local spirits were said to hinder the building with storms and tremors. Padmasambhava is remembered as having subdued them one by one, binding each not to destroy it but to guard the teaching instead.

Tradition holds that Padmasambhava and his closest students concealed teachings across Tibet, some in rock and earth, some said to be sealed directly into a disciple's mind, to surface only when a future student was ready to receive them. These hidden teachings are called terma. Finding one is called revealing it, not writing it.

As the tradition tells it, when Milarepa's father died, an aunt and uncle seized the family's property, leaving his mother to beg. At her urging, the young Milarepa studied black magic and used it to bring down the house of the relatives who had wronged them. Remorse over what he had done outlasted the satisfaction of revenge.

Milarepa found the translator Marpa and asked to study with him. As the story is told, Marpa set him to building a stone tower alone, then ordered it torn down and rebuilt, again and again, without explanation. Only later did Marpa reveal the trials as a way of burning off the weight of the deaths Milarepa had caused.

Once trained, Milarepa retreated to caves in the Himalayas for years of solitary meditation, living for long stretches on nothing but boiled nettles. Later tellers say the diet turned his skin green. He emerged from those years as Tibet's best-loved poet-saint, teaching in songs rather than sermons for the rest of his life.

In Vajrayana practice, a student may be given a yidam, a specific deity's form to hold in meditation, in vivid detail, not as an outside god to petition but as a picture of the student's own awakened nature. It is given by a teacher, to a particular student, for a particular reason. It is not taught from a book.

Every practice in this tradition is said to depend on samaya, the bond between a teacher and a student who has been given it directly. Padmasambhava taming a mountain spirit, Milarepa building his tower, a yidam held in meditation: none of it is offered as instruction here. It is offered as a record of what devotion has looked like.