Milarepa, one of the most revered bodhisattvas in Tibetan Buddhism, did not have the most conventional path to enlightenment. He is presented as a Tibetan Buddha, a homegrown enlightened being who received no direct instruction from Indian masters and who never even visited India. As recounted in the biography The Life of Milarepa, by the Fifteenth Century AD scholar Tsangnyon Heruka, Milarepa was born into a wealthy and prominent family. However, when his father died unexpectedly, the family were deprived of their wealth and position by his uncle and aunt. At the behest of his mother, Milarepa left home to learn sorcery, with the intention of wreaking revenge on his relatives, and on society at large. Whatever the success of his training, Milarepa became Tibet’s first and most notorious serial killer, Milarepa was never caught, but he felt sorrow for his misdeeds, and turned to a Buddhist teacher Marpa the Translator for guidance. Marpa encouraged penance through self-abuse and trials, including single-handedly building and demolishing three great towers of stone and clay. Finally, Marpa instructed him to build a final tower, nine stories high; reputedly, this tower still stands, and forms the centre of the Sekhar Gutok monastery at Lhodrak. His negative karma thus realigned, Milarepa left to engage in meditation in caves, eventually achieving a great experiential realisation about the nature of reality unknown even to his teacher Marpa. Thereafter, Milarepa lived as a yogi, dispensing his wisdom to various disciples, and writing an important corpus of poetry, collected in English as The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa.

The incredible life of Milarepa, an extraordinary story of redemption which shows that, in the Buddhist tradition at least, even murderers can be rehabilitated, is commemorated to this day among Tibetan Buddhists. He remains a popular object of veneration, and of a considerable body of art. This exceptional gilt bronze depicts Milarepa in his immediately recognisable pose. Whereas many Sino-Tibetan figures adopt significant features from Indian artistic forms, images of Milarepa follow a largely native Tibetan style. Instead of being seated on a double lotus throne (padmāsana), he is depicted sat on a simplified low-profile platform, on which lays the skin of a shou, the Tibetan red deer (Cervus canadensis wallichi). Seated in the ‘royal ease’ pose (lalitasana), with one leg bent in front of him, and the other with the knee raised. His lithe, athletic, body is partially hidden under a thin cotton garment, in this case richly decorated with foliate tendrils, in reference to the meaning of his name, Milarepa (‘cotton-clad’). One hand rests in his lap, and holds an alms bowl. Since the Gautama Buddha relied on the goodwill of a woman named Sujatta for alms of milk and rice before his final enlightenment, Tibetan Buddhist monks also lived off the kindness of strangers. Some of these bowls, known as rin chen thod pa, were made out of human skulls (e.g. Horniman Museum nn4431). Milarepa’s right hand is raised to his ear, which he cups, in a pose often associated with singers in Himalayan and Indian art. It is hypothesised that he is listening to the vajra songs he is singing, or to the rhythms of nature, or to the whispered teachings of the Gautama Buddha. Alternatively, there is a tradition in which his pose is deliberately ambiguous, that the subject of his listening is a secret. Milarepa is depicted with an intense expression of concentration. His ears are stretched by heavy hooped earrings, and his hair is picked out in copper inlay. Unlike many Indian-inspired bodhisattvas, he is not represented with the usnisha, a prominent cranial bump or topknot which signifies wisdom, and instead is depicted with the refined flat hairstyle of a Tibetan peasant.

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries AD were a time of flourishing for Tibetan arts. While Tibet was occupied by the Chinese Qing Dynasty, and the Emperors installed ministers resident (amban) in Lhasa, the practicalities of governing this isolated mountain kingdom ensured that the Tibetans were given considerable latitude to conduct their own affairs. Indeed, the Tibetans did not even consider themselves conquered; instead, the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, maintained his control of the theocratic Ganden Phodrang governmental system, and the Tibetans thought of the Qing Emperor as a patron of the existing system. The Qing were active in promoting Gelug, the main Tibetan school of Buddhism, and indeed Emperor Yongzheng forcibly converted members of the other three Tibetan schools to Gelug. Items of Buddhist devotion were encouraged, and Tibet’s native art-forms, most especially metalworking, were enabled to flourish.