MILAREPA: MAGICIAN, MURDERER, SAINT

Subtitled MAGICIAN, MURDERER, SAINT, MILAREPA is a very discouraging, depressing movie, even for those of us who immersed ourselves in different forms of Buddhism before being set free by the saving grace of Jesus Christ. The movie is like a constant bad memory. It is interesting that the director, who at the age of two was recognized as the reincarnation of the great Tibetan yogi, Chokgyur Lingpa, planned the entire production based on divination, and, as a result, came up with such a lackluster movie.

Set in the 11th Century, MILAREPA tells the story of Tibet’s greatest sorcerer. Milarepa was born into a wealthy family, but when his father dies while Milarepa is still young, his father entrusts the estate to his unscrupulous brother, Milarepa’s uncle. Milarepa and his mother and little sister are forced to live on less than what the dogs get in his uncle’s house.

When Milarepa grows up, his mother invites the villagers to a wine party, where she announces that Milarepa will marry his childhood sweetheart and take control of his family’s estate. The villagers side with the uncle. The mother vows to avenge this injustice. She sends Milarepa into the Himalayas to study with a master sorcerer and that sorcerer sends him to an even more important sorcerer. When Milarepa returns, he sits on a mountain overlooking his village and causes death and destruction to reign down on his enemies. When a few survivors form a militia to kill him, he causes a massive landslide.

Haunted by the sight of the innocent dead, Milarepa hides away in a small Buddhist temple. Eventually, he rejects the animistic occultism of his society for Buddhism.

This movie takes seriously all the folklore that yogis could fly and black magic governs the world. To gain his power, Milarepa builds himself a sweat lodge where he seeks to be demon-possessed and is. It is a very sobering scene. Strangely enough, his sorcery teacher makes one brilliant statement, “I can kill thousands, but I can’t save a man from dying.” The conversation of both the teacher and of the Tibetan Buddhist teacher (whose Tibetan Buddhism accepts some of the occultism of ancient Chinese animism) is that their religion is only good for death and destruction.

The good news is that Jesus Christ came to save each of us from dying. There is an antidote to the demonic possession and black arts of Tibet. Clearly, the filmmaker, being a Tibetan mystic himself, does not understand this, though he has let this line emerge in his movie. Missionaries throughout this region talk about how seriously people in Tibet and other parts of China and Asia use black magic, sometime to the extent of very serious illnesses. They rejoice when they find out Jesus can set them free, just as I rejoiced at the age of 27 when Jesus rescued me from this arcane world that included hobnobbing with some of these mystics, including the Dalai Llama.

This is a depressing world and a depressing movie about a depressing world, but it will certainly be attractive to those who want power to avenge themselves on their enemies, and that includes a lot of fallen people. It is sad this movie is being released in the United States. It is sadder still that it perpetuates the occult folklore and myths of Tibet and it is sadder still that most people are blind to the truth that Milarepa discovers after killing even his beloved in his own village.