Milarepa’s Towers

A treasured story of mine from the wisdom canon is that of the Tibetan sage Milarepa, who managed to go from a very bad man (a mass-murdering sorcerer, in fact!) to an enlightened being, in a single lifetime, through dint of an incredible series of efforts. An idol for all those who are willing to work hard and have a long way to go.

Here’s my version — Milarepa was ripe for this adventure. He was bright, and, once he’d hit rock bottom, sincere in his efforts to improve his situation. And he had help, and how! His teacher was the famous sage Marpa, the Translator, who put Milarepa through a series of trials that might make Hercules defer.

One of these was setting Milarepa to task at building him towers. These were towers of spiritual significance — think a little chapel with a tall tower. These towers were built in stone, and by Milarepa’s hand.

When Milarepa nearly finished a tower, Marpa would cut in and say “actually, the tower should be over here” — pointing to a far off location in the valley. And Milarepa would start over again, the old tower now just raw stone for the new one.

This happened over and over and over again, until Milarepa only knew how to build towers, and thought nothing of actually finishing.

Once that thought took root in Milarepa’s mind, Marpa let the last tower stand. That final tower, they say, still stands in Tibet.

Feats of spiritual fortitude aside, I find resonance in this story because it enacts something essential about the process of practice — how to do it without being goal oriented, and how to actually get better in the doing.

A part of my creative process involves invoking this as an exercise called, unsurprisingly, “Milarepa’s Towers.” I set a goal (I’m building _this_), and then as soon as I am about to set into the “finishing” stage, I set it aside and use that as fuel for the next version of the tower. Over and over, I tear it down and build it again.

Every iteration gets stronger, fitter, cleaner. The process of the process itself grows more sure. There’s no better way to know a tricky trail than walking it all the time.

I find that I really didn’t understand what it was that I was building at the outset. I allow space for my point of view to evolve, for my skill to sharpen.

Sometimes it takes me ten tries, sometimes hundreds. At some point in the process, the work and the understanding of the work feels mature, and then we move into a finishing stage.

I’ve used this process across domains, including writing, music, and software development. Rapid, focused, iteration. Mental architecture is easier than a real stone tower.

A friend of my mother’s, a master potter, underwent a formal apprenticeship in South East Asia. As he learned the trade, every pot he ever made was smashed after it was fired and appraised by his master. Every single one.

The gift he got at the end of his multi-year apprenticeship was to keep the last piece.

All of this is to say there is something profoundly valuable in the doing of things, something I dare say more valuable than the things themselves.

And, like Milarepa and the potter, the way things are done informs the doing, shapes the product. And the way things are done is encompassed in who you are when you do it.

I was fortunate enough to visit the Rodin museum in Paris many years ago. It featured not only hundreds of Rodin’s magical sculptures, but exhibits of the processes and materials Rodin employed. For a systems nerd like me, this was heaven.

I recall a series of models, _maquettes_, each growing in detail and complexity, from what looked to me like a bunch of pipe cleaners stuck together to a fully cast and realized sculpture.

There it is again! Milarepa’s Towers. Rodin went to all that work, had to go through all that work, to produce such a transcendent piece. All of those intermediate sculptures are present, integrated somehow, in the final work.

This is the creative process, the process of becoming… anything at all. We build, and there are towers, but what are we making of ourselves?