ABSTRACT
Tsangnyön Heruka’s (1452-1507) The Life of Milarepa has proved to be the most accessible work of Tibetan literature for other cultures. As early as the 1920s it was translated into English1 and French.2 It has so far inspired an Italian movie,3 a comic-strip book,4 a novelisation5 and a French play.6 Milarepa even served as a recondite ingredient for Iris Murdoch’s Booker Prize winning novel The Sea, the Sea in 1978, in which the narrator searches in vain amongst Italian poets to find the songs of ‘Milarepa’, while the reader is tacitly assumed to know the identity of this ‘poet’.7 This Tibetan classic has also, inevitably, been the subject of doctoral theses.8
