Tea with the demon

Milarepa comes home to a cave full of demons and tries everything, in the wrong order.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-08-22 · Nondual

Chapter 09 of 12 in The masters were funny

Milarepa comes back to his cave and it is full of demons. He does the sensible things first. He is polite. He teaches them. He gets angry and threatens them. Nothing works, and the biggest one is still sitting there. Finally he gives up, sits down among them and says something like, since you are here, we may as well live together, and the ones that are left dissolve. In some tellings the last stubborn demon only goes when Milarepa puts his head into its mouth.

The story comes out of the Tibetan hagiography, which is a genre with flying yogis in it, so take the demons how you like. The sequence is what matters, because the sequence is a joke at the expense of every technique.

Politeness fails. Instruction fails. Force fails. What ends it is the one move that is not a move: he stops requiring them to leave.

Anyone who has tried to meditate knows the whole arc in miniature. You sit down. There is anxiety about a shipment. You are nice to it, you note it kindly. It stays. You explain to it, at length, that worrying will not load the truck. It stays. You get stern and try to push it out. Now it is anxiety plus a fight. Then some afternoon you are too tired to run the programme, you let it sit there, and twenty minutes later you notice it left without telling you.

The head in the mouth is the part I cannot demonstrate and do not want to soften. It is not acceptance as a technique, which is just force wearing a nicer coat, and the demons can tell. It is the difference between putting up with something and no longer standing apart from it.

And the honest limit: this is a story about a yogi and some demons in a cave, not a treatment plan. Some things in a life need a doctor, a lawyer, or a different job, and reading them as demons to be sat with is how people stay in bad situations for years. Milarepa's demons were in his cave. Yours might be in your building.