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 I take the demons loosely. The sequence is a joke at the expense of every technique. What ends it is that he stops requiring them to leave.

Sitting down to meditate runs the same arc in miniature. There is anxiety about a shipment. I am nice to it, I note it kindly. It stays. I explain to it, at length, that worrying will not load the truck. It stays. I get stern and try to push it out. Now it is anxiety plus a fight. Then some afternoon I am too tired to run the programme, I let it sit there, and twenty minutes later it has left without telling me.

I cannot demonstrate the head in the mouth and I do not want to soften it. Acceptance used as a technique is force wearing a nicer coat, and the demons can tell. Putting up with something is one thing. No longer standing apart from it is another.

The limit is that this is a story about a yogi and some demons in a cave, and it is not a treatment plan. Some things in a life need a doctor 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. Some people's are in their building.