Milarepa builds the tower.
Milarepa killed thirty-five people with sorcery to avenge his family, then went looking for a teacher who could undo it. Marpa made him build a stone tower single-handed, then tear it down and put the stones back; then build another, and tear that down; four times, until his back was one open sore and he was ready to kill himself. Only then was he taught. He became Tibet's great yogi-poet, and the sequence is told as mercy rather than cruelty.
The Life of Milarepa is the most-read book in Tibet and it opens with the protagonist as a mass murderer: he learns black magic to avenge his family's dispossession and brings a house down on thirty-five people at a wedding. What follows is not forgiveness but work. Marpa refuses to teach him and instead orders towers built and unbuilt with his own hands, four times, driving him to the edge of suicide before relenting. The tradition reads the towers as the karma being burned off rather than waived, and Milarepa's cave years, his cotton robe in the snow, and the hundred thousand songs he left are what the book is actually famous for.
The same ground, other faiths
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