Welcome, Mystery. Sit down and tell me about you.

This practise of generating compassion and having loving kindness is said to be the best protection against demons. Milarepa was meditating in a cave in Tibet. In the sky before him he saw a cloud coming and from this cloud came the appearance of his teacher Lord Marpa and on seeing the appearance of his teacher Lord Marpa he became very happy and supplicated to Marpa for his blessing.

After this vision of Marpa he went off to collect some wood and generally, when he was collecting wood, he would put it in the bottom of his robes. Because of having done this over a long period of time a lot of tears had appeared in his clothes. Whilst walking along with the wood all of a sudden a big wind came up and almost blew the wood out of his hand, so he held on tightly to the wood. The wind blew again and almost blew the cloth away, so he held more tightly to the cloth.

Milarepa thought I have been meditating in a cave on ego-clinging and I still have a little bit of clinging and right at this moment I'm clinging to the wood and so he just let it all drop down. As Milarepa climbed up to his cave the wind became less. When he entered the cave to his surprise there were seven beings there and their bodies were the size of a thumb and they had very big heads, and their eyes were half the size of their heads and they had very long beards and large noses and they were sitting in the cave.

They ran all over the cave and one was sitting in Milarepa 's chair and looking through the pages of the texts, one was in the corner of the cave giving the appearance of teaching the Dharma and one was sitting there listening to him. The other couple were running around making noises, looking at Milarepa and making funny faces at him. Milarepa thought , oh there are a lot of them, and he was a little frightened. he thought he had better do something and he prayed to the Buddha, but as he prayed nothing really happened there wasn't much benefit because they were still there making their clucking noises at Milarepa, making faces at him and frowning.

Then he thought I better try something else so he visualised himself as a wrathful deity and said wrathful mantras, he said Hung Hung Peh Peh and became a wrathful deity, but the demons multiplied and became more. They became so many they were jumping around and the cave became full of these demon creatures.

Milarepa thought, what I can do, what method can I apply here. The idea occurred to him that maybe these creatures were apparitions from the local deity. Maybe I have been here such a long time and haven't made any prayers to the local deity maybe it is upset with me. So he made some nice offerings of wood and sang a song of praise to the local deity saying how nice he was and praising him and what happened was two of the demons disappeared but the others were just as made and crazy as before running around all over the cave.

Then Milarepa thought nothing I do seems to help. Then he generated compassion for these beings who did not know the nature of emptiness; they don't know this truth or how to cause benefit for sentient beings. All they can do is cause harm and because of this continuously causing harm to beings they are sowing the seeds of a rebirth in hell. He had great compassion arise in him and he sang another song. Milarepa said in this song everything is fine, whatever you want you can have it, if you want to eat my flesh you can eat it, if you want to drink my blood you can drink it. Anything you do to me is fine.

He asked them stay in his house and said he would talk to them. Milarepa sang this song from the doorway of the cave whilst the creatures were running around inside. Milarepa then vanished from the doorway and re-appeared inside the cave. One of the creatures was there shaking and making a lot of noise and the other demons were running around but one by one they dissolved into him and he became very large.

Finally the last big remaining demon ran out of the cave.

They were not able to harm Milarepa, what was the reason for this?

It was because he generated this great compassion. Before Milarepa did not have compassion for them and he had gotten a little bit annoyed with them and they multiplied, but when he generated the compassion they all run off.