Tibetan biographers began writing Jetsun Milarepa s 1052 1135 life story shortly after his death initiating a literary tradition that turned the poet and saint into a model of virtuosic Buddhist practice throughout the Himalayan world Andrew Quintman traces this history and its innovations in narrative and aesthetic representation across four centuries culminating in a detailed analysis of the genre s most famous example composed in 1488 by Tsangnyon Heruka or the Madman of Western Tibet Quintman imagines these works as a kind of physical body supplanting the yogin s corporeal relics