Nine hundred years ago in Tibet, an era when “sorcerers roamed the hills and yogis were seen flying through the sky,” according to a title card that opens “Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint,” a prosperous Tibetan merchant and his wife live a life of ease that is the envy of their relatives and neighbors. But the merchant falls ill and dies and, despite deathbed promises to the contrary, his brother spends the merchant’s fortune as if it were his own.

Unaccustomed to fending for herself, the merchant’s widow, Kargyen (Kelsang Chukie Tethtong) endures beatings and starvation at the hands of her brother and sister-in-law and bides her time until her son Milarepa (Jamyang Lodro) is of age and the family fortune will be returned to her. But when the day arrives, the brother reneges and the people of the mountain village turn their backs on the proud widow and her dutiful son. Kargyen’s considerable capacity for sacrifice hardens into an acute desire to have revenge on her brother and sister-in-law and the villagers whose apathy and scorn have permitted her family to suffer.

The only available instrument Kargyen commands is young Milarepa. “If revenge doesn’t come soon, I will kill myself in your presence,” she vows to her son, leaving him no choice but to accede to mom’s wishes and ride into the mists to learn the dark and destructive ways of sorcery. Under the tutelage of a wizard named Yongten Trogyal (Orgyen Tobgyal), Milarepa discovers that he has a natural affinity for the mystic arts, and his power grows quickly as he trains in a windswept mountaintop fortress. “If you are many, make war; if you are few, cast spells,” Milarepa learns. Sorcery is apparently the provenance of freedom fighters and terrorists. But in spite of his mother’s mania and his own rigorous training, the prodigal son who returns to his hometown with a supernatural ability to level it still has a conscience. The choice whether or not to destroy his uncle and the rest of his mother’s tormenters comes easily, but its aftermath forms a whole new road of trials.

In the interest of preserving a realistic running time and in the hopes of spawning a sequel, “Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint” recounts the origin and redemption of Tibet’s greatest Buddhist mystic only as far as “murderer.” The film marks the directing debut of H.E. Neten Chokling Rinpoche, a 34-year-old reincarnated Buddhist monk (according to the film’s press notes) who caught the movie bug while observing Bernardo Bertolucci and his crew making “Little Buddha” among the Tibetan communities of Northern India.

Mr. Chokling, who also cowrote the film’s script, demonstrates a talent for clear and uncluttered storytelling, and “Milarepa” admirably walks the line between the ancient fable it’s based upon and the low-budget exotic mass-audience entertainment it aspires to be. Shooting on location on the Indian-Tibetan frontier, Mr. Chokling and his director of photography, the National Geographic veteran Paul J. Warren, capture the heady scenery and intimate details of ancient Tibetan village life with the straightforward visual economy of a nature documentary.

The easygoing mythological stroll from the pastoral to the portentous contains a smattering of digital visual effects that evoke Cecil B. DeMille’s vintage showmanship more than state-of-theart Hollywood post-production mayhem. The village’s fate is particularly interestingly rendered with ’50s retro simplicity in muddy shades of aqua and orange, and a mid-film inward journey conjures the kind of Western spiritual ramping-up facilitated by a midnight Laserium Pink Floyd show as much as Eastern divinity.

Despite the story’s necessary preoccupation with the polar extremes of good and evil, Mr. Chokling’s cast, headed by Mr. Lodro and Mr. Tobgyal, stars of 1999’s “The Cup,” keeps the histrionics to a minimum. Mr. Lodro in particular does an admirable job of believably downsizing a larger-than-life role to better resell the old saw about absolute power and its potential for limitless corruption.

“Cease negative actions, cultivate positive actions, and control your mind,” a priest tells Milarepa as he flees a crowd of villagers bent on their own revenge. It’s a line that with a few grammatical modifications could just as easily come out of Yoda’s latex mouth. After decades of being borrowed and diluted for post-Joseph Campbell Hollywood heroic spectacles, “Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint” subordinates Western-style filmmaking to Eastern wisdom, with modest, unforced charm and narrative thrift.