Markandeya -- The Sage Who Conquered Death

The sage Mrikandu and his wife longed for a son and prayed to Shiva. In the version told across Shaiva tradition, Shiva offered them a choice: a son who would be wise and devoted but live only sixteen years, or one who would live long and be dull and unworthy. They chose the short-lived, devoted son, and named him Markandeya.

The boy grew up learned and gentle, and devoted above all to Shiva. As his sixteenth year drew to a close and his parents' grief grew, he went to worship at a Shiva linga. When the messengers of Yama, the god of death, came for him, they could not approach him. So Yama came himself and cast his noose -- and the boy threw his arms around the linga, so that the noose fell over both. Shiva burst out of the linga in fury, struck Yama down and declared that his devotee would remain sixteen for ever. For this Shiva is called Kalantaka or Kalari, "the ender of Death".

This is why Markandeya is linked with the Mahamrityunjaya mantra, the Rigvedic prayer to the three-eyed one to free us "from death, not from immortality". Many devotees recite it, and the stotras attributed to Markandeya, for protection in illness and danger. The boy who held on to the linga became the image of what devotion can do against the one thing no one escapes.

The Bhagavata Purana tells a different and quieter story about the same sage, in the twelfth book. There Markandeya, after his sacred thread ceremony, devotes himself to austerity and worship of Hari for an immense span of time, and by it "conquers death, so very hard to conquer".

The sages Nara and Narayana appear to him and offer a boon. Markandeya asks only to see the Lord's maya, the power by which the world appears. His wish is granted terribly. One evening, as he sits in worship, a storm rises, the oceans overflow and the whole world is drowned; for what feels like ages he is tossed in the dark water, starving, afraid, alone in a dissolved universe. Then he sees a banyan tree standing in the flood, and on one of its leaves, a radiant infant lying in the curl of the leaf, sucking its toe.

As Markandeya approaches, he is drawn into the child's body with its breath -- and inside finds the entire world again, mountains, rivers, cities, and his own hermitage. Breathed out again, he finds himself back in the flood, and then back in his hermitage, as if nothing had happened. The image of the infant on the banyan leaf, Vatapatrashayi or Balamukunda, became one of the best-loved images of Krishna. And in the next chapter Shiva and Parvati themselves visit Markandeya and grant him boons, so that the Bhagavata, too, ends the story with both Vishnu and Shiva blessing the same sage.

Markandeya is also the narrator of a whole Purana, the Markandeya Purana, which contains the Devi Mahatmya -- the seven hundred verses on the Goddess also known as the Durga Saptashati. So one sage connects the three great streams of Hindu devotion: Shiva, who saved him from death; Vishnu, whose child-form he saw on the banyan leaf; and the Goddess, whose glory he tells. That may be the deepest point of his story. The one who has truly escaped death no longer sees walls between the forms of God.