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Skandha 12, adhyayas 8-10 · Saptah day 7
A sage asks to see the Lord's maya, is swept into a flood that drowns the worlds, and finds a child asleep on a banyan leaf.
The sage Shaunaka raises a problem with this story before Suta tells it. Markandeya is said to have lived on through a dissolution of the worlds, and to have seen the Lord in it as a child lying on a banyan leaf. But Markandeya was born in our own family line, Shaunaka says, in this very cycle of creation, and no dissolution has happened in this cycle. How can both be true?
Suta answers by telling the whole story. Markandeya was the son of the sage Mrikandu. After his sacred thread was given, he studied the Veda and took a vow of lifelong celibacy, living with matted hair and clothes of bark, carrying a staff and a waterpot, and worshipping the Lord morning and evening. He lived this way for a span of time so long that the Bhagavatam measures it in the reigns of Manus.
His austerity alarmed Indra, who sent Kama, the god of desire, to his hermitage in the Himalaya with celestial dancers and singers, the spring season and a fragrant breeze. The dancers danced and Kama aimed his arrow, and the sage did not stir. The visitors felt the heat of his austerity and withdrew. Then the twin sages Nara and Narayana appeared before him. Markandeya worshipped them and sang their praise, and they offered him any boon he wished.
He said that having seen them he needed nothing. Still, he asked one thing: to see their maya, the power by which the whole world, with the gods who guard it, sees many things where there is one reality. The two sages smiled, said that it would be so, and left for Badarikashrama.
One evening, as he sat in worship by the river near his hermitage, a fierce wind rose. Dark clouds gathered and rain fell in streams as thick as cart axles. The oceans rose on every side and swallowed the earth, and Markandeya saw every living thing drowned. He alone was left, wandering in the waters, blind in the darkness, deaf in the roar, tormented by hunger and thirst, by waves and sea monsters, by fear and grief, for what seemed like ages.
Then he saw a banyan tree standing in the flood, and on one of its leaves lay an infant, dark and shining, so beautiful that Markandeya's exhaustion fell away at the sight. He came near, and as the child breathed in, the sage was drawn inside him like a mosquito. Within the child's body he saw the whole universe as it had been before the flood: sky and stars, mountains, oceans and continents, rivers, cities and villages, gods and demons, the ages of time. He saw his own hermitage there, and the river beside it, and himself.
The child breathed out, and Markandeya fell back into the waters of dissolution. He saw the infant again on the leaf, smiling at him with a loving glance, and he moved to embrace him. At that moment the child vanished, and with him the tree and the flood, and Markandeya was sitting in his own hermitage, just as before.
That last line is the text's answer to Shaunaka. No dissolution had passed over the world. The sage had asked to see the Lord's maya, and he was shown it: a flood that lasted ages in his own experience and left his hermitage untouched.
Some time later Shiva and Parvati, passing overhead on their bull, saw Markandeya sitting in deep meditation. Parvati asked Shiva to grant him a boon. Shiva told her the sage wanted nothing at all, not even liberation, because he had found supreme devotion to the Lord. Still, he said, they should speak with him, because meeting such a person is itself the highest gain. Shiva entered the sage's heart, and Markandeya, seeing him there, came out of his meditation and worshipped them both. Pressed to choose a boon, he asked for steady devotion to the Lord, to the Lord's devotees, and to Shiva. Shiva granted it, and added more: fame, freedom from old age and death until the end of the cycle, knowledge of past, present and future, and the role of a teacher of the Puranas.
The story stands near the end of the Bhagavatam for a reason. The book has described dissolution many times as cosmology, in vast numbers and ordered stages. Here it shows dissolution through one man's eyes, as terror and exhaustion, and puts at its centre a child holding the whole world inside him.
नामसङ्कीर्तनं यस्य सर्वपापप्रणाशनम् । प्रणामो दुःखशमनस्तं नमामि हरिं परम् ॥I bow to Hari, the Supreme, the singing of whose name destroys all sin, and bowing to whom ends all sorrow.
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