Mrityu Bodha: Facing Fear and Death

Befriending what everyone flees

On the morning his life is supposed to end, the sixteen-year-old Markandeya wraps his arms around a Shivalinga and refuses to let go. Yama's noose falls around the Linga too, and Shiva rises. The lesson reads this not only as a story of rescue but as the Shiva Purana's direct teaching on how to meet the fear of death.

The Boy Who Hugged the Stone

In the small hermitage of the sage Mrikandu, on the bank of a forest stream somewhere in central India, sometime in the long mythic time the Puranas use, a boy named Markandeya is sitting at the family Shivalinga. He is sixteen years old. The stone is dark, slightly damp from the morning's abhisheka, and small enough that his arms can reach all the way around it. He is reciting Om Namah Shivaya with his eyes closed.

It is the day the boy was told, since his birth, that he would die. Mrikandu and his wife Marudvati had asked Shiva for a son and had been given a choice: a brilliant son who would live only sixteen years, or a dull son who would live a hundred. They chose the brilliant son. Today, the sixteen years end.

The boy knows this. He has been told. He is, this morning, doing the only thing the family tradition has ever asked him to do. He is sitting at the linga and chanting the five-syllable mantra his father taught him.

A shadow falls across the courtyard. Yama, the god of death, is standing at the gate. He is dark-skinned, holds a small noose in one hand, and rides a black buffalo that snorts quietly behind him. He is patient. He is doing his job.

Markandeya does not look up. He tightens his arms around the stone. He keeps chanting.

Yama steps forward. He raises his noose. He throws.

The noose lands not on the boy but on the linga he is hugging. The stone, the boy, and the noose are now wrapped together. And then, in the most famous moment in the entire Shaiva canon of stories about death, the linga splits open.