The Secret of Reviving the Dead

The sages told the Pandavas of an old contest between the gods and the demons that was decided not by arms but by a single piece of forbidden knowledge, and of the devoted young man who risked death many times over to win it.

In those days the gods, the devas, and the demons, the asuras, were locked in endless war, and the demons held a decisive advantage. Their preceptor was the great sage Shukracharya, wisest of teachers, and Shukra alone in all the worlds possessed the mrita-sanjivani vidya - the science of bringing the dead back to life. Whenever an asura warrior fell in battle, Shukra would revive him, whole and living, to fight again. But the gods had no such art, and their slain stayed dead. So however many demons the gods killed, the demons rose again, while the gods' own ranks only dwindled. The war was being lost, not for lack of valor, but for lack of that one secret.

The gods saw that they could never win until they too possessed the science of reviving the dead. And they devised a plan to steal it - not by force, which had failed, but by sending one of their own to learn it from Shukra himself.