The Child on the Cosmic Waters

Among all the sages who visited the Pandavas in their forest exile, none was so wonderful as Markandeya. For Markandeya was deathless. Ages of the world had risen and fallen while he lived on, unaging, and he had seen things that no other living being had ever seen. As he sat with them one evening, Yudhishthira looked at the ancient, ageless sage and asked the question that was in all their hearts.

"Holy one," he said, "you have outlived the destruction of the world itself and live on into a new creation. You are older than the mountains and the seas as we know them. Tell us - what have you seen? You who have watched the universe dissolve and be born again, what is the greatest wonder you have beheld in all your endless years?"

Markandeya was silent a while, his eyes turned inward upon depths of memory no other could follow. Then he said, "I will tell you of the one thing I have seen that is greater than all the rest - the thing I saw when the whole world had ended and there was nothing left but a shoreless sea, and I alone was left awake in all of creation. Listen, son of Pandu, and I will tell you of the dissolution of the world, and of the child I found floating upon the cosmic waters."

"You must understand," said Markandeya, "that the world does not endure forever. It moves through great ages, the yugas, turning from a golden age of truth down through slow decline to a final age of darkness, when dharma stands upon a single foot, when truth and virtue have all but vanished from the earth, when men are short-lived and greedy and cruel, and the whole order of things wears thin.

"And when that last dark age has run its course, and the world is utterly exhausted and steeped in unrighteousness, the time comes for the dissolution - the pralaya, the unmaking of all things. The whole vast creation, which seems to us so solid and so lasting, is folded up and dissolved back into the formless deep from which it came, so that it may in time be made anew. This has happened more times than can be counted, and it will happen again. I am telling you not of a thing I was told, but of a thing I lived through and saw with my own eyes, for by a strange grace I was kept alive and awake through the ending of a world."

The brothers listened in awe, for they were hearing the testimony of one who had watched the universe die.

"When the appointed end came," Markandeya went on, "first there was the fire. A terrible drought gripped the world for years on end, until every river and lake and sea was dried up and the earth lay cracked and dead. Then the sun blazed with the heat of many suns, and a great fire arose and swept across all the worlds, burning the mountains and the forests and the cities and the heavens themselves, consuming everything that had ever been made, until all of creation was reduced to ash and naked, smoking ground.

"And when the fire had devoured everything, then came the waters. Great clouds gathered, vast as mountains, dark and terrible, and they poured down rain without end - sheets and torrents and oceans of rain - flooding the burnt and broken world, rising and rising, swallowing the ruined mountains and the scorched plains, until at last there was no land anywhere, no sky to be seen, no direction, no high or low. There was nothing in all the universe but one boundless, shoreless, silent expanse of water, dark and still, stretching without edge in every direction. Every creature, every god, every world had been dissolved away. Creation had returned to the formless deep."

"And in all that endless ocean," said Markandeya, "I alone remained. By the will of the Supreme I had not been dissolved with the rest; I was left awake and conscious and alive, the single surviving thing in a universe that had ended. I wandered over those waters, with no boat and no shore, no sun or moon or star to guide me, no living thing to speak to, no place to rest. There was only the dark water under me and the empty dark above, on and on without end.

"I cannot tell you the loneliness of it. I drifted for a length of time that has no measure, weary beyond weariness, frightened and bewildered, searching for any solid thing, any sign that creation might exist again, and finding nothing but more water. My strength failed; my hope failed; I felt I would wander that drowned and silent eternity forever, the last awareness in a dead universe, and I despaired."

The Pandavas scarcely breathed, imagining the deathless sage adrift and alone upon the waters where a world had been.

"Then," said Markandeya, and his ancient face lit with the memory, "at last I saw something. Far off upon the waters there rose a great tree - a vast and spreading banyan, lordly and beautiful, standing impossibly upon the surface of the shoreless sea. I made my weary way toward it, and as I came near I saw, cradled in the fork of one of its broad branches, a couch of soft leaves; and upon that couch lay a child.

"It was a little boy, an infant, lovely beyond all telling, his skin the deep blue of a storm cloud, glowing with a soft and gentle light that fell upon the dark waters all around. He lay there in perfect peace in the midst of the drowned and ended universe, alone and unafraid, radiant, as though the dissolution of all worlds were no more to him than a quiet afternoon. The sight bewildered me utterly. How could a newborn child be here, where everything that ever was had been destroyed? How could anything live upon these waters but myself? And why did the sight of him fill my heart, so long frozen in dread, with a sudden and overwhelming peace?"

"As I stood marveling," Markandeya continued, "the divine child opened his eyes and looked upon me, and he spoke - and his voice was soft and sweet, yet it filled the whole of that empty universe.

"'I know you are weary, Markandeya,' the child said, calling me by my name, though I had told it to no one in that dead world. 'You have wandered long upon these waters and you are tired and afraid. Come, rest. Enter into my body and dwell there awhile, and be at peace.'

"I, an aged sage who had lived through ages of the world, stood astonished to be addressed so by an infant - and more astonished that he should bid me enter his small body. But there was an authority in that gentle voice that I could not resist, and a love in it that drew me. And then, before I could even resolve to obey, the child opened his mouth, and a breath drew me in, and I was swept inside the body of the radiant infant floating on the cosmic sea."

"And what I saw within that child," said Markandeya, his voice dropping in wonder, "I have no words equal to. For inside the body of the infant I found the entire universe - the whole of creation that had just been destroyed, living and whole again.

"I beheld the earth with all its mountains and forests; I saw the great rivers - the Ganga and the Yamuna and all the rest - flowing in their courses; I saw the oceans and the cities and the kingdoms; I saw the sun and the moon and the host of stars; I saw the heavens of the gods and the underworlds of the serpents; I saw all the peoples of the world going about their lives, the four ages turning, the whole shining machinery of creation, complete and entire, contained within the small body of a child. I wandered through this inner cosmos for what felt like a hundred years, walking its roads and gazing upon its wonders, and I could not come to the end of it, for it was as boundless within the child as the universe is without.

"At last, still bewildered, I was carried by another breath up and out through the child's mouth, and I found myself once more outside, on the branch of the banyan, on the shoreless sea, with the radiant infant before me as before - and I understood that I had seen the whole of creation held within a single divine being as easily as a man holds a thought."

"Then the child revealed to me who he was," said Markandeya. "'I am Narayana,' he said - the Supreme, the imperishable, the source and the end of all things. 'I am the one who remains when all else is dissolved, and the one from whom all things arise again. The worlds are made within me and unmade within me; the gods themselves, Brahma who creates and the powers who govern, arise from me and return to me. When the dissolution comes and everything is folded away, it is folded into me, and it rests in me as you have just seen it rest, and when the time is right I send it forth again. I am beyond the dissolution and beyond death; I have no beginning and no end. You have been kept alive through the ending of the world, Markandeya, so that you might see this and know it, and tell it to others who can bear to hear it.'

"And I understood at last the meaning of my long deathlessness: that I had been preserved to witness the one truth that stands beneath all the rising and falling of the ages - that behind the endless making and unmaking of the world there is an imperishable ground that is never touched by the destruction, a divine reality in which the whole universe sleeps and wakes. Then the waters began to stir, and creation began anew, and the world that you and I now live in was born again out of that child upon the sea."

Markandeya fell silent, and the forest around the Pandavas seemed very quiet, as though it too had heard. Then he turned his ageless eyes upon them.

"That, son of Pandu, is the greatest wonder I have seen: the whole universe destroyed and yet preserved, held safe within a divine child floating upon the waters of the end. I tell it to you because of what it teaches. The world you cling to - your kingdom, your losses, your enemies, your exile, all the things that seem so solid and so final - all of it is passing. It has been made and unmade countless times and will be again. Even the mountains and the seas are not forever. Do not be crushed by the sorrows of a world that is itself a passing thing.

"But beneath all that perishes there is one that does not perish, the imperishable ground in which all things rest. Hold to that, and to the dharma that flows from it, and no turning of the ages can truly harm you. Your present grief, too, will pass, as everything passes, and the same divine order that breathes out the universe after its destruction will not abandon the righteous in their season of darkness."

And the Pandavas were comforted and made thoughtful, for they had been given, by one who had seen it, a glimpse of the eternal beneath the ruin of all passing things.