Abundant Life

"Deathless" (amata) is another word for abundant life. If we think of Mara as death (the words amata and amara are both rooted in the Vedic mr = death), then to no longer be constrained by his armies is to be freed to live fully. Gotama does not think of the deathless as immortality—as the term is understood in Brahmanism—but as the positive absence of reactivity. Perhaps he is playing on the mythic sense of amata (like the Sanskrit amrta and its Greek cognate ambrosia) as the divine nectar that grants eternal life.

---Stephen Batchelor, in after buddhism---