When writing a post about my Hugo experiences, I came across this issue of Hugo wanting to parse a shortcode in my examples. This one just about drove me insane, but I found the answer here, and thought I should document it for myself and any other Hugo/Markdown noob that comes across this issue. I tried to escape the code \ and even tried to use HTML entity code { and } for the curly braces. The solution, however, is to comment it out:

{{</* shortcode */>}}

Which will be render like this:

{{< shortcode >}}

Using comment syntax allows me to display the shortcode. It effectively treats the shortcode as a comment, so it is not executed or interpreted by Hugo.