Arjuna

On the field of Kurukshetra, with two armies drawn up along a front longer than a man could see, the finest archer his age had ever trained let his bow slip from his hands. His mouth had gone dry. His limbs shook so badly that his own skin seemed to be crawling. Gandiva, the great bow that had never once betrayed him, would not stay in his fingers, and he sank down onto the floor of his own chariot because his knees would no longer hold him upright. He told his charioteer, who happened to be his oldest friend and, though he did not yet fully grasp it, God Himself standing in human form and holding the reins, that he could not do this. He would rather be cut down unarmed by his own cousins than kill teachers and grandfathers and kinsmen for a kingdom he no longer wanted. It is one of the strange mercies of Arjuna's story that the man remembered across three thousand years for receiving the deepest teaching ever spoken did not receive it in a moment of strength. He received it collapsed, weeping, and undone. Before he became the disciple who held the Bhagavad Gita in his hands, he had to become the friend who hid nothing, not even his own terror, from the One sitting beside him.

He was born the third of Kunti's sons, in years when the house of Kuru waited anxiously for an heir, and tradition remembers his father not as the ailing king Pandu who raised him but as Indra, lord of the gods, invoked by the mantra Kunti had been given as a girl. Yet the devotional tradition that shaped the Bhaktamal looks past even that lineage toward a stranger and older claim. Arjuna, this tradition holds, was Nara come again into the world: one half of the ancient rishi pair Nara-Narayana, who had performed tapasya together at Badarikashram in the high Himalaya for ages beyond counting, one of them always human, the other always divine, inseparable through every age. Krishna, in this reading, was not merely a cousin and a friend. He was Narayana returning to finish, birth after birth, a single unbroken conversation with the one soul who had chosen, life after life, to walk beside Him rather than above Him. Everything that follows, the wars won, the years lost to grief and exile, the moment the bow is finally set down on the very field it was forged to be used on, unfolds inside that older, deeper friendship.

When their teacher Dronacharya wanted to know which of his royal pupils, Kaurava and Pandava alike, had actually learned anything from him, he set a wooden bird on a distant branch and called the princes forward one at a time. Look carefully, he told each of them, and tell me exactly what you see. Yudhishthira, eldest and most honest of the brothers, answered that he saw the tree, the sky, his teacher, his brothers, and the bird. Duryodhana gave some version of the same crowded answer. Bhima, Nakula, and Sahadeva, one after another, described a world still full of everything else. When Arjuna's turn came, Drona put the same question to him, and Arjuna said only: I see the bird's eye. Nothing else. Drona pressed him, are you certain you see nothing of the branch, the leaves, the bird's body? Arjuna said there was nothing else to see, that in that moment the eye was the only thing that existed for him at all. He loosed the arrow and split it clean through. The other students had learned archery that day. Arjuna alone had learned what it costs to gather a wandering mind into a single point and hold it there without wavering, and it was this same faculty, what the tradition calls ekagrata, that would one day let him sit in a stopped chariot between two armies and actually hear what his friend had come to teach him.

Years later, a guest in Krishna's own city of Dwaraka, Arjuna went up to a festival on Mount Raivataka and saw, among the crowd, a young woman whose beauty undid him where he stood. She was Subhadra, Krishna's own sister. From that hour something in him would not settle. The Bhaktamal describes it without any ornament at all: restlessness and agitation pervaded every fiber of his being, and his fickle heart could find no comfort even as an honored guest in another's household, because a guest's courtyard, however kindly offered, is never quite one's own. He could not eat properly. His voice broke whenever he tried to speak of ordinary things. His eyes filled with tears he did not trouble to hide, and those who noticed thought a man so drowned in love looked half out of his senses.

He did not carry this to a minister or a priest, not even to his own brothers. He carried it straight to Krishna and told Him everything, unguarded and unedited, ashamed of none of it. This, the old commentators insist, is the real teaching folded inside a love story: what veil can there be before a true friend, what concealment before one's own beloved. The heart lays everything bare before Hari, and He takes away both its gladness and its grief in the very taking. Krishna did not lecture him. He arranged things. Since there was old friction between the two families, and a formal proposal risked refusal from Subhadra's elder brother Balarama, Krishna counseled Arjuna to take her instead, with Subhadra's own willing heart and Yudhishthira's quiet blessing, as she rode home from the festival. Arjuna did exactly that, lifting her onto his chariot before the whole clan's eyes, and Balarama's fury cooled only once Krishna had explained, without a trace of apology, that the two had wanted each other long before either had said so aloud. What lingers from this episode is not the elopement itself but a smaller, stranger detail the commentators loved to repeat afterward: that Krishna would simply walk into Arjuna and Subhadra's rooms unannounced, without warning or ceremony, the way one walks into one's own home. Let sakhya, friendship, be like this, the tilak exclaims, let love be like this, let there be such trust and such certainty between two hearts. It does not know whether to praise the devotee more, or the Lord's tenderness toward him, or that queen of every love, prema-bhakti, for making such ease possible between the created and the Creator.

Not long after, Arjuna traveled in disguise, dressed as a wandering Brahmin, to the swayamvara of the Panchala princess Draupadi, where suitors were asked to string an impossibly stiff bow and pierce a revolving target by its reflection alone, in a bowl of oil or water set on the ground below. Kings and warriors who had come from every direction failed, one after another, some unable even to lift the bow. Arjuna strung it as though it weighed nothing, found the target's reflection, and put his arrow through it without a tremor, to the outrage of royalty who could not believe an unknown Brahmin had bested them all. It was in that same friendship, later, that he received the weapons he would carry for the rest of his life. When Krishna wished to help the fire god Agni, whose appetite had been weakened by illness, consume the whole Khandava forest in a single feast, Arjuna stood at his side as Agni's instrument, holding back the rain god Indra, his own father, with an unbroken wall of arrows so the fire could finish what it had begun. In gratitude, Agni gave him the bow Gandiva, two quivers that never ran empty, and a chariot yoked to white horses and marked with the very banner that would later carry Hanuman into legend. Krishna received the discus Sudarshana from that same fire. Two friends walked away from a burning forest carrying, between them, most of what the coming war would ask of them.

That war drew closer during the Pandavas' thirteen years of exile, when Arjuna left his brothers to win from the gods weapons no human hand could otherwise obtain. He climbed into the high Himalaya and began a penance so fierce it drove the mountain's own creatures away from him. Shiva decided to test what the austerity had actually made of him. Taking the rough shape of a Kirata, a mountain hunter, with Parvati beside him disguised as the hunter's wife, the god picked a quarrel over a wild boar both he and Arjuna had struck at nearly the same instant. Arjuna, recognizing nothing but an insolent forester trespassing on his hunting ground, loosed arrow after arrow until his quiver stood empty, and the hunter walked through every one of them unharmed. He broke his bow across the stranger's shoulders. It did nothing. He drew his sword. It shattered in his hand. Finally, with no weapon left in the world, he threw himself bare-handed at the hunter and grappled with him as an equal, refusing to yield even as he was ground into the mountain rock. Only when he had nothing left to fight with, and still would not stop, did the disguise fall away, and he found himself in the actual arms of Mahadeva. Shiva laughed, blessed his stubbornness, and gave him the Pashupatastra, the one weapon in all creation capable of ending it. What the exhausted archer had actually been wrestling with, without knowing it, was grace itself, refusing to arrive by any easier road than the one he had already chosen.

From there Indra carried his son up into the heaven of the gods to learn celestial weapons the earth had no names for. It was in that court that the apsara Urvashi, offended when Arjuna refused her because he honored her as an ancestress of his own line rather than as a lover, cursed him to lose his manhood, a curse Indra later softened into a single year still owed on the exile. Arjuna spent that year at the court of King Virata as Brihannala, teacher of song and dance to the princess Uttara, his bow hidden inside a bundle bound into a tree so no one would think to look for it there. When the Kaurava armies raided Virata's cattle near the year's end, it was Brihannala whom the terrified young prince Uttara begged to drive his chariot into that same battle, and it was Brihannala who, at the edge of the field, climbed down, untied the hidden Gandiva, and had to prove who he actually was before the shaking prince would believe him, reciting for him the ten names by which the world already knew him: Arjuna, Falguna, Jishnu, Kiritin, Shwetavahana, Bibhatsu, Vijaya, Krishna, Savyasachin, Dhananjaya, each name carrying its own small history of victory or restraint. Then he faced Bhishma, Drona, Karna, and Duryodhana together and, using little more than a weapon of confusion and the sheer unbearable volume of his arrows, scattered them without needing to kill a single man he had grown up beside. It remains one of the strangest scenes in the whole epic: the greatest bowman alive stepping out of a dancing girl's silks to disarm, rather than destroy, his own family.

When war finally became unavoidable, both sides sent envoys to Dwaraka to ask for Krishna's support. Krishna offered a single choice to whichever side reached him first: his enormous army, the Narayani Sena, fully armed and battle ready, or himself alone, unarmed, refusing even to lift a weapon. Duryodhana arrived first and seated himself near Krishna's head as he slept, waiting to be noticed the moment he woke; Arjuna arrived after him and stood quietly at Krishna's feet instead, and so it was Arjuna whom Krishna's eyes found first on opening. Given the first choice, Arjuna asked for Krishna Himself and nothing more, and Duryodhana went away delighted with an army twice the size of anything the Pandavas could raise. Everyone at that meeting except Arjuna seemed to think he had made a fool's bargain. It is the whole of his devotion compressed into a single afternoon: given the choice between everything God can give and God Himself, he did not hesitate over which was worth more.

And so it was Krishna, and only Krishna, standing in Arjuna's chariot as his charioteer, Parthasarathy, when Arjuna's courage failed him on the first morning of that war. What Krishna spoke to him there, seeing the bow fallen and the resolve broken, has outlived every kingdom either of them ever ruled: that the self within is never born and never dies, that a man's own nature will find him out however he tries to evade it, that action offered without clinging to its fruit is itself a form of worship, and that in the end the only real refuge left to any soul is to lay everything else down and turn wholly toward the One who asks nothing less than everything. Arjuna listened the way a friend listens, doubts and all, arguing back more than once before he was finally silenced not by force but by love. He picked the bow back up. He did not do it because his fear had left him. He did it because he had just been shown something larger than fear, and because it was Krishna, and no one else, who had shown it to him.

War, once entered, cost him what it costs everyone who enters it. His young son Abhimanyu, barely past his own wedding, was drawn alone into the wheel-shaped chakravyuha formation and cut down by a ring of the Kauravas' finest warriors while Jayadratha, king of Sindhu, held the rest of the Pandava army back from reaching him in time. When Arjuna learned how his son had died, he swore before the whole assembled army that he would kill Jayadratha with his own hands before the next day's sun went down, or walk into fire himself. Jayadratha, warned of the vow, spent that entire day sheltered behind his own soldiers rather than fighting, and as the sun sank low with him still untouched, Krishna raised his discus and darkened the sky, so that both armies believed the sun itself had set and the vow had failed. Jayadratha's guards relaxed their watch. Jayadratha himself stepped out to see his humiliated enemy. In that instant Krishna withdrew the illusion, the true sun blazed low over the horizon, and Arjuna's arrow found its mark before Jayadratha understood what had happened to him. Even a friend's grief, in this story, could not simply be soothed with words; it had to be given somewhere to go, and Krishna gave it a target and a way through.

Long before that day, in a scene the Bhaktamal itself preserves with unusual tenderness, Hanuman had been sent from his own dwelling on Gandhamadana to have darshan of Sitarama in the celestial Saketa, and Rama, sending him back again, asked one thing of him: to guard, without fail, the Pandavas, His own devotees born again in another age. Flying home through the sky, Hanuman overheard Krishna and Arjuna below him near Dwaitavana, the Pandavas asking how they would ever survive the suffering the Kauravas were bringing upon them, and Krishna pointing upward and saying, look, here goes Pavanaputra, sent by the Lord of Saketa; he alone will protect you. Hanuman came down at once to learn what this meant, and Krishna, to show him plainly that He himself was that same Lord of Saketa come again, revealed to him the form of Rama. Hanuman placed the Pandavas under his own protection from that hour, and it is remembered ever after that this is why he chose to ride, unseen by most eyes, on the banner of Arjuna's own chariot for the rest of the war, so that Arjuna came to be known by yet another name, Kapidhvaja, the one whose flag carries the monkey. Every arrow the enemy loosed at that chariot, tradition says, had first to pass a guardian nobody else on that field could see.

Peace, when it finally came, was not undiluted. Karna, whom Arjuna had fought for years without knowing him for his own eldest half-brother, fell to him on the field, a truth Arjuna learned in full only afterward, from his own mother, and it left in him a grief that even victory could not fully close. Decades on, an old man now, ruling a kingdom soaked in the blood of people he had once loved, Arjuna set out with his brothers and with Draupadi on the Mahaprasthana, the last walk toward the Himalaya and whatever lay beyond it, renouncing the throne while still alive to feel the cold. One by one the travelers fell on that mountain road, and Yudhishthira, walking on ahead without looking back, was asked each time by Bhima why. Draupadi fell first, for a partiality she had always secretly held for Arjuna above her other husbands. Sahadeva fell next, for a quiet pride in his own wisdom. Nakula, for pride in his own beauty. And then Arjuna himself went down onto the snow, and Yudhishthira said, without cruelty, that his brother's flaw had always been this: he had once boasted that he would destroy every enemy in a single day, and had never since been able to see any other archer, in any age, as truly his equal. The man who had learned as a boy to see only the bird's eye and nothing else had, in the end, to learn to see something other than his own unmatched skill, and the mountain took that lesson from him at the very last stretch of road, before it would let him go any further.

It is fitting, then, that tradition remembers Krishna's own last word on the whole war not as a boast about weapons or armies but as a single verse placed at the very close of the Gita: wherever there is Krishna, master of yoga, and wherever there is Partha, bearer of the bow, there will be fortune, victory, abundance, and unshakeable right conduct. Not wherever the army is largest. Not wherever the strategy is cleverest. Wherever the two of them stand together, friend beside friend, God beside the devotee who once chose Him over every army in the world. That, more than any bow or boon or battlefield, is the real inheritance Arjuna left behind: proof that a heart willing to hide nothing, doubt included, from the One it loves will eventually be given more than it ever knew how to ask for. Anyone who has ever felt too agitated, too doubtful, too undone by love or fear or grief to belong in front of God could do worse than remember the archer who arrived at his own turning point in exactly that condition, trembling, weeping, bow fallen from his open hand, and was received anyway.