Arjuna: learning to ask, learning to choose

Vows, the Forest, and the Weapons of the Gods

At Indraprastha the brothers bound themselves by a rule: whoever walked in on a brother sitting with Draupadi would spend twelve years in the forest. The first test fell to Arjuna. A Brahmin came weeping to the gate because robbers had driven off his cattle, and the weapons needed to recover them lay in the very chamber where Yudhishthira was sitting with Draupadi. Arjuna weighed the king’s displeasure against the Brahmin’s tears, decided that “virtue is superior to the body and lasts after the body has perished,” went in, took the bow, and brought the cattle back. Then he asked for his exile. His elder brother tried to release him from it, and the answer came back without a tremor: “I cannot waver from truth. Truth is my weapon.” In that exile he married Subhadra, and Abhimanyu was born of her. On his return, when the fire-god Agni begged the brothers to let him consume the Khandava forest, Varuna gave Arjuna the bow Gandiva, two quivers that would never empty, and a chariot whose banner bore a great ape. In the later exile he went north alone for the weapons of the gods. There two arrows struck a single boar at the same instant, his own and one from a mountain hunter who was Shiva in disguise. They fought over the kill. The arrows ran out, the bow was torn from his hands, his sword shattered on the hunter’s head, and in the wrestling that followed Arjuna was beaten senseless to the ground. When he came to, he shaped a clay image of Shiva and laid a garland of flowers on it, and the same garland appeared on the hunter’s crown. The man no mortal could defeat received the Pashupata by losing.

In Indra’s heaven the apsara Urvashi came to his door, and Arjuna folded his hands to her as the mother of his line: “You deserve my worship as my own mother, and it falls to you to protect me as a son.” She cursed him for it, and Indra set a limit on the curse, one year, and turned it into the armor of the hidden thirteenth year. In the women’s quarters of Virata’s palace that same archer became Brihannala, and when the Kauravas drove off Virata’s cattle he went out against the whole Kuru army alone, with the boy prince Uttara for his charioteer. The twang of Gandiva and a stupefying weapon laid the Kuru host senseless where it stood, and Arjuna loosed nothing at a man who could not stand. He sent the boy walking among the stunned chiefs to bring away their garments, with one warning: Bhishma alone would know how to counter that weapon.

Whose Hands on the Reins

When war was certain, Duryodhana and Arjuna reached Dwarka on the same day. Krishna was asleep. Duryodhana took a fine seat at the head of the bed; Arjuna stood at its foot with joined hands; and when Krishna woke, his eyes fell first on Arjuna. On one side stood the entire army of the Narayanas, ten crores of cowherds who could match Krishna in strength; on the other stood Krishna alone, under a promise to lift no weapon. The first choice was Arjuna’s, and he chose the unarmed Krishna. Asked why, he answered with an old wish: “It has always been my desire to have you drive my chariot.” At Kurukshetra the plea to be taught came first, and then Arjuna said “I will not fight” and fell silent. At the end of the long conversation Krishna told him to reflect on it fully and then act as he chose, and the answer came: “My delusion is destroyed, and by your grace I have regained my memory.”

A War of Vows

The Gita gave Arjuna’s tears a direction. When Bhishma himself told the brothers how he might be killed, Arjuna bent under the shame of it. As a small boy he used to climb into the old man’s lap with his body covered in dust, and once called him father, and the grandfather had corrected him: your father I am not; I am your father’s father. On the tenth day, with Shikhandi placed in front of him, Arjuna’s arrows brought the grandfather down, and Bhishma, sending back the soft pillows the kings fetched for him, looked toward Arjuna. With his eyes full of tears Arjuna propped the old man’s head on three arrows, and Bhishma said, “You have given me a pillow that becomes my bed, son of Pandu. Had you done otherwise, I would have cursed you in my anger.”

On the thirteenth day he came back from fighting the Samshaptakas, and the camp was wrong: no music playing, and no Abhimanyu running out to meet him. When the weeping stopped, a vow rose out of it: tomorrow, before the sun sets, Jayadratha dies, or Arjuna walks into the fire. On the fourteenth day, in a darkness Krishna raised by his yoga, Jayadratha looked up believing the sun had set, and Arjuna’s arrow carried his head off the field and dropped it into the lap of his father, an old ascetic at his evening prayers. The hardest hour came in front of his own brother. Yudhishthira, wounded by Karna and bitter with it, told Arjuna to give his Gandiva to someone else, and a secret vow Arjuna had sworn long before brought his sword out of its scabbard. Krishna stopped him with a teaching on the fine line between truth and falsehood, the story of the ascetic Kaushika whose honest answer sent robbers after innocent men, and Arjuna went out to meet Karna only after laying his head on his elder brother’s feet. On the seventeenth day Karna’s serpent arrow, the one he had worshiped for years and into which the snake Ashvasena had slipped, took only Arjuna’s crown, because Krishna had pressed the chariot a cubit into the earth with his feet. Then, in the afternoon, the Anjalika arrow ended a rivalry that had been running since a noon in the arena at Hastinapura.

After the war Arjuna admitted to Krishna that what he had heard on the battlefield had slipped from him, “forgotten by me through the fickleness of my mind.” Krishna did not repeat it. He told an old story instead, the one called the Anugita. After Krishna was gone, Arjuna was escorting the women of Dwarka when the Abhira robbers of the five rivers fell on the column. Gandiva went to the string only with effort, the quivers emptied, and the celestial weapons would not come to his memory. On the great journey north, at Agni’s bidding, he gave the bow back to the sea, and when he fell on the Himalaya, Yudhishthira named the cause: he had once said he would consume all their enemies in a single day, and he had not done it.

His Path

The Training in Arms and Ekalavya · A bow drawn in the dark, and the price of a teacher’s promise, paid by a Nishada boy.

The Broken Rule, Subhadra, and the Burning of Khandava · An exile who called truth his weapon, and the bow Gandiva received at Khandava.

The Hunter, the Pashupata, and the World of Indra · A defeat at Shiva‘s hands, a garland laid on a clay image, and the restraint that called Urvashi mother.

The Cattle Raid in the North · An archer stepping out of Brihannala’s dress, and no arrow loosed at a stunned enemy.

Two Petitioners at Dwarka · An unarmed Krishna chosen over an entire army.

The Fall of Bhishma and the Bed of Arrows · A childhood lap, the cover of Shikhandi, and a pillow of three arrows.

Karna and Arjuna, and the Death of Karna · A chariot pressed into the earth, a fallen crown, and a rivalry carried from the arena.

The Great Journey · A bow returned to the sea, and an old pride called to account on the climb into the Himalaya.

The Dharma of Keeping On Asking

Excellence keeps arriving in Arjuna’s life, and each time a question arrives with it. He was glad to see Ekalavya’s thumb cut off; he lost to a hunter and laid a garland on a clay image; he became a student in front of Krishna; and having won the war he admitted that what he heard had slipped away. The same thing shows in all four scenes: even the most capable archer alive readies himself for his work by asking. His vows rise and fall the same way. The vow against Jayadratha was kept; the vow about Gandiva carried him to the point of drawing a sword on his elder brother; and one old sentence of pride became the reason he fell on the mountain. What survives is the answer he gave at that dawn: the delusion gone, memory restored, now the work. Even that memory slipped away one day, and the habit of asking stayed with Arjuna to the end.