Arjuna the Warrior

Those hands had trained since he was a small boy. Thousands of mornings, thousands of arrows. The bowstring drawn tight and released, drawn tight and released, until the fingers knew what to do without a thought.

They were the hands of Arjuna, the third of the five Pandava brothers, son of the god Indra and of Kunti. He is a hero of the Mahabharata, an ancient Indian epic composed in Sanskrit. In that language his name means shining and pure. People called him Dhananjaya. They called him the finest archer in the world.

His teacher was Drona. One day the teacher hung a wooden bird on a high branch, then asked each student what he saw. One saw the tree, another saw the sky. When it was Arjuna's turn, he said just one thing: "I see only the eye of the bird." The teacher smiled. That was the focus Arjuna carried all his life.

One day that skill shone before a great crowd. King Drupada held a contest to choose a husband for his daughter, Draupadi. It was called a svayamvara. The test was very hard. High above, a fish was turning. No one taking part could look straight at it. Each archer could only watch its reflection in a bowl of water on the ground, and then shoot the fish in the eye.

Many famous warriors tried and gave up. At the time, Arjuna was disguised as a poor holy man. He stepped forward, looked down into the water, raised his bow, and let go. The arrow flew upward and struck the tiny eye high above. The whole hall burst into cheers. That was Arjuna.

But there came a morning when that skill brought him no comfort. It was a morning on the field of Kurukshetra, before the greatest battle of his life.

Two armies stood facing each other, too many to count. Arjuna stood in his chariot. His charioteer was Krishna, his close friend. Arjuna asked Krishna to drive out between the two armies, so that he could clearly see the men he was about to fight.

And he saw them.

He saw the teacher who had taught him archery long ago. He saw Bhishma, the grandfather he had loved since he was a little boy. He saw cousins and kinsmen, and friends he had grown up with. The other side held no strangers. These were faces he had loved all his life.

The hands that had always drawn the bow so steadily suddenly felt heavy. Arjuna was not afraid of dying. What he feared was winning. He thought to himself: if winning means that they must fall, then what is winning for? He looked down at his hands. They still remembered how to loose an arrow. But he could not command them. The Gandiva bow in his hands seemed to grow heavier and heavier, until it felt as heavy as a mountain.

In that moment, Krishna sat down beside him, and they talked for a long time. That conversation is deep enough to be a story for another day. What Arjuna carried out of it was only this: he stood up, raised his bow, and went into battle.

The battle lasted eighteen days. Eighteen days, as long as eighteen lifetimes. Arjuna fought, because it was what he had to do, even though his heart grew heavier with every day that passed.

On the seventeenth day, he came face to face with Karna.

Karna was a great warrior, as strong as Arjuna, perhaps the only man who was his equal. The two fought in the middle of the field. Then a wheel of Karna's chariot sank into the soft mud. Karna leapt down and strained to lift the wheel out of the mire.

Arjuna hesitated for an instant. Before him stood a man who was no longer on guard. But this was a battlefield, and Karna was the most dangerous enemy he faced. Krishna urged him not to let the moment pass. Arjuna raised his bow, set the Anjalikastra arrow to the string, and let go. Karna fell. The whole field seemed to hold its breath.

In the end, the Pandava side won the war. But no one cheered. A heavy silence lay over the field. Millions had fallen, on both sides.

Then, beside the river, came the rites of remembrance for the dead. Kunti, the mother of Arjuna, came to her sons. She told them something she had kept hidden all her life.

She told them that as a young girl, before she married, she had given birth to a son. His father was the sun god Surya. Afraid of what people would say, she laid the baby in a rattan basket and set it adrift on the river. A charioteer named Adhiratha lifted the child from the water, raised him, and named him Vasusena. Later, that boy came to be known by another name.

That name was Karna.

Arjuna fell silent. Karna was his brother. The man he had just struck down on the field was his own flesh and blood, the child once left on the water in a basket. In time, the brothers learned more. Before the battle, Karna had promised Kunti that he would not kill the other four brothers. Whatever happened, she would still have five sons.

Arjuna had won. And this was the price of winning. He stood in the middle of a field where the weapons had fallen quiet, his heart weighed down by a grief that nothing could undo. He had done what he had to do. But he would carry that loss for the rest of his life.

The story of Arjuna traveled very far, over mountains and across seas, all the way to Vietnam. In 1972, a Vietnamese translation of the Bhagavad Gita appeared under the title Chí Tôn Ca. The Bhagavad Gita is a Hindu scripture that forms part of the Mahabharata. This translation was the work of Nguyễn Quỳnh, and the Quảng Hoá publishing house brought it out. In its pages, Arjuna pours out his heart in Vietnamese, as if he were sitting very close by.

The field fell silent long ago. And there stands the finest archer in the world, the victor, weeping for those he lost.