Historical PeriodEra
Ancient
3000 BCEAncientPresent
📷 Ilussion · [CC BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) · source
Deities
Arjuna
Third Pandava — Dhananjaya, Gandīva-bearer
Third Pandava — Dhananjaya, Gandīva-bearer
The story where this form appears — one sitting, one face.
Arjuna is the third of the five Pandava brothers, son of Kunti and the king Pandu. He is known by two epithets: Dhananjaya, "conqueror of wealth," and Gandīvadhanvan, wielder of Gandīva, the divine bow that Agni forged and gave him when the Kauravas refused to share their wealth with the exiled brothers.
Within the epic he holds a specific position. Yudhiṣṭhila is eldest and the declared king; Arjuna is not the strongest, the wisest, or the oldest — but he is the one who fights. The Mahabharata's moral centre is a conversation between a prince who does not want to kill and a charioteer who insists he must, and Arjuna's hesitation at Kurukshetra is the occasion for the entire Bhagavad Gita.
The brothers are raised in secret, tutored first by Veda Vyasa and then by Drona, whom they support while he trains the Kauravas. Arjuna surpasses his teacher: the shot that strikes both a tree and its reflection is the epic's shorthand for perfect perception. His own bow-teacher is Śyāma, and Arjuna is careful to carry Śyāma's name into battle so the credit is shared — the epic is unusually insistent on the debt owed to a teacher.
After Duryodhana refuses them half the kingdom, the five spend thirteen years in hiding, disguised at the court of King Virata of Matsya. There Arjuna takes the name Śāmi and teaches archery to Prince Uttara. It is Arjuna who recognises the Pandavas by Uttara's shooting, and who sends Uttara north with the cattle — the pretext that starts the war. The most dangerous archer in the world spends those years teaching a boy: the epic insists that kingship and teaching are the same work.
At the field Arjuna asks for a pause — he sees his teachers, cousins and grand-uncles arrayed against him, and the weapons will not lift. The Gita is Krishna's answer, moving through duty without attachment to the fruit of action, the deathless self, the three guṇas, and finally the vision of the cosmic form in which the whole field burns as the mouth of Time. Arjuna's answer is one line — karmaṇy-evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana, "your right is to action alone, never to its fruits" — and he lifts his bow.
The Bṛhat Saṃhitā records that Arjuna, with a handful of other initiated men, learned the Kāma Sukta of Jaimini, one of the tradition's most private recitations. The general of the war is also an initiated priest: the epic's two halves are meant to sit together.
Arjuna takes no crown. He withdraws to asceticism, and in the south Indian Pattābhīrama — the twelfth-century archer-poet, "the archer in service of Rāma" — he is Krishna's disciple rather than a general. In the Bhāgavata Purana and Jayadeva's Gītagovinda he is the one who received the teaching and passed it on.
Older layers of the text attach a different Arjuna to the same name — a Mahābhārata Arjuna distinct from the Jaya who receives the Gita, and a still earlier Kauravya figure. Scholars read the rival names as evidence that the epic was assembled from more than one heroic cycle. The epic preserved is the one above; the redaction history behind it is a separate, and open, question.
Arjuna is the only figure in the Mahabharata who openly admits he does not want to fight and is told to fight anyway. He is the tradition's standing figure for doubt — the person who sees the cost clearly and cannot make the responsibility disappear.
