god Shiva who assumes the form of a mountain man. Once in Indra’s heaven, Arjuna spends ten years and he learns to dance.
The background of Arjuna’s adventures relates to an episode in which two sets of cousins,
the Pandavas and the Kauravas, are competing for the throne. Yudhisthira, the eldest of the
Pandava brothers, loses his right to rule during a dice game. Tha Kauravas challenge Yudhisthira
to take part in a dice competition where the dice are not only loaded but also handled by one of
the Kauravas’ uncle. Yudhisthira is not allowed to refuse the challenge, since he is a member of
the Kshatriya caste (the warrior rulers caste), and it …show more content…
The Mahabharata is the oldest of the great epics of Hindu literature and is the longest poem ever written, with 100,000 stanzas arranged in 18 books. The work is actually a compilation of material from a number of sources from different periods, and there may have been earlier versions of varying lengths. There is no single version of the work today because not all of it has been translated and released, and the text is under restoration at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Poona, India, with successive portions of the text having been edited and published from there since 1927. The work in its present form dates from about the year 400 and is made up of a mass of legendary and wisdom material worked around a central narrative concerning the struggle for power between two related families. Within this larger work is the famous "Bhagavad Gita," or "The Lord's Song," standing as the single most significant religious text of Hinduism. This poem was written as a dialogue between the warrior prince Arjuna and his friend, charioteer, and mentor Krishna, an incarnation of the black god Vishnu, and while the poem has the basic form of a war story, it expands beyond this to consider the nature of God and how He can be