Draupadī

In Ekachakra the Pāṇḍavas heard of the great svayamvara of Draupadī, daughter of King Drupada of Pānchāla; and Kuntī, reading her sons' silent wish and seeing the alms grow thin, suggested they move on to Drupada's kingdom. There they lodged in a humble potter's cottage and went to the royal assembly disguised as young brāhmaṇas.

Drupada had set an extraordinary test: a great stiff bow, and high above a rotating fish target behind a spinning wheel, and the archer must string the bow and send five arrows through the wheel into the fish's eye, aiming only by its reflection in a vessel of oil below.

Mighty kings and warriors tried and failed and were humbled, the stiff bow flinging them off; even Karṇa tried and failed by a hair. Then Arjuna, in his plain brāhmaṇa's deerskin, stepped out from among the priests; and meditating on the Lord, he lifted the great bow with ease, strung it without a tremor, and looking down at the reflection in the oil, sent five arrows through the spinning wheel into the target's eye, and it fell amid a rain of flowers. Draupadī set the garland of victory on Arjuna's neck.

But when the brothers brought her home and called out to their mother that they had brought the most precious alms won that day, Kuntī, speaking from within without looking, gave the command that could not be recalled: share the alms equally among yourselves. And so, by a mother's unwitting word, held sacred because it could not be unsaid, Draupadī became the wife of all five brothers.

Unusual as this union was, it served a deep purpose: it bound the five Pāṇḍavas into a single unbreakable unit, one household, one shared devotion, welded together to stand as a single instrument of dharma against the storms that were gathering out of Hastināpura.