The Quest for the Pāshupata

While Yudhishthira kept his calm and his patience, Bhīma and Draupadī chafed, and pressed him again and again to abandon this passive endurance and make war on Hastināpura at once. Bhīma argued that the thirteen years were only a trap to let Duryodhana entrench his power, and even proposed that by certain sacred incantations they might compress the thirteen years into thirteen days and so fulfil the letter of the oath while escaping its cost.

But Yudhishthira refused it utterly, holding that truth is higher than power and must be kept whatever it costs, that a vow honoured only in its letter and cheated in its spirit is no honoured vow at all.

But if he would not make war before the time, he would prepare for the war that must come at the end of it; and on the counsel of Vyāsa, he sent Arjuna to the Himālayas to win divine weapons from the gods against the day of battle. And Arjuna climbed the rugged heights of Indrakīla and performed severe austerities. There Indra came to him first, disguised as an old ascetic, and tested him by offering him celestial pleasures in place of weapons; and Arjuna refused, saying his only desire was to protect dharma upon the earth.

And then Arjuna turned his penance toward Lord Shiva.

And Shiva came to test him in a stranger way. A wild boar charged at Arjuna, and Arjuna shot it, and at the very same instant a hunter, a Kirāta, also pierced it with a shaft; and a fierce dispute arose over whose kill it was, and it grew into open combat between Arjuna and the hunter. And Arjuna, for all his supreme skill, could not prevail: his arrows were swallowed up, his mighty bow Gāṇḍīva was wrenched from him, and he was overpowered.

And then, at last, he understood, and recognized that the hunter was none other than Shiva himself, come to test him; and he fell down in total surrender at the god's feet. And Shiva, well pleased with Arjuna's courage and his humility both, raised him up, restored his bow, and gave him the greatest of gifts, the infallible Pāshupata weapon, the ultimate astra, against the day of the war.

So Arjuna, who had first shown his valour and then his humility, was found worthy, for the highest gifts are given not to valour alone nor to humility alone, but to the soul in which the two are joined.