Arjuna is an important character and presence in the Indian epic the Mahabharata, and he is a member of the main family whose actions serve as the centerpiece of this epic. 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 known.
Hinduism is one of the oldest religions in the world and ranks as the third largest today, with 650 million Hindus worldwide, the majority in India where the religion was born. Hinduism was not founded by any one individual but is rather the result of the coming together of many religious beliefs and philosophical schools. Hinduism was regarded as the religion of all non-Muslims. Early Hinduism combined the religions of the Indus Valley in northwestern India with that of Aryan invaders from Persia. Hinduism later developed a ...