The hymn has been borrowing the sun since verse 7. In verse 17 Manatunga turns on his own image and lists exactly what is wrong with it.
The Verse
स्पष्टी-करोषि सहसा युगपज्जगन्ति ।
नाम्भोधरोदर-निरुद्ध-महा-प्रभावः
सूर्यातिशायि-महिमासि मुनीन्द्र लोके ॥१७॥
Transliteration:
nāstaṁ kadācid upayāsi na rāhu-gamyaḥ
spaṣṭī-karoṣi sahasā yugapaj jaganti |
nāmbhodharodara-niruddha-mahā-prabhāvaḥ
sūryātiśāyi-mahimāsi munīndra loke ||17||
Meaning (literal): You never go to your setting. You are not within Rahu’s reach. You make the worlds plain at once, all of them together. Your great power is not shut inside the belly of a raincloud. In this world, O lord of sages, your greatness is the greatness that exceeds the sun’s.
What to Notice
Three failures, named in order. The sun sets. The sun is eaten in eclipse. The sun is shut behind cloud. Manatunga is doing to the sun what verse 13 did to the moon and verse 16 will be remembered for doing to the lamp: taking the borrowed image apart at its joints. The method is now unmistakable as a method. Every light the world offers is intermittent, and he says so each time before moving on.
“Yugapat”: all at once. This single word is the doctrinal weight of the stanza. The sun lights one half of the earth at a time and arrives at the other half later. Kevala-jñāna, the omniscience a Jina attains, is not a sequence of illuminations. It knows every substance in every mode without succession, and yugapaj jaganti, “the worlds simultaneously,” is Manatunga saying so in two words. He is not exaggerating a sunrise. He is describing a different kind of knowing.
Rahu is furniture, not doctrine. The eclipse-swallowing demon belongs to the shared story-world of sixth-century India, and Manatunga uses it the way any poet of his time would. It is worth saying plainly, because this is one of only two stanzas in the hymn where a graha is named at all: the sentence is about what happens to the sun, not about what is happening in anyone’s chart. The Bhaktamar Stotra is not a planetary remedy text. Jain graha-shanti has its own composition, the Navagraha Shanti Stotra, and this is not it.
“Loke”: in the world. He bounds the claim in the last word. Within the world, among the things that can be compared, this greatness surpasses the sun’s. He does not say the Jina is a larger sun, and the restraint is characteristic. The hymn keeps declining the upgrade and asking for a different category instead.
A quiet joke in the negatives. Three of the four lines begin with a negation: na astam, na rāhu, na ambhodhara. The praise is built almost entirely out of what does not happen. For a tradition whose highest description of the liberated soul is a list of absences, that is the right grammar.
Traditional Use
The two modern lists disagree completely here, and we print both.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 17 sarva udara pīḍā nāśaka, the destroyer of all abdominal pain. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it instead to the extinguishing of fire. Neither subject appears anywhere in the Sanskrit. The abdominal label looks as though it was built from a single word: ambhodhara-udara, “the belly of the raincloud,” which is the only belly in the verse and is not a human one. We report the labels because a reader will meet them in print. We do not pass them on as medicine, and nobody should delay treatment for a stomach on the strength of a stanza about eclipses.
No riddhi is printed here. The verse-by-verse manual this series cites publishes only through shloka 6, and we do not reproduce mantras we cannot check against a second source.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- Recite it when something you had been relying on for light has gone out. The verse names the three ordinary ways that happens, and it does not pretend they are unusual.
- Sit with yugapat rather than skipping it. Most of what we call knowing is one thing at a time, in order, with the rest dark. The verse is pointing at the alternative, not at a brighter version of the same thing.
- The greatness described here is what the tradition says Rishabhanatha attained under a banyan at Purimatala, after a thousand years of standing austerity. The hymn never separates the light from what it cost.
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Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse apart from anusvara spelling (जगन्ति / जगंति). Verse 17 is identical in the Digambara and Shvetambara recensions. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.