Verse 17 took the sun apart. Verse 18 turns to the moon and, having refused the comparison outright in verse 13, now accepts it on one condition: that the moon in question has never existed before.
The Verse
गम्यं न राहु-वदनस्य न वारिदानाम् ।
विभ्राजते तव मुखाब्ज-मनल्प-कान्ति
विद्योतयज्जगदपूर्व-शशाङ्क-बिम्बम् ॥१८॥
Transliteration:
nityodayaṁ dalita-moha-mahāndhakāraṁ
gamyaṁ na rāhu-vadanasya na vāridānām |
vibhrājate tava mukhābjam analpa-kānti
vidyotayaj jagad apūrva-śaśāṅka-bimbam ||18||
Meaning (literal): Always risen, having split the great darkness of delusion, not to be reached by Rahu’s mouth nor by the rain-givers, your lotus face shines with no small brilliance, lighting up the world: a moon-disc without precedent.
What to Notice
“Apūrva”: the word that carries the stanza. It means having nothing before it, unprecedented, of a kind not previously seen. Verse 13 had refused the moon simile on two charges, that the moon is stained and that it needs night to look like anything. Manatunga does not withdraw either charge. He reintroduces the moon under a new heading: not this moon, a moon with no prior instance. It is the same move as aparaḥ, “another lamp,” in verse 16. The hymn will use the world’s images only after saying clearly that the world has no example.
The darkness has a name, and it is technical. Moha, not ignorance in general. In Jain doctrine mohanīya is one of the eight karma types and the one the system treats as decisive: the deluding karma that distorts both belief and conduct, and the one that must be destroyed before omniscience is possible at all. Dalita, “split, broken open,” is what the doctrine says happens to it. The line is a summary of a soteriology, compressed to fit a quarter-verse.
A resonance worth flagging, and not more than flagging. Apūrva is also the first word of apūrva-karaṇa, the “unprecedented process,” the name Jain texts give to the eighth stage of the ladder of purification, where the deluding karma begins to be destroyed. The verse puts apūrva and the splitting of moha in the same stanza. We do not know that Manatunga intended it, no commentary we have seen says so, and we record it as a resonance rather than a reading.
Two conventional images that do not agree. He calls the face a lotus, mukhābja, and a moon, śaśāṅka-bimba, in the same sentence. In Sanskrit poetic convention the day-lotus closes when the moon comes up: the two images are on opposite sides of a well-established piece of literary furniture. Putting them together is not carelessness. It is what apūrva has just licensed him to do.
Negation again. Analpa-kānti, “of not-small radiance.” Gamyaṁ na… na…, not reachable, not reachable. As in verse 17, the praise is largely assembled out of things that fail to happen, which is the tradition’s habitual grammar for describing what is free.
Traditional Use
The two modern lists disagree, and one of them is at least reading the verse.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 18 śatru senā stambhaka, the immobiliser of an enemy army. Nothing in the Sanskrit concerns armies, enemies or immobilising. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns the verse to the removal of illusion, which does follow the stanza’s own subject: moha is exactly what the verse says is broken. Where the two lists split like this we print both and say which one tracks the words.
We would add the obvious. Reciting a stanza does not stop an army, and the tradition’s own reading of moha is that it is the reciter’s problem, not the opponent’s.
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 you have been told to be realistic about what is possible. Apūrva is the hymn’s answer, and it is a narrow one: not that anything is possible, but that the absence of a precedent is not by itself an argument.
- Take moha literally for a week. Watch for the specific places where what you want quietly decides what you believe. That is the karma the verse names, and noticing it is the whole of the practice.
- The face described here belongs to Rishabhanatha, who according to the tradition went a full year without food after renouncing because nobody yet knew how to give alms to a monk. The hymn’s moon is not a decorative one.
Previous: Verse 17, three ways a sun can fail · Next: Verse 19, when the rice is already ripe.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. We print बिम्बम्; vidyasagar.net sets विम्बम्, a व-for-ब slip rather than a variant, since no edition glosses it differently. Verse 18 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.