Having audited the sun in verse 17 and replaced the moon in verse 18, Manatunga now asks what either of them is still for. The second half of the stanza answers with a rice field.
The Verse
युष्मन्मुखेन्दु-दलितेषु तमःसु नाथ ।
निष्पन्न-शालि-वन-शालिनि जीव-लोके
कार्यं कियज्जल-धरैर्जल-भार-नम्रैः ॥१९॥
Transliteration:
kiṁ śarvarīṣu śaśināhni vivasvatā vā
yuṣman-mukhendu-daliteṣu tamaḥsu nātha |
niṣpanna-śāli-vana-śālini jīva-loke
kāryaṁ kiyaj jala-dharair jala-bhāra-namraiḥ ||19||
(Śaśināhni in the first line is śaśinā plus ahni, “by the moon” and “by day,” run together by the ordinary vowel sandhi.)
Meaning (literal): What use is the moon in the nights, or the sun by day, O Lord, when the darknesses have already been split by the moon that is your face? In a world of living beings that is already lovely with forests of ripened rice, how much work is left for rainclouds bowed low under their load of water?
What to Notice
Two questions, and both of them are about timing. Neither half of the verse says the sun, the moon or the rain is bad. It says they have arrived after the thing they came to do was done. This is a different objection from verse 13, where the moon was charged with a stain and with needing night. Here nothing is at fault. Something is simply no longer required.
The register changes halfway through. The first two lines are about seeing. The last two are about eating. Manatunga moves from light to food, from the sky to a field of śāli, ripened winter rice, and the shift is deliberate: he is testing his claim against the most material need a village audience has. The answer comes out the same.
“Jala-bhāra-namraiḥ”: bowed low under the weight of water. This is the kindest image in the hymn’s long argument about borrowed comparisons. The clouds are heavy with exactly what they came to give, and they are bending under it, and there is nothing to do with it. He does not mock them. He lets them stand there full.
What the verse assumes about the harvest. Niṣpanna means ripened, accomplished, brought to completion. The stanza’s whole force depends on the crop already being in. This is how the hymn consistently positions the Jina: not as a supplier who arrives with what you lack, but as a condition under which the thing is already done. The lamp of verse 16 needed oil from outside; the field of verse 19 needed rain from outside; and in both cases the point is dependence, which is what the hymn’s subject does not have.
A grammatical hinge. Śālini is a locative agreeing with jīva-loke, “in the world of living beings which is lovely with.” Several printed editions set śālinī with a long final vowel, which is neither the case the sentence needs nor a syllable the metre allows. We discuss this at the foot of the page.
Traditional Use
Neither modern list has anything to do with the words of this verse, and they do not agree with each other either.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 19 jādū-ṭonā-prabhāva nāśaka, destroyer of the effects of sorcery. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to getting a job or a promotion. We report both because they are what the manuals print, and we decline both. A hymn is not a counter-spell, and the sorcery framing has a cost worth naming: it teaches a reciter to look for the person who did it, which in practice means suspecting a neighbour or a relative. That is a straightforward failure of the tradition’s own first commitment. As for employment, nothing in a verse about rice fields is a substitute for an application.
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 are still carrying something for someone who no longer needs it. The stanza is unusually gentle about that situation and does not turn it into a fault.
- The harvest image is a good corrective to petition. Most devotional habit assumes a shortage. This verse assumes the opposite and asks what follows.
- Read it beside the biography of Rishabhanatha, who is remembered as the one who taught agriculture, the making of pots and the setting down of writing before he renounced any of it. The rice in this verse is, in the tradition’s own telling, downstream of him.
Previous: Verse 18, a moon with no precedent · Next: Verse 20, the glass shard also catches light.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. Two decisions recorded: we print शशिनाह्नि with jinvani.in, since the compound is शशिना plus अह्नि and vidyasagar.net's शशिनान्हि cannot be resolved into either word; and we print शालिनि although the editions we collate set शालिनी, because the locative agreeing with जीव-लोके requires the short vowel and Vasantatilaka requires a light tenth syllable in the line. Verse 19 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.