This is the first verse of the hymn to name other gods. What it says about them is more careful than its reputation, and the care is in the last two words.
The Verse
नैवं तथा हरि-हरादिषु नायकेषु ।
तेजः स्फुरन्मणिषु याति यथा महत्त्वं
नैवं तु काच-शकले किरणाकुलेऽपि ॥२०॥
Transliteration:
jñānaṁ yathā tvayi vibhāti kṛtāvakāśaṁ
naivaṁ tathā hari-harādiṣu nāyakeṣu |
tejaḥ sphuran-maṇiṣu yāti yathā mahattvaṁ
naivaṁ tu kāca-śakale kiraṇākule’pi ||20||
Meaning (literal): Knowledge shines in you as in something that has been given its full room, and it does not shine so in Hari, Hara and the other lords. Brilliance comes to greatness in flashing gems as it does not in a shard of glass, even one crowded with rays.
What to Notice
“Kṛtāvakāśam”: room having been made. This is the doctrinal word and it is spatial, not additive. In Jain analysis, knowledge is not something conferred on a soul; it is the soul’s own nature, and what limits it is jñānāvaraṇīya karma, an obscuring, a thing in the way. What changes in a Jina is that the obstruction goes and the room is there. The verse does not say knowledge was given. It says it was given space. Verse 27 will use the same spatial logic from the opposite end, saying the virtues left no room, niravakāśatayā, for anything else.
The shard is not dark, and he says so. Read the last line before deciding what the verse claims. Kiraṇākule’pi: even though crowded with rays. Manatunga concedes that a piece of broken glass flashes, sometimes more busily than a gem, and he concedes it in the same breath as the comparison. The distinction he is drawing is not between light and no light. It is between light that is the thing’s own and light that is being handled.
He does not insult them. Hari and Hara are called nāyakas, lords, without qualification or sneer. There is no mockery in the stanza, no story about their failures, no adjective doing quiet damage. The difference is placed entirely in an optical fact about gems, which the listener can check.
It is still a sectarian verse, and this series will not pretend otherwise. Verse 20 says that the highest knowledge is not found in the gods of the neighbouring traditions. That is a claim, it is meant as one, and it belongs to a genre in which every sixth and seventh century tradition in India wrote comparable stanzas about the others. A reader reciting this in a mixed household should know what the words say. Nothing in it licenses contempt, and the verse that follows, which thanks the other gods for having been seen first, makes that reading harder to sustain.
The plural is doing work. Maṇiṣu, in gems, plural. Hari-harādiṣu, in Hari, Hara and the rest, plural. He is not comparing one being to one being. He is comparing two categories, which is why the stanza reads as a claim about kinds rather than a quarrel with a person.
Traditional Use
The two lists disagree, and one of them attaches a promise this site will not repeat.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 20 santāna-lakṣmī-saubhāgya-vijaya buddhi-dāyaka, giver of progeny, wealth, good fortune, victory and intelligence. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to the removal of all turbulence.
We report the first label because it is what that manual prints, and we decline to endorse it. Of its five promises only one, buddhi, has any footing in the Sanskrit, and the verse is about knowledge in a Jina, not about intelligence acquired by a reciter. As we have said elsewhere in this series, we do not treat any scripture as an instrument for obtaining children, wealth or a favourable outcome, and the stanza itself makes no such offer. The pattern is worth stating once more, because it recurs from here to the end of the hymn: modern manuals attach worldly boons to verses whose Sanskrit is about something else, we print what they say, we name who says it, and we do not pass it on as though the text said it.
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 as a question about your own light rather than about anyone else’s. The verse’s test is not brightness. It is whether the shining is yours or borrowed, and the honest answer for most of what we know is borrowed.
- If the sectarian edge troubles you, do not smooth it away. Read it, note that it is there, and then read verse 21, which is the same author being generous about the same gods.
- Kṛtāvakāśa is a practical instruction. The tradition’s own method is subtractive: fasting, silence, giving things up. Knowledge in this system is what is left when the obstruction is gone, which is what the biography of Rishabhanatha spends a thousand years demonstrating.
Previous: Verse 19, when the rice is already ripe · Next: Verse 21, glad to have looked elsewhere first.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. The third line is a genuine variant, not a slip: vidyasagar.net prints तेजः स्फुरन्मणिषु, jinvani.in prints तेजो महा मणिषु, and both scan correctly in Vasantatilaka. We follow स्फुरन्मणिषु because its ray-word sets up किरणाकुले in the closing line, and we record the other reading here because a reader will meet it. Verse 20 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.