The hymn turns for a moment to the woman who bore its subject. The verse is about singularity, and it is worth reading closely, because its surface says something a modern reader will want to argue with.
The Verse
नान्या सुतं त्वदुपमं जननी प्रसूता ।
सर्वा दिशो दधति भानि सहस्र-रश्मिं
प्राच्येव दिग्जनयति स्फुरदंशु-जालम् ॥२२॥
Transliteration:
strīṇāṁ śatāni śataśo janayanti putrān
nānyā sutaṁ tvad-upamaṁ jananī prasūtā |
sarvā diśo dadhati bhāni sahasra-raśmiṁ
prācy eva dig janayati sphurad-aṁśu-jālam ||22||
Meaning (literal): Women in their hundreds, hundreds of times over, bring forth sons; no other mother has borne a son the like of you. All the quarters of the sky hold stars; only the eastern quarter brings forth the thousand-rayed one with its net of flashing rays.
What to Notice
The shape is: general rule, single exception, and then the same shape again in the sky. Manatunga states an ordinary fact, marks off one case, and then repeats the structure with directions and stars so that the reader can see the logic without the emotional charge of the first half. The claim being made is about unrepeatability. It is not a ranking.
The stars are not being disparaged. Sarvā diśo dadhati bhāni: every direction holds stars. The east is not brighter than the north, and the verse does not say it is. The east is where one particular thing rises, which is a fact about position rather than about quality. Read back into the first half, that is the whole load-bearing point: the other mothers are not diminished by the exception, any more than the northern sky is diminished by not being the east.
On putrān and sutam: the Sanskrit says sons. We render it as it stands rather than tidying it, because a translation that quietly de-genders the words is not the text. What we will not do is read into it a claim it does not make. The stanza is not saying that sons are worth more than daughters, and it is certainly not offering anyone a son. Its logic runs the other way: hundreds of thousands of sons are exactly the unremarkable background against which one event stands out. This site does not treat any scripture as promising the sex of a child, and where a modern manual attaches such a promise to a verse we say so and decline it, as we did at verse 9.
The mother the verse is about is named. The tradition calls her Marudevi, wife of Nabhiraja. It also holds that she attained kevala-jñāna and liberation, in the usual telling while travelling on an elephant to see her son after his enlightenment, and several accounts make her the first liberated soul of this descending cycle. The stanza praises the son through the mother. The tradition that carries the stanza does not stop there.
A recension note that belongs here. On the question of whether a Tirthankara can be a woman, the two traditions differ: the Shvetambara account holds that Mallinatha, the nineteenth Tirthankara, was a woman, while the Digambara account holds that Mallinatha was male and that liberation from a female body is not possible in that lifetime. This is one of the substantive doctrinal divisions between them and it has nothing to do with the 44 or 48 verse question. We record it because a reader arriving at verse 22 will reasonably ask, and because the honest answer is that the traditions disagree.
The limit of the simile. In the second half the mother becomes a direction, and a direction does not do anything; the sun rises there. Manatunga has spent five verses auditing borrowed images for exactly this kind of slippage. We note it in his own manner rather than defend it.
Traditional Use
Neither modern list connects to the words of the stanza, and they do not agree.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 22 bhūta-piśācādi vyantara bādhā nirodhaka, the preventer of obstruction by bhutas, pishachas and other vyantara beings. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to the binding of family members.
The first is at least intelligible inside the tradition’s own cosmology, where vyantara devas are a recognised class of celestial being; it is still not what this verse is about, and there is a practical cost to the framing that we would rather state than leave implicit. Explaining a person’s distress as possession is a way of not getting them help. The second label we decline on the same grounds as verse 21: binding another person, even a relative, is a form of control, and control over another’s will is not a boon this tradition has any room for.
Neither list assigns a child-boon to this stanza, though the subject matter invites one. The manual that does print a male-child boon attaches it to verse 9, where we reported it, named it, and declined 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 stanza about singularity rather than about superiority. The difference between the two is the entire craft of the second half.
- If the gendered surface catches, let it catch. The useful response is not to explain it away but to hold it beside what the same tradition says about Marudevi, and beside the fact that the two branches of the tradition have never agreed on the larger question.
- The son in question is Rishabhanatha, and the tradition’s interest in his mother is not decorative: her story is the one it uses to say that liberation does not require a long apprenticeship.
Previous: Verse 21, glad to have looked elsewhere first · Next: Verse 23, the verse that quotes an Upanishad.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. We print सहस्र-रश्मिं with jinvani.in against the सहस्त्र spelling in vidyasagar.net, the same slip recorded at verse 9. Verse 22 is identical in the Digambara and Shvetambara recensions. Marudevi's liberation follows the standard Adipurana and Kalpasutra accounts; on Mallinatha the two traditions differ, and both positions are stated above without adjudication. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.