This is the most openly borrowed stanza in the hymn. Manatunga takes a famous Upanishadic sentence almost word for word, and then changes its destination.
The Verse
मादित्य-वर्णममलं तमसः पुरस्तात् ।
त्वामेव सम्यगुपलभ्य जयन्ति मृत्युं
नान्यः शिवः शिवपदस्य मुनीन्द्र पन्थाः ॥२३॥
Transliteration:
tvām āmananti munayaḥ paramaṁ pumāṁsam
āditya-varṇam amalaṁ tamasaḥ purastāt |
tvām eva samyag upalabhya jayanti mṛtyuṁ
nānyaḥ śivaḥ śiva-padasya munīndra panthāḥ ||23||
Meaning (literal): The sages hold you to be the supreme Person, sun-coloured, stainless, standing ahead of the darkness. It is by rightly apprehending you alone that they conquer death. There is no other auspicious road, O lord of sages, to the auspicious state.
What to Notice
The source is Shvetashvatara Upanishad 3.8, and the borrowing is not disguised. That verse reads vedāham etaṁ puruṣaṁ mahāntam āditya-varṇaṁ tamasaḥ parastāt / tam eva viditvāti mṛtyum eti nānyaḥ panthā vidyate ‘yanāya: I know this great Person, sun-coloured, beyond darkness; knowing him alone one passes beyond death; there is no other path to go by. Manatunga keeps the Person, the sun-colour, the darkness, the conquest of death and the no-other-path, in that order. Any listener in his century would have recognised the sentence on hearing it.
What he changes is the last word, and it does all the work. The Upanishadic line ends with ayana, a way to go. Manatunga ends with śiva-padasya panthāḥ, the road to the śiva-pada. In Jain usage śiva, the auspicious, is a standard name for liberation, and śiva-pada is the siddha’s state; he is not naming a god. He has taken a sentence written in one tradition’s vocabulary, kept every image intact, and pointed it at mokṣa as Jain doctrine defines it. It is an argument conducted entirely by relocation.
“Āmananti munayaḥ”: the sages hold. He does not say I say this. He reports, in the present tense, what the sages transmit, which is precisely how the Upanishadic material would have been referred to. The distance is deliberate and it is the same distance he keeps in verse 24, where the epithets are again what santaḥ, the good, call him.
“Paramaṁ pumāṁsam” is a stretch, and the series will say so. Jainism has no cosmic Person, no creator, and no universal self. A liberated soul is a jīva that has shed karma; it is not the ground of anything. The stanza is written in the shared philosophical idiom of sixth and seventh century India and it should be read as idiom, not as an import of Vedantic metaphysics. The hymn’s own careful theology is in verse 9, where the sun does not come to the pond, and in verse 16, where the light makes nothing.
“Samyak” is not filler. Samyag upalabhya: having apprehended rightly. The whole Jain path carries this prefix, in samyag-darśana, samyag-jñāna and samyak-cāritra, and the adverb is the difference between having seen and having seen correctly. The verse conditions the conquest of death on it.
“Jayanti mṛtyum”: they conquer death, plural and repeatedly. Not survive one death. The tradition’s reading is the ending of the succession, the saṁsāra of births, which is why the verb sits next to the road to the śiva-pada rather than next to any promise about this body.
Traditional Use
The lists disagree, and the more interesting label is wrong for a reason worth spelling out.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 23 preta bādhā nivāraka, remover of trouble caused by pretas, the restless dead. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to protection from the evil eye.
The first label appears to have been drawn from the word mṛtyu, death, in the third line. The connection is verbal rather than conceptual: the verse is about conquering death, not about managing the dead. And it sits awkwardly with the doctrine, because Jain cosmology has no preta realm. A soul leaving a body is reborn in one of four destinies, deva, manuṣya, tiryañc or nāraka, immediately; there is no intermediate class of hungry ghosts requiring pacification. The label is borrowed from a neighbouring cosmology, which is a fair description of a good deal of what has accumulated around this hymn.
We report both labels because a reader will find both in print, and we recommend neither as a remedy.
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 knowing where the sentence came from. The verse is more interesting, not less, once you can hear the older line under it.
- Take samyak as the operative word. The stanza does not say that apprehending is enough. It says apprehending rightly is, and the tradition spends whole treatises on the difference.
- The road named here is the one the tradition says Rishabhanatha opened first in this cycle, which is why the hymn can say there is no other and still be talking about a path anyone may walk.
Previous: Verse 22, every direction has stars · Next: Verse 24, many and one at the same time.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which print तमसः पुरस्तात्. We follow them. The Shvetashvatara line the stanza echoes reads तमसः परस्तात्, "beyond the darkness," and some printings of the Bhaktamar carry that reading too; both scan correctly in Vasantatilaka, and we record the variant rather than harmonise the hymn to its source. Verse 23 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.