Fifteen names in one stanza, most of them belonging to other people’s gods. Two of the fifteen are the hymn’s own doctrine, hidden inside the list.
The Verse
ब्रह्माणमीश्वरमनन्तमनङ्ग-केतुम् ।
योगीश्वरं विदित-योगमनेकमेकं
ज्ञान-स्वरूपममलं प्रवदन्ति सन्तः ॥२४॥
Transliteration:
tvām avyayaṁ vibhum acintyam asaṅkhyam ādyaṁ
brahmāṇam īśvaram anantam anaṅga-ketum |
yogīśvaraṁ vidita-yogam anekam ekaṁ
jñāna-svarūpam amalaṁ pravadanti santaḥ ||24||
Meaning (literal): The good declare you imperishable, all-pervading, unthinkable, innumerable, the first, Brahma, Ishvara, endless, the banner over the bodiless one, lord of yogins, knower of yoga, many and one, having knowledge for your very nature, stainless.
What to Notice
“Pravadanti santaḥ”: the good declare. As in verse 23, Manatunga reports rather than asserts. The names are what people call him, and the sentence is honest about that. It matters, because several of the fifteen are the property of other traditions and he is not pretending otherwise.
“Anekam ekam”: the two words that are not borrowed. Many and one. This is not paradox used for decoration. It is anekāntavāda, the Jain position that a real thing carries many aspects at once and that any single description is true only from a standpoint, compressed into two syllables each. One soul; countless modes. The stanza smuggles the tradition’s signature epistemology into the middle of a list of other people’s epithets, and does not stop to explain it.
“Jñāna-svarūpam”: knowledge as own-form. The other doctrinally precise item. Not a knower who possesses knowledge, but a substance whose very nature is knowing. Jain metaphysics does not treat omniscience as an acquisition; it treats it as what a soul is when nothing is in the way. Verse 20 said the same thing with the word kṛtāvakāśa, room having been made.
“Anaṅga-ketu.” Anaṅga, the bodiless one, is Kama, the god of desire. Ketu means a banner and also a comet, an ill portent. So the epithet reads either as the flag flying over a defeated Kama or as the omen that spells his end, and both readings are current. In Jain terms this is not a compliment about celibacy for its own sake. It names the destruction of mohanīya karma, the deluding karma, which is the same subject as verse 18.
“Asaṅkhya” is a quantity word. Innumerable is a strange thing to call a single being, until you remember that asaṅkhyāta is a technical numerical class in Jain cosmology, sitting between the countable and the infinite and used constantly in the karma literature. The audience would have heard a measurement term, not a superlative.
The list is a setup. Verse 25 takes four of these names, Buddha, Shankara, Dhata and Purushottama, and gives a Jain reason why each fits. Read as a pair, verse 24 collects what he is called and verse 25 explains on what grounds the calling is allowed. Neither stanza concedes the metaphysics that the names came with.
Traditional Use
For the first time in this stretch of the hymn the two lists nearly agree, and the agreement is not evidence of anything.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 24 śira pīḍā nāśaka, destroyer of headache. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to the healing of half-headaches, that is, migraine. Both point at the head. Nothing in the Sanskrit does: there is no head, no pain and no body in the stanza at all, only a list of names.
We record the labels because they are what the manuals print. We do not offer them as treatment. Migraine is a diagnosable and treatable condition, and a fourteen-syllable metre is not a therapy for it. That two independent modern lists converge on the same claim tells us the lists share an ancestor, not that the claim is true.
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 slowly enough that the list does not become a blur. Fifteen names in four lines invites speed, and the two that matter, anekam ekam, sit exactly where speed will lose them.
- Use it as a test of borrowed vocabulary. The stanza accepts every name and concedes none of the theology behind them, which is a discipline worth having in any argument.
- Jñāna-svarūpa is the claim the whole hymn rests on, and the biography of Rishabhanatha is the tradition’s demonstration of it: not a man who was told things, but one for whom the obstruction finally went.
Previous: Verse 23, the verse that quotes an Upanishad · Next: Verse 25, you are the Buddha, and Shankara.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse; vidyasagar.net's मसंखय- for मसंख्य- is a broken conjunct rather than a variant. Verse 24 is identical in the Digambara and Shvetambara recensions. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which agree in substance here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.