Verse 24 collected the names. Verse 25 takes four of them and gives, for each, the reason on which the name is allowed. The reasons are the whole point.
The Verse
त्वं शङ्करोऽसि भुवन-त्रय-शङ्करत्वात् ।
धातासि धीर शिव-मार्ग-विधेर्विधानाद्
व्यक्तं त्वमेव भगवन् पुरुषोत्तमोऽसि ॥२५॥
Transliteration:
buddhas tvam eva vibudhārcita-buddhi-bodhāt
tvaṁ śaṅkaro’si bhuvana-traya-śaṅkaratvāt |
dhātāsi dhīra śiva-mārga-vidher vidhānād
vyaktaṁ tvam eva bhagavan puruṣottamo’si ||25||
Meaning (literal): You alone are the Buddha, because of the awakened understanding that the wise revere. You are Shankara, because you are a maker of welfare for the three worlds. You are the Ordainer, O steadfast one, because you laid down the ordinance of the road to liberation. Plainly you alone, Lord, are Purushottama, highest among persons.
What to Notice
Every name comes with an ablative. Bodhāt, śaṅkaratvāt, vidhānāt: because of, on the ground of, by reason of. Manatunga is not asserting an identity in any of the three cases. He is stating a condition under which the word applies, and the condition each time is something Jain doctrine already claims. This is why the stanza is not syncretism. It never says the gods are one. It says: if these words mean what they say, then they land here.
Buddha, taken as a common noun. Buddha means awakened before it means anybody in particular, and Jain texts use it and its relatives freely; the two shramana traditions shared a great deal of vocabulary long before either had a proper name to defend. The ground given, buddhi-bodha revered by the vibudha (the wise, and also the gods), is stated in terms of knowledge rather than of a person.
Shankara, taken apart into its syllables. Śaṁ-kara is literally “welfare-maker,” and Manatunga grants the name by etymology, restating the parts in his reason clause: bhuvana-traya-śaṅkaratvāt, from being a welfare-maker for the three worlds. He accepts the word. He does not accept Shiva.
Dhata, and the one place he is careful to the point of caution. Dhātṛ is the ordainer, the arranger, in most usage the creator. Jainism has no creator: the universe is uncreated, beginningless and not the work of any will, and this is not a marginal position but a central one. So the reason clause narrows the name to almost nothing: not the making of the world, but the vidhāna of the vidhi of the śiva-mārga, the laying down of the rule of the road to liberation. He founded a discipline. That is the entire concession, and the triple play on dhā and vidhi keeps the ear busy while the claim shrinks.
The fourth name has no reason clause, and that is the structure. Vyaktam, plainly, evidently. Purushottama is not argued for; it is drawn. The first three are premises with grounds attached and the fourth is what follows, which is why eva, “alone,” reappears in the last line where it appeared in the first.
“Dhīra”: steadfast. One plain word in a stanza of grand ones, and a vocative, so it is addressed rather than described. The hymn does this regularly. It reaches for the largest available vocabulary and then puts an ordinary word in the middle of it.
Traditional Use
The lists disagree, and the first one carries a social cost worth naming.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 25 nazar, dṛṣṭi doṣa nāśaka, destroyer of the evil eye. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to protection from the attacks of enemies. Neither subject is present in the Sanskrit, which contains four names and three reasons and nothing else.
We report both and endorse neither. On the evil eye specifically: the belief does not stay abstract in practice. It resolves into a suspicion about a particular neighbour or relative, very often an older woman, and it has cost real people their standing in real households. A tradition that puts non-injury first has no business supplying a remedy for a harm that works by accusation.
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 four sentences rather than one list. The stanza is built as an argument and it reads as an argument if the ablatives are given their weight.
- The method transfers. Granting a word while declining the thing it usually carries is a way of staying in a conversation without conceding it, and this is the clearest demonstration of it in Jain devotional literature.
- The founding of the śiva-mārga is the only creator-like act the verse allows, and it belongs to Rishabhanatha as the first Tirthankara of this cycle: the one who set out a road, not one who made a world.
Previous: Verse 24, many and one at the same time · Next: Verse 26, four salutations and no argument.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. We print विधानाद् with jinvani.in, the voiced sandhi before व्यक्तं; vidyasagar.net sets विधानात्, which is permissible across the pada break and is not a variant reading. Verse 25 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.