The virtues have taken the whole house. The faults, who have done rather well elsewhere, have never once come to the door.
The Verse
त्वं संश्रितो निरवकाशतया मुनीश ।
दोषैरुपात्त-विविधाश्रय-जात-गर्वैः
स्वप्नान्तरेऽपि न कदाचिदपीक्षितोऽसि ॥२७॥
Transliteration:
ko vismayo’tra yadi nāma guṇair aśeṣais
tvaṁ saṁśrito niravakāśatayā munīśa |
doṣair upātta-vividhāśraya-jāta-garvaiḥ
svapnāntare’pi na kadācid apīkṣito’si ||27||
Meaning (literal): What is there to wonder at here, if all the virtues without remainder have taken shelter in you, so that no room is left, O lord of sages? By the faults, grown proud of the various lodgings they have found elsewhere, you have never once been so much as glanced at, not even inside a dream.
What to Notice
“Niravakāśatayā”: by there being no room. This is the exact counterpart of kṛtāvakāśam, “room having been made,” in verse 20, and the two stanzas are working the same spatial metaphor from opposite ends. In verse 20 knowledge shone because the obstruction had gone and there was space. Here the space is full and nothing else can be admitted. Jain karma theory is materially spatial in just this way: karma is subtle matter that occupies, and its removal is a vacating rather than a forgiving.
Virtue is not addition. Read the logic and it is doing something more than praise. The verse does not say the virtues are numerous or excellent. It says they are aśeṣa, without remainder, and that their occupancy leaves no room. Virtue and fault are not being weighed on a balance; they are competing tenancies of one space. That is why the tradition’s method is subtractive and why its literature counts what has been shed rather than what has been earned.
The faults are given a personality, and it is funny. Upātta-vividhāśraya-jāta-garvaiḥ: proud, on account of the various accommodations they have secured. Manatunga makes the faults into tenants with an impressive portfolio of properties, pleased with themselves. They are not demons and there is no battle. They are lodgers who have done well in the market and simply never inspected this address.
“Apīkṣitaḥ”: not even glanced at. This is the sharpest word in the stanza and it is easy to read past. He does not say the faults came and were repelled. He says they never looked. There was no encounter, no struggle, no resistance. In the tradition’s own vocabulary that is the difference between upaśama, the suppression of karma under pressure, and kṣaya, its destruction: the liberated state is not restraint holding steady, it is the absence of the occasion.
“Svapnāntare’pi”: even inside a dream. Not hyperbole. Sanskrit ethical literature, Jain included, takes conduct in dreams as a real category, and the lay and monastic manuals discuss transgressions that occur in sleep. Extending the claim into the dream is extending it to the last place a person is not in charge of themselves.
“Ko vismayo’tra”: what is surprising about that. The hymn’s oldest habit. Verse 15 opened citraṁ kim atra, “what is strange in this,” on the way to saying that Mount Meru does not move. Twelve verses later the construction returns for the same purpose: to make an enormous claim sound like the obvious thing.
Traditional Use
The lists disagree, and one of the two is a claim about a disease.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 27 śatrukṛta-hāni nirodhaka, preventer of harm caused by enemies. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to the curing of leprosy.
We report both and we decline both. On leprosy the position needs to be flat. It is caused by a bacterium, it is curable with multidrug therapy, and that therapy is provided free through the national programme in India. The disease has done less damage over the last century than the belief that it is a moral condition, and a printed instruction to recite a verse for it is a small contribution to the second thing. Nothing in this stanza mentions the body, illness or an enemy; its subject is that faults never approached, which is a statement about a liberated soul and not a diagnosis.
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 description of an occupancy rather than of a character. The verse says nothing about effort, resolve or willpower, and reading virtue as achievement is the misreading it is built to prevent.
- The tenant image is worth carrying into an ordinary day. Faults do not usually break in. They take a room that was empty, and they take it because it was empty.
- Verse 20 and verse 27 make a pair, room made and no room left. Read them together once, and then read what the tradition says Rishabhanatha actually did across a thousand years to make one into the other.
Previous: Verse 26, four salutations and no argument · Next: Verse 28, the sun standing beside a cloud.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse; vidyasagar.net breaks the sandhi of अशेषैस्-त्वं across the line and omits two avagrahas, neither of which is a variant reading. Verse 27 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.