The second marvel is a seat. It is called a lion throne, and there is no lion anywhere in the stanza.
The Verse
विभ्राजते तव वपुः कनकावदातम् ।
बिम्बं वियद्-विलसदंशु-लता-वितानं
तुङ्गोदयाद्रि-शिरसीव सहस्र-रश्मेः ॥२९॥
Transliteration:
siṁhāsane maṇi-mayūkha-śikhā-vicitre
vibhrājate tava vapuḥ kanakāvadātam |
bimbaṁ viyad-vilasad-aṁśu-latā-vitānaṁ
tuṅgodayādri-śirasīva sahasra-raśmeḥ ||29||
Meaning (literal): On the lion throne, made many-coloured by the flame-tips of the rays of its jewels, your body, pale as gold, blazes out, like the disc of the thousand-rayed one on the head of the lofty mountain of sunrise, its canopy of ray-creepers glittering across the sky.
What to Notice
The second pratiharya, and it is furniture. The eight marvels that attend a Tirthankara’s assembly are being counted off one per stanza. Verse 28 gave the aśoka tree. Verse 29 gives the siṁhāsana, the lion throne. The list is not building to a climax; it is an inventory, and the hymn takes each item in a single stanza and moves on.
No lion. Siṁhāsana is a compound that has long since stopped being read as a compound: it is simply the word for a throne, in Sanskrit as in the modern Indian languages that borrowed it. Manatunga uses the word and describes jewels, rays and colour, and never once looks at the lions the name refers to. Compare verse 28, where he was equally uninterested in unpacking aśoka, “without sorrow.” Twice in two stanzas he declines a pun that was sitting in front of him.
The throne is described only as light. There is no shape, no size, no material, no craftsmanship. What we are given is maṇi-mayūkha-śikhā-vicitre: variegated by the flame-tips of jewel-rays. Śikhā is the tip of a flame or the crest on a head. The seat is presented as a scattering of coloured points, which is what a jewelled object actually looks like and not at all what a throne is usually described as.
The sun has moved. Verse 28 placed the sun’s disc beside a raincloud. Verse 29 places it on the summit of Udayagiri, the mountain of sunrise. Same sun, same word bimba, second position in two stanzas. The tree gave the light a dark ground to show against; the throne gives it a height to be seen from. Manatunga is running one simile through a sequence and changing only where the sun is standing.
“Vitāna” for the third time. In verse 28 the canopy was the spreading tree, and the canopy of darkness that had been put down. Here it is aṁśu-latā-vitāna, a canopy of ray-creepers spread across the sky at dawn. The word has now covered a tree, a darkness and a sunrise inside two consecutive verses, and each time it is something spread overhead.
“Kanakāvadāta”: the colour is doctrine, not decoration. The tradition assigns each Tirthankara a body colour, and Rishabhanatha’s is gold. The adjective is not the poet reaching for a rich word. It is the iconographic fact, stated plainly, which is why the sun simile follows so easily.
He is still not doing anything. Vibhrājate, shines forth, is middle voice and intransitive, exactly like ābhāti in verse 28. He sits and his form gives off light. The devas arrange the marvels; the Jina occupies them. The hymn has kept this grammar consistent since verse 9 and it does not slip here even in the most ornamental stretch of the poem.
Recension Note
Verse 29 is carried identically by both traditions and bears the same number in both. The Digambara recension of 48 verses and the Shvetambara recension of 44 are word for word the same through verse 31. The divergence begins immediately after that, and this series states the mapping on every page from verse 32 onward.
Traditional Use
The lists disagree, and one of them is a claim about an emergency.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 29 netra pīḍā va bicchū viṣa nāśaka, destroyer of eye pain and of scorpion venom. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it instead to being pulled out of addiction of any kind.
We report both and endorse neither, and on the scorpion the refusal has to be flat. Envenoming by the Indian red scorpion is not a folk complaint. It can drive pulmonary oedema and cardiac failure within hours, it is most dangerous in children, and it is survivable with prazosin and supportive care given early. What kills is delay. Anyone who reaches for this verse in place of a hospital is spending the only resource that matters. Recite it in the vehicle if it steadies you; do not recite it instead of getting in one. Eye injury and sudden eye pain deserve the same answer for the same reason.
On addiction we decline more gently but we still decline. Recovery is real work with real support behind it, and the stanza describes a seat and a sunrise. It offers nothing to anybody and does not claim to.
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
- Read verses 28 and 29 as one movement. They are a single sun placed twice, and the pair is spoiled by reading either alone.
- Notice that the throne has no lions and the tree has no pun. The hymn is at its most decorative here and still refuses the easy ornament.
- The assembly being described is the samavasarana that the tradition places after Rishabhanatha attained omniscience. He is seated in it. He did not build it.
Previous: Verse 28, the sun standing beside a cloud · Next: Verse 30, the only thing in the scene that moves.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. We print विभ्राजते and कनकावदातम् with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki; vidyasagar.net sets विभाजते and कानकावदातम्, and the metre decides against both, since Vasantatilaka requires a heavy syllable in first position (which वि- has only before the conjunct भ्र) and a light one in ninth. We print सहस्र-, the Sanskrit word for a thousand, with jinvani.in; vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki both set सहस्त्र-, a common orthographic slip that scans identically. Verse 29 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.