Three stanzas into the description of the assembly, something finally moves, and it is not the Jina.
The Verse
विभ्राजते तव वपुः कलधौत-कान्तम् ।
उद्यच्छशाङ्क-शुचि-निर्झर-वारि-धार-
मुच्चैस्तटं सुर-गिरेरिव शातकौम्भम् ॥३०॥
Transliteration:
kundāvadāta-cala-cāmara-cāru-śobhaṁ
vibhrājate tava vapuḥ kaladhauta-kāntam |
udyac-chaśāṅka-śuci-nirjhara-vāri-dhāram
uccais taṭaṁ sura-girer iva śātakaumbham ||30||
Meaning (literal): Lovely with the beauty of the moving fly-whisks, white as kunda jasmine, your body shines out, beautiful as gold, like the lofty golden slope of the mountain of the gods, with its falling streams of cascade water pure as the rising moon.
What to Notice
The third pratiharya: the chamaras. Cāmara, the yak-tail whisk, is the third of the eight marvels, after the ashoka tree and the lion throne. In the ritual iconography attendants stand on both sides and wave them, and in Indian court practice the whisk is a mark of sovereignty rather than of comfort. The hymn is still working through the same royal inventory.
Half the line is a repeat. Vibhrājate tava vapuḥ: eight syllables identical to the second line of verse 29, in the same metrical position, one stanza later. Manatunga has not run out of words; he has built a frame. The verb, the pronoun and the noun are held fixed and only the final compound changes, so that the two stanzas read as two entries on one list rather than two separate poems.
“Cala,” moving, is the point. Twenty-nine stanzas of light, stillness, absence and negation, and here is the first thing in the scene with motion in it. It is the whisks. The Jina does not move, the throne does not move, the tree does not move. The one moving object in the samavasarana as Manatunga paints it is the item held by somebody else.
White against gold, and then white against gold again. The whisks are kundāvadāta, white as kunda jasmine. The body is kaladhauta-kānta. The simile answers with white cascades falling down a golden slope. The colour scheme of the first half of the stanza is repeated exactly in the second half at the scale of a mountain, which is what the iva is doing: not decorating the image but enlarging it.
The simile settles an ambiguous word. Kaladhauta means gold or silver, and translators have gone both ways. The comparison decides it. The slope is śātakaumbha, made of gold, from Śatakumbha, a name of Meru. If the mountain is gold then the body it is compared to is gold, and the reading that makes the simile work is the reading to take.
Meru, and this hymn has been here before. Sura-giri, the mountain of the gods, is Meru, and verse 15 already put it in the poem: the mountain that does not move when the winds of the end of an age strike it. Fifteen stanzas later Manatunga returns to the same mountain for something entirely different, its shining flank and its waterfalls. The image bank of this hymn is small and heavily reused.
Nothing is offered and nothing is asked. The stanza is a description of an appearance, in the same grammar the hymn has held since verse 9. Vibhrājate, shines forth, middle voice, no object. Somebody else is waving the whisks.
Recension Note
Verse 30 is carried identically by both traditions and bears the same number in both. Verses 1 to 31 are common ground; the Digambara recension of 48 and the Shvetambara of 44 diverge only after verse 31, and this series states the mapping on every page from verse 32 onward.
Traditional Use
The lists disagree, and neither claim survives contact with the stanza.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 30 śatru stambhaka, paralyser of enemies. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to opening the doors of success.
We report both and endorse neither. On power over an enemy the position of this series is the one set out at verses 21 and 22, and it does not change: a tradition whose first vow is non-injury has no room for a recitation that immobilises another person, and reading one into a hymn about a Tirthankara’s assembly is an innovation, not a transmission. On opening the doors of success we make the objection recorded at verse 28: a promise that can absorb every outcome is not a promise, and it works by claiming credit afterwards for whatever happened.
The verse describes two white whisks, a golden body and a waterfall. It makes no offer to the reciter, and it is worth noticing how completely the traditional labels here have stopped tracking the words on the page.
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 verses 28, 29 and 30 in sequence. The repeated half-line is audible only across stanzas, and it is the strongest formal signal in this part of the hymn.
- Sit with the fact that the whisks are the only moving thing. A tradition that describes its highest state by subtraction paints its central figure as motionless and gives all the activity to the attendants.
- The whisks are held by others, the throne is set by others, the tree was already there. Nothing in the scene is the doing of Rishabhanatha, and the hymn never once suggests otherwise.
Previous: Verse 29, a lion throne with no lion · Next: Verse 31, three umbrellas and a shut-out sun.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. We print निर्झर, cascade, with jinvani.in and vidyasagar.net; DigJainWiki sets निर्भर, which scans identically and so is decided by sense rather than by metre. DigJainWiki also sets शशाङ्, a syllable short of शशाङ्क and one syllable short of the line. Verse 30 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.