The fourth marvel makes a claim out loud, and this is the last stanza that the two recensions of the hymn hold in common.
The Verse
मुच्चैः स्थितं स्थगित-भानु-कर-प्रतापम् ।
मुक्ता-फल-प्रकर-जाल-विवृद्ध-शोभं
प्रख्यापयत्-त्रिजगतः परमेश्वरत्वम् ॥३१॥
Transliteration:
chatra-trayaṁ tava vibhāti śaśāṅka-kāntam
uccaiḥ sthitaṁ sthagita-bhānu-kara-pratāpam |
muktā-phala-prakara-jāla-vivṛddha-śobhaṁ
prakhyāpayat tri-jagataḥ parameśvaratvam ||31||
Meaning (literal): Your triple umbrella shines, lovely as the moon, standing high, the fierce heat of the sun’s rays shut off, its beauty swelled by netting strung with masses of pearls, proclaiming your supreme lordship over the three worlds.
What to Notice
The fourth pratiharya: the chhatra-traya. Three tiered umbrellas, one above the other, the fourth of the eight marvels after the ashoka tree, the lion throne and the fly-whisks. In the iconography they are stacked and diminishing, and they are the most reliably identifiable feature of a Tirthankara image after the seated posture itself.
The first of the marvels to say anything. Prakhyāpayat, proclaiming. The tree sheltered, the throne shone, the whisks moved, and none of them made an assertion. The umbrella announces. Three stanzas of pure description end here, and the announcement is placed in the last line where the stanza can do nothing further with it.
And what it announces has been said before. Tri-jagataḥ parameśvaratvam, supreme lordship over the three worlds. Five verses earlier, at verse 26, the same words appeared as tubhyaṁ namas tri-jagataḥ parameśvarāya, a salutation offered in the dative. Here the words come out of an object. The devotee said it as a gift; the umbrella states it as a fact, and Manatunga does not need to repeat himself because he has changed who is speaking.
Two threes in one stanza, and he leaves the arithmetic alone. Chatra-trayam and tri-jagat. The tradition reads the three umbrellas as the three worlds, and the stanza puts both threes in front of the reader without once joining them. This is the fourth time in four stanzas that Manatunga sets up an obvious move and declines to make it.
The sun gets demoted again. In verse 28 the Jina’s form was the disc of the sun. In verse 29 it was the sun on the summit at dawn. In verse 31 the sun is bhānu-kara-pratāpa, the scorching of its rays, and the umbrella exists to shut it off, while the umbrella itself is śaśāṅka-kānta, lovely as the moon. Sun promoted, sun promoted, sun demoted, three stanzas running. The hymn has done this before at verse 17, where the sun failed in three named ways, and at verse 13, where the moon was cut down to a night-shift worker. Manatunga uses the luminaries as tools, not as ranks.
“Muktā” is the past participle “released.” The pearl gets its Sanskrit name from being let go by the shell, and muktā-phala, the word in this line, is literally released-fruit. A hymn about liberation has strung the canopy of its central image with hundreds of them. He says nothing about this either.
Where the Recensions Divide
Verse 31 is the last verse the two transmissions share.
The Digambara recension counts 48 verses, the Shvetambara 44. Verses 1 to 31 are word for word the same in both and carry the same numbers, so nothing in this series so far has turned on the question. From the next stanza it does.
The four stanzas at issue are numbers 32, 33, 34 and 35 in the 48-verse numbering, and they complete the set of eight pratiharyas: the divine drum, the flower shower, the halo and the divine speech. The Shvetambara recension does not carry them in the body of the hymn, and Shvetambara editions that print them place them in an appendix. Jainpedia states that the four additional verses “lie between stanzas 31 and 36” and assigns those four pratiharyas to them; the English Wikipedia article identifies the same four by number. Two independent sources, one mapping.
The consequence for numbering, which follows directly from that omission: what the Digambara recension calls verse 36 is verse 32 in the Shvetambara, 37 is 33, 38 is 34, and so on to the end, where Digambara 48 is Shvetambara 44.
Neither recension is wrong and neither is a corruption of the other. The oldest known manuscript, dated 1332 CE at Patan, carries 44; the Digambara ritual practice of 48 yantras and 48 lamps is equally consistent in the other direction. This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension and states the Shvetambara equivalent on every page from verse 32 onward.
Traditional Use
The lists agree in part, and the part they agree on is a claim about disease.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 31 rājya sammāna dāyaka va carma roga nāśaka, giver of state honour and destroyer of skin disease. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to skin disease of any kind.
We report both and endorse neither, and on the skin the answer is the one this series gave at verse 27. “Any kind of skin disease” covers fungal infection that clears in weeks with treatment, autoimmune conditions that need a specialist, and melanoma, where the whole prognosis is a function of how early somebody looked. Printing a verse against the category is worse than useless, because the category contains at least one thing where delay is the illness. Skin conditions also carry more social punishment in India than almost any other, and a devotional remedy quietly reinforces the idea that they are a moral matter. They are not.
On state honour we simply note that the stanza does proclaim lordship, over the three worlds, belonging to somebody else. It confers nothing on the reciter and does not offer 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 to 31 as a single block before going further. Four marvels, four stanzas, one grammar, and the block is complete and self-contained in both recensions.
- Notice where the assertion sits. Three stanzas of looking earn one line of claim, and the claim is put in the mouth of an umbrella rather than the poet’s.
- The umbrellas mark a sovereignty that Rishabhanatha had already renounced once, as a king, before he attained it in this other sense. The hymn does not point that out. It is worth carrying to the verse anyway.
Previous: Verse 30, the only thing in the scene that moves · Next: Verse 32, a drum nobody is beating.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. Differences between the three are limited to anusvara-for-conjunct spellings such as शशांक for शशाङ्क, which are orthographic and not variant readings. Verse 31 is identical in the Digambara and Shvetambara recensions and is the last verse they share. Recension mapping follows Jainpedia and the English Wikipedia article on the Bhaktamara Stotra, which independently identify the four interpolated stanzas as 32 to 35 of the 48-verse numbering. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which agree in part here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.