The fifth marvel is the first one you hear rather than see. It is a drum in the open sky with no drummer under it.
Which Verse This Is
This is the first stanza in the hymn where the two traditions part, so the label comes before the text.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension. Verse 32 is one of the four stanzas the Shvetambara 44-verse recension does not carry. It has no Shvetambara verse number. Shvetambara editions that print it at all print it in an appendix, and in the Shvetambara text verse 31 is followed directly by the stanza this series numbers 36.
The Verse
त्रैलोक्य-लोक-शुभ-सङ्गम-भूति-दक्षः ।
सद्धर्म-राज-जय-घोषण-घोषकः सन्
खे दुन्दुभिर्ध्वनति ते यशसः प्रवादी ॥३२॥
Transliteration:
gambhīra-tāra-rava-pūrita-dig-vibhāgas
trailokya-loka-śubha-saṅgama-bhūti-dakṣaḥ |
saddharma-rāja-jaya-ghoṣaṇa-ghoṣakaḥ san
khe dundubhir dhvanati te yaśasaḥ pravādī ||32||
Meaning (literal): Filling every division of the directions with a deep and far-carrying sound, skilled at producing the good fortune of an auspicious gathering for the people of the three worlds, being the crier of the proclamation of the victory of the king of true dharma, the drum sounds in the sky, the herald of your fame.
What to Notice
The fifth pratiharya: the deva-dundubhi. Four marvels have been seen. This one is heard. The ashoka tree, the lion throne, the whisks and the umbrellas were all arranged around a body; the drum is placed khe, in the sky, and it is the first item in the sequence that is not near him at all.
Nobody is beating it. There is no drummer in the stanza, no deva named, no hand. The verb is dhvanati, it sounds, intransitive and without an agent. This is the same grammatical habit the hymn has held since verse 9, where the sun did not travel to the pond, but here it is applied to a percussion instrument, which is a harder case: a drum with no striker is a deliberate image and not an accident of syntax.
“Gambhīra-tāra”: deep and piercing at once. Gambhīra is low, grave, resonant. Tāra is high, loud, carrying. Manatunga puts them in the same compound, which as a description of sound is a contradiction and as a description of a large drum heard from far away is exactly right. It is the most precise piece of acoustics in the hymn.
Sound fills, light points. Everything in verses 28 to 31 was directional: a form beside a cloud, a disc on a summit, whisks on two sides, umbrellas above. The drum is pūrita-dig-vibhāga, filling the divisions of the quarters. The change of sense brings a change of geometry with it, and it is the reason this stanza feels larger than the four before it.
The drum’s job is to convene. Śubha-saṅgama-bhūti-dakṣaḥ: skilled at bringing about the good fortune of an auspicious gathering. Dakṣa, competent, is a strange word to apply to an object, and it tells you what the drum is for. It is not applause. It is a summons, and the thing it summons is the samavasarana, the assembly that comes to hear.
The vocabulary is a war proclamation. Saddharma-rāja-jaya-ghoṣaṇa, the announcement of the victory of the king of true dharma, is the language of a herald riding out after a battle. The hymn permits itself this because of the title it is addressing: Jina means one who has conquered, and what was conquered was in the conqueror. There is no enemy in the stanza and no army, and a reader who has followed the argument of verses 20 to 27 already knows where the fighting took place.
“Pravādī,” herald, is the last word. The drum does not celebrate. It reports. It is the second object in three stanzas, after the umbrella at verse 31, to be given the job of making a statement, and in both cases Manatunga assigns the claim to a thing rather than making it himself.
Traditional Use
The lists agree here in substance, and what they agree on is a childhood killer.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 32 saṅgrahaṇī ādi udara pīḍā nāśaka, destroyer of sangrahani and other abdominal complaints. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to curing diarrhoea.
We report both and we refuse both flatly. Diarrhoeal disease remains one of the leading causes of death among children under five in India, and it does not kill by way of the gut. It kills by dehydration, over a day or two, in a manner that oral rehydration salts and zinc reverse for a few rupees at any primary health centre, free of charge. There is no illness in this list where substituting recitation for treatment is cheaper to avoid or more expensive to get wrong. A child who is drowsy, sunken-eyed or not passing urine needs fluids now and a doctor now.
The stanza contains a drum, a sky and a proclamation. It says nothing about a body, and it is worth being blunt that the traditional labels through this whole stretch have stopped tracking the words on the page altogether.
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
- If you recite the 44-verse text, this stanza is not in it, and nothing is missing from your recitation. Both transmissions are complete as they stand.
- Listen for the shift from eye to ear. Four stanzas of looking and then a sound that fills the directions is a real change in the hymn, and it is lost when the pratiharya block is read as a list of eight equivalent items.
- The drum announces a victory won by Rishabhanatha over nothing outside himself. Carry that into the martial language rather than around it.
Previous: Verse 31, three umbrellas and a shut-out sun · Next: Verse 33, the shower that turns into speech.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. We print दिग्विभाग with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki; vidyasagar.net sets दिग्वभाग, which leaves the line a syllable short, so the metre decides it. We print प्रवादी, the nominative singular of pravādin, with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki; vidyasagar.net sets प्रवादि. The final syllable of a Vasantatilaka pada is free, so the metre cannot settle that one and the grammar does. jinvani.in sets दुन्दुभि-ध्र्वनति, a broken conjunct rather than a variant. Verse 32 is carried only by the Digambara 48-verse recension; the Shvetambara 44-verse recension omits it. Recension mapping follows Jainpedia and the English Wikipedia article on the Bhaktamara Stotra. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which agree in substance here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.