The seventh marvel is a ring of light, and with it the hymn walks back into the argument it spent verses 13 to 19 conducting.
Which Verse This Is
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension. Verse 34 is the third of the four stanzas the Shvetambara 44-verse recension does not carry, and it has no Shvetambara verse number. Shvetambara editions that print it place it in an appendix.
The Verse
लोक-त्रये द्युतिमतां द्युतिमाक्षिपन्ती ।
प्रोद्यद्-दिवाकर-निरन्तर-भूरि-संख्या
दीप्त्या जयत्यपि निशामपि सोम-सौम्याम् ॥३४॥
Transliteration:
śumbhat-prabhā-valaya-bhūri-vibhā vibhos te
loka-traye dyutimatāṁ dyutim ākṣipantī |
prodyad-divākara-nirantara-bhūri-saṁkhyā
dīptyā jayaty api niśām api soma-saumyām ||34||
Meaning (literal): O all-pervading one, the great radiance of your gleaming ring of light, casting down the brightness of everything bright in the three worlds, as numerous as suns rising without a break, conquers by its blaze even the night that is gentle with the moon.
What to Notice
The seventh pratiharya: the bhamandala. The halo, the disc or ring of light behind the head that is the most widely recognised marker of a Tirthankara image and of a great deal else in Indian art. Manatunga calls it prabhā-valaya, a circle of splendour, which is the plain descriptive term rather than the technical one.
This is the sun and the moon problem, solved. Go back to what the hymn established earlier. At verse 13 the moon was cut down to a night worker. At verse 17 the sun was named as failing three ways: it sets, it is eclipsed, it is shut inside a cloud. At verse 18 the Jina was a moon with no waning and no night. Verse 34 does the arithmetic: the halo has the number of many suns and it defeats the night that the moon makes gentle. It takes the quantity of one luminary and the register of the other, and both of the defects the hymn spent six stanzas cataloguing are simply gone.
Two readings of the last line, and we are not going to smooth them. Dīptyā jayaty api niśāṁ api soma-saumyām can be taken as “by its blaze it overcomes even a moon-gentle night,” meaning it is brighter than moonlight, or as “blazing though it is, it surpasses even the moon-gentle night,” meaning it is brighter than many suns and still easier on the eye than moonlight. The doubled api pushes towards the second. The Sanskrit supports both, no edition we consulted disambiguates it, and the second reading is the one that makes the stanza continue the argument of verses 16 to 18 rather than merely repeat it. We print the literal and leave the choice with the reader.
“Bhūri” twice. Bhūri-vibhā in the first line, bhūri-saṁkhyā in the third. Much light, many in number. The repetition is not elegant and Manatunga does not usually do this, which is one of the reasons the four disputed stanzas have been questioned on style as well as on manuscript grounds. We note it as an observation, not as a verdict; nothing in this series takes a position on authorship.
“Ākṣipantī”: throwing down, not outshining. The participle is aggressive. Ākṣip is to cast aside, to hurl away, to discredit. The brightness of everything bright in the three worlds is not simply exceeded, it is thrown out. This is the most forceful verb in the pratiharya block, and it sits in the stanza that describes the most static of the eight objects.
“Vibho,” the vocative, is doing quiet work. Vibhu means pervading, present everywhere, and it is one of the borrowed epithets the hymn argued about at verses 23 to 25. Reaching for it here, in the stanza about a ring of light that fills the visible field, is neat enough that it is probably deliberate.
Traditional Use
The lists agree in substance, and one of them appears to contain a printing error that changes its meaning entirely.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 34 garva rakṣaka, which as printed means protector of pride and is not a coherent benefit. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns the same verse to the prevention of miscarriage. Read together, the near-certain intention is garbha rakṣaka, protector of the womb, and the single consonant that separates the two words is the whole difference. We record the printed reading and the likely one rather than silently correcting it.
We report both and we refuse them flatly. A verse advertised as preventing miscarriage does two kinds of harm and neither is small. The first is that it puts a preventability where there is none: the large majority of first-trimester losses are chromosomal accidents that nothing available to anyone would have changed, and a woman who has been told a recitation prevents them is being handed a reason to believe her loss was her failure. The second is delay. Bleeding or one-sided pain in early pregnancy can be an ectopic pregnancy, which ruptures and is a haemorrhage emergency, and incomplete miscarriage can become sepsis. Both are survivable with same-day care. Neither waits.
The stanza describes a circle of light. It says nothing about pregnancy, and there is no reading of it that does.
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 verse 17, verse 18 and verse 34 in that order once. The halo stanza is an answer, and it is nearly inaudible as one if it is read inside the pratiharya block alone.
- Sit with the ambiguity in the last line instead of resolving it. A light that is brighter than suns and gentler than moonlight is a contradiction only if light is the subject.
- The ring is behind the head of Rishabhanatha and it is not his doing. Seven marvels in, the hymn has still not attributed a single one of them to him.
Previous: Verse 33, the shower that turns into speech · Next: Verse 35, one sound, every language.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. We print लोक-त्रये द्युतिमतां with jinvani.in and vidyasagar.net; the DigJainWiki setting लोकत्रय तिमतां द्यु तिमाक्षिपन्ती is a typesetting collapse that leaves the pada short of fourteen syllables, and the metre decides against it. vidyasagar.net sets दिवाकर् with a broken virama. Verse 34 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, whose गर्व is read here as a probable misprint for गर्भ, and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.