The eight marvels are finished. He stands up and walks, and the stanza does something none of the previous eight did: it names who is arranging all this.
Which Verse This Is
Both traditions carry this stanza, under different numbers.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 36. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 32, because that recension does not carry the four stanzas this series numbers 32 to 35. In the Shvetambara text it follows directly on the triple umbrella. From here to the end of the hymn the offset is constant at four: Digambara 37 is Shvetambara 33, Digambara 48 is Shvetambara 44.
The Verse
पर्युल्लसन्नख-मयूख-शिखाभिरामौ ।
पादौ पदानि तव यत्र जिनेन्द्र धत्तः
पद्मानि तत्र विबुधाः परिकल्पयन्ति ॥३६॥
Transliteration:
unnidra-hema-nava-paṅkaja-puñja-kāntī
paryullasan-nakha-mayūkha-śikhābhirāmau |
pādau padāni tava yatra jinendra dhattaḥ
padmāni tatra vibudhāḥ parikalpayanti ||36||
Meaning (literal): Your two feet, having the beauty of a heap of fresh golden lotuses newly opened, lovely with the flame-tips of the rays glancing from their nails: wherever, O lord of Jinas, they set down their steps, there the gods fashion lotuses.
What to Notice
The gods finally appear. Vibudhāḥ parikalpayanti, the gods arrange them. For eight consecutive stanzas the marvels had no agent: the form shone, the drum sounded, the shower fell, the halo threw down other lights, and not one sentence named who was responsible. Verse 36 names them, and the placement is exact. The agent shows up in the first stanza after the pratiharya block closes, at the moment the hymn no longer needs the reader to be looking at the Jina.
The simile turns into the fact. The first half says his feet are like a heap of newly opened golden lotuses. The second half says that wherever those feet come down, gods make lotuses. The comparison of the first two lines is then physically laid on the ground in the last two, so that the poetic image and the reported marvel are the same object. This is the tightest construction in this part of the hymn.
Three p-words, and they are the frame. Pādau, feet. Padāni, steps. Padmāni, lotuses. Feet place steps, gods place lotuses, and the three nouns sit at the head of their clauses in consecutive lines. Manatunga has spent the whole pratiharya block refusing available wordplay; here he takes one, and it is structural rather than decorative.
Everything is in the dual, and it stays there. Kāntī, abhirāmau, pādau: dual forms, not plural, not singular. Two feet, exactly. Sanskrit has a dual and most poets use it when they must; the accumulation of three duals in two lines keeps the reader’s attention on a specific pair of feet rather than on a general radiance, which is what the whole hymn has been describing until now.
“Unnidra”: not asleep. The standard Sanskrit way of saying that a flower has opened is to say it is awake, and its closing is sleep. Twenty-seven verses earlier, at verse 9, a pond of lotuses opened because the sun’s light reached it and not because the sun came to the pond. The same flower, in the same state of having opened, is now underfoot. The hymn’s image bank is small and it keeps circling back.
These lotuses are not one of the eight. The tradition’s lists put the golden lotuses that appear under a Tirthankara’s feet among the atiśayas, the extraordinary attributes, rather than among the eight pratihāryas, which verse 35 completed. Verse 36 has crossed a boundary in the source material even though nothing in the poetry announces it.
They are made wherever he goes. Parikalpayanti is a present tense with habitual force, and yatra … tatra, wherever, wherever. This is not a single event. He walks and the ground is prepared continuously, which in the tradition’s own accounts is precisely the point: a Tirthankara’s feet do not touch the earth.
Traditional Use
The lists disagree, and one of them has left the tradition entirely.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 36 sampatti-dāyaka, giver of wealth. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to the removal of vastu dosha.
We report both and endorse neither. The wealth label is the standard transactional promise and it meets the standard objection recorded at verse 28: it is unfalsifiable, it takes credit for good years and is silent about bad ones, and the stanza it is attached to describes two feet and some flowers.
The vastu label is a different problem and worth naming plainly. Vastu shastra is a separate system with its own literature, its own practitioners and its own claims about buildings. It is not a Jain category, it has no standing in Jain doctrine, and a Jain hymn to a Tirthankara has nothing to say about the orientation of a kitchen. This series has made the same objection once already about planets: the Bhaktamar Stotra is not a graha remedy, and Jain graha shanti uses the separate Navagraha Shanti Stotra. The pattern is the same one. A modern manual reaches for whichever anxiety is currently marketable and attaches it to a verse that does not mention it.
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 it immediately after verse 31 once, the way a Shvetambara reciter does, and then after verse 35, the way a Digambara reciter does. Both sequences work and they do not feel the same, and that is the most useful thing anyone can learn about the two recensions.
- Follow the three p-words in recitation. They are audible, and they carry the stanza’s argument from his body to the ground.
- The gods lay the flowers. Rishabhanatha walks. Nine stanzas in, the hymn has still not given him a single transitive verb.
Previous: Verse 35, one sound, every language · Next: Verse 37, the planets are shining too.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. The three agree on this stanza and differ only in word division and in writing पंकज-पुंज for पङ्कज-पुञ्ज, which is orthographic. All three carry the dual कान्ती, not कान्ति. This verse is verse 36 in the Digambara 48-verse recension and verse 32 in the Shvetambara 44-verse recension; recension mapping follows Jainpedia and the English Wikipedia article on the Bhaktamara Stotra. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.