Nine stanzas of description close with one word, and then the hymn does the thing it does best: it makes a comparison and quietly narrows the ground it is claiming.
Which Verse This Is
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 37. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 33. The offset of four holds from here to the end of the hymn.
The Verse
धर्मोपदेशन-विधौ न तथा परस्य ।
यादृक्प्रभा दिनकृतः प्रहतान्धकारा
तादृक्कुतो ग्रह-गणस्य विकासिनोऽपि ॥३७॥
Transliteration:
itthaṁ yathā tava vibhūtir abhūj jinendra
dharmopadeśana-vidhau na tathā parasya |
yādṛk prabhā dinakṛtaḥ prahatāndhakārā
tādṛk kuto graha-gaṇasya vikāsino’pi ||37||
Meaning (literal): In this way, O lord of Jinas, as your majesty has been at the work of teaching dharma, so it has not been for anyone else. Such radiance as belongs to the maker of day, which has struck down the darkness: from where would the host of planets have that, even the shining ones among them?
What to Notice
“Ittham” closes the block. In this way, thus. One particle, and everything from verse 28 onward, the tree, the throne, the whisks, the umbrellas, the drum, the flowers, the halo, the speech and the lotuses, is gathered up as vibhūti, majesty, and handed over as evidence for a claim. Nine descriptive stanzas turn out to have been an argument all along, and the argument only becomes visible in retrospect.
The claim is narrower than it looks. Dharmopadeśana-vidhau, at the work of teaching dharma. He does not say his lord is greater than everyone. He says that in this one department, the giving of the teaching, no one else has had what he has had. This is the same instinct that produced the concession at verse 21 and the careful grants of verses 23 to 25: the hymn habitually specifies the ground on which it is claiming, and specifying a ground is the opposite of what a triumphalist text does.
He does not name a rival. Parasya, of another. Singular, indefinite, anonymous. Twelve verses earlier the hymn was naming Hari, Hara, Buddha and Shankara out loud and granting them their words. Here, at the moment of asserting a difference, it declines to say who the other is. Whatever else that is, it is not a taunt.
The sun is promoted again. At verse 31 the sun was heat that an umbrella had to shut out. Here it is dinakṛt, the maker of day, whose radiance has beaten down the darkness. Manatunga has now used the sun as the Jina, as an obstacle, as a failure, and as an unanswerable standard, all within twenty stanzas. The luminaries in this hymn are instruments, and none of them holds a fixed rank.
“Vikāsino’pi”: even the ones that do shine. The concessive is the polite part of the stanza. The planets are not called dim. They are granted their light and then asked, without hostility, where they would get that light from. The construction is yādṛk … tādṛk kutaḥ, such as … from where such. It is a question, not a verdict.
And the reading of that word is genuinely disputed. Vikāsin, from kās, expanding or blooming, against vikāśin, from kāś, shining. Two of three editions give the first, one gives the second, and the two scan identically in Vasantatilaka, so the metre is silent. The sense shifts slightly: planets that are opening out, or planets that are luminous. We print vikāsino’pi with the majority and record the other rather than hiding it.
A note on the planets, since this is where they appear. Graha-gaṇa, the host of planets, is the only mention of grahas anywhere in this hymn, and it is a simile about brightness. The Bhaktamar Stotra is not a planetary-remedy text, it makes no astrological claim, and the tradition’s own graha ritual is a different composition, the Navagraha Shanti Stotra. Anybody selling this verse as a Jain remedy for a difficult Saturn is working from the one word in the poem that could be made to look like an opening.
Traditional Use
The lists agree in substance, and what they agree on is something this series has already declined twice.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 37 durjana vaśīkaraṇa, the subjugation of wicked people. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to changing a cruel person.
We report both and we decline both. Vaśīkaraṇa means bringing another person’s will under your own, and the position of this series on that is settled: it was recorded at verses 21 and 22, restated at verse 28 for the subduing of enemies, and restated again at verse 30 for the paralysing of them. A tradition whose first vow is non-injury and whose entire method is subtraction from oneself does not have a category for a technique that operates on somebody else’s mind. Reciting a verse in the hope that a difficult person will become tractable is not devotion with a practical edge. It is a different activity wearing devotional clothes.
The gentler version, changing a cruel person, is not much better once you notice who it puts the work on. If somebody is being cruel to you, the useful responses are the ordinary ones: distance, witnesses, a complaint, a lawyer, a police station. A stanza comparing a teaching to sunlight is not one of them, and it does not claim to be.
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 28 through verse 37 in one sitting at least once. The last stanza is the one that tells you the previous nine were making a case, and the effect only exists at that length.
- Watch how small the claim is. In the whole of a hymn’s central description, the assertion that finally gets made is about one activity, with the rival unnamed and the planets granted their light.
- The teaching being compared to sunlight is the discourse the tradition places at Purimatala, after Rishabhanatha attained omniscience. Verse 35 has already said it turns into every language by its own nature. Verse 37 says only that nobody else has had it.
Previous: Verse 36, gold lotuses laid under the feet · Next: Verse 38, the elephant coming straight at you.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. We print न तथा परस्य with jinvani.in and vidyasagar.net; DigJainWiki sets न यथा, which scans identically but leaves the correlative यथा without its तथा, so the grammar decides it. We print दिनकृतः with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki; vidyasagar.net sets देनकृतः, which puts a heavy syllable in the fifth position, where Vasantatilaka requires a light one. The metre decides that one. विकासिनोऽपि, with jinvani.in and vidyasagar.net, against DigJainWiki's विकाशिनोऽपि, is a genuine variant of sense that the metre cannot settle, and it is discussed in the body of this page rather than smoothed. This verse is verse 37 in the Digambara 48-verse recension and verse 33 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 agree in substance here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.