A new block opens, and it opens with a bull elephant in musth charging down the line of sight. Read the last line carefully. It does not say what most people remember it as saying.
Which Verse This Is
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 38. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 34. The offset of four holds to the end of the hymn.
The Verse
मत्त-भ्रमद्-भ्रमर-नाद-विवृद्ध-कोपम् ।
ऐरावताभमिभमुद्धतमापतन्तं
दृष्ट्वा भयं भवति नो भवदाश्रितानाम् ॥३८॥
Transliteration:
ścyotan-madāvila-vilola-kapola-mūlaṁ
matta-bhramad-bhramara-nāda-vivṛddha-kopam |
airāvatābham ibham uddhatam āpatantaṁ
dṛṣṭvā bhayaṁ bhavati no bhavad-āśritānām ||38||
Meaning (literal): The base of its cheeks restless and clouded with oozing rut-fluid, its rage swollen by the noise of the maddened bees circling it, an elephant like Airavata, rearing, charging down: on seeing it, no fear arises for those who have taken refuge in you.
What to Notice
A new block begins here. The description of the assembly ran from verse 28 and was summed up at verse 37. From verse 38 the hymn turns to a sequence of great dangers, one to a stanza, each with the same closing move: the danger is drawn in detail and then dissolved. The elephant is the first. A lion, a forest fire and a serpent follow.
The elephant is observed, not invented. Ścyotan-mada, oozing rut-fluid, from the temporal glands of a bull in musth. Madāvila-vilola-kapola-mūla: the base of the cheeks smeared and unsteady. Matta-bhramad-bhramara-nāda-vivṛddha-kopa: bees are drawn to the secretion, they circle and hum, and the noise makes the animal angrier. That is an accurate causal chain about a real animal in a real state, and it is why the stanza frightens people who have never seen an elephant. Manatunga is describing something he or his audience knew.
Airavata is a compliment paid to a threat. Airāvatābham, resembling Airavata, Indra’s own elephant. The comparison does not diminish the danger to make the rescue easier; it makes the danger as large as the tradition’s imagination can make it. The hymn has never once won an argument by shrinking the opposition, from the ocean of virtues at verse 4 to the named gods of verses 21 to 25.
The sound of the last line is the point of the last line. Dṛṣṭvā bhayaṁ bhavati no bhavad-āśritānām. Four bha syllables in eleven, and three of them carry the meaning: bhaya, fear; bhavati, arises; bhavat, you. Fear, arising and you, chiming on the same consonant, in a stanza whose second line has already run matta-bhramad-bhramara. This is the most heavily worked line for sound in the whole hymn.
And here is what it actually says. Bhayaṁ bhavati no: fear does not arise. It does not say the elephant stops. It does not say the elephant turns aside, or is bound, or is subdued, or that the devotee is untouched. The subject of the sentence is fear, and the claim is about what happens inside the person watching. Everything this series has said about the grammar of this hymn since verse 9 applies here in its sharpest form, and the difference between “you will not be afraid” and “you will not be hurt” is the difference between a devotional claim and a false one.
Refuge, not request. Bhavad-āśritānām, of those who have taken refuge in you. A genitive describing a class of people, not an imperative and not a petition. Nobody in this stanza asks for anything, which has been true of every stanza in the hymn.
Compare verse 5. Thirty-three stanzas earlier a doe turned to face a lion out of love for her fawn, and the hymn used her as its image of a small creature acting beyond its capacity. Fear and its absence has been this poem’s subject from the beginning; verse 38 simply puts the animal on the other side.
Traditional Use
The lists agree, and for once the label at least points at the same object as the verse. That does not make it right.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 38 hāthī vaśīkaraṇa, the subjugation of elephants. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to subduing the effects of an intoxicated elephant.
We report both and decline both, for two separate reasons.
The first is textual. The stanza does not claim that the elephant is subdued. It claims that fear does not arise. A manual that converts the second into the first has changed the verse into something Manatunga did not write, and the change is in the direction of a promise the poem carefully avoided making.
The second is practical, and it needs to be flat. Elephants kill several hundred people a year in India, most of them in ordinary encounters near fields, roads and forest edges rather than in dramatic ones. A bull in musth is the single most dangerous large animal a person in this country is likely to meet. If you are in front of one, the things that help are leaving quietly and immediately, putting solid cover between you and it, and heeding the forest department’s warnings about which paths are closed and when. Standing your ground and reciting is not one of them, and no reading of this verse asks you to. It describes people who are not afraid. It does not describe people who stayed.
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
- Recite the last line slowly enough to hear the four bha sounds. The stanza is built on that chime and it is inaudible at speed.
- Hold the distinction the verse holds. Fear is a state, and the hymn’s whole claim is about states. Nothing in it is a claim about what an animal will do.
- Refuge here is āśraya, taking shelter, the same word family as the ashoka tree that Rishabhanatha was saṁśrita, sheltering under, at verse 28. The hymn has quietly moved the shelter from him to the reciter.
Previous: Verse 37, the planets are shining too · Next: Verse 39, the lion that does not take the next step.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and DigJainWiki; the jain24.com Sanskrit page did not resolve for this stretch. We print दृष्ट्वा with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki; vidyasagar.net sets दृष्टवा, which adds a fifteenth syllable to a fourteen-syllable pada, so the metre decides it. We print श्च्योतन्, from the root ścyut, to ooze, with jinvani.in and vidyasagar.net; DigJainWiki sets श्चोतन्, which scans identically and is an orthographic slip rather than a variant reading. This verse is verse 38 in the Digambara 48-verse recension and verse 34 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 here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.