The lion has already killed once this morning and the ground around it is still wet. A man is inside its reach. Nothing happens.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 39. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 35. The two texts are word for word identical through verse 31; the four stanzas the Shvetambara recension does not carry are the ones this series numbers 32 to 35, the last four of the eight pratihāryas, and their absence is why every stanza from verse 36 onward is numbered four lower there. Verse 39 is present in both. From here to the close of the hymn there is no stanza that one tradition has and the other lacks; everything still in dispute is numbering, and it is a consequence of four stanzas already passed. Which tradition is right about those four is not a question this series adjudicates.
The Verse
मुक्ताफल-प्रकर-भूषित-भूमि-भागः ।
बद्ध-क्रमः क्रम-गतं हरिणाधिपोऽपि
नाक्रामति क्रम-युगाचल-संश्रितं ते ॥३९॥
Transliteration:
bhinnebha-kumbha-galad-ujjvala-śoṇitākta-
muktāphala-prakara-bhūṣita-bhūmi-bhāgaḥ |
baddha-kramaḥ krama-gataṁ hariṇādhipo’pi
nākrāmati krama-yugācala-saṁśritaṁ te ||39||
Meaning (literal): Even the lord of deer, the ground about him strewn with a scatter of bright pearls smeared with blood, fallen from the split temple-boss of an elephant, his stride gathered for the leap, does not spring upon one who has come within his stride, if that one has taken shelter at the mountain that is your pair of feet.
What to Notice
One word, three times. Krama means a step, a stride, a foot. Manatunga uses it three times in two lines and means something different each time: baddha-kramaḥ, the lion with its stride gathered; krama-gatam, the man who has come within stride; krama-yuga, your two feet. The lion’s step, the distance, and the Jina’s feet are the same word. The verse is a small machine for putting all three in one place.
The pearls are the detail that dates the image. Sanskrit poetry holds that an elephant’s kumbha, the boss on its forehead, contains pearls. Split it and pearls spill. So the ground is not simply bloody; it is scattered with bright things that have blood on them, and the poet has spent his most decorative line on the aftermath of a kill. This is the hymn at its most physical.
“Acala”: the feet are a mountain. Krama-yugācala, the mountain that is the pair of feet. The image is not new to the hymn. Verse 15 said Mount Meru does not move when the wind of the aeon’s end strikes it; here the same immovability is placed under the devotee. What he has taken shelter at is not a protector who acts but a thing that does not move.
The lion is not tamed, converted or driven off. It is fully itself, blood-smeared and gathered to spring, and it simply does not complete the movement. There is no miracle in the sentence: no light, no voice, no intervention. The verb is na ākrāmati, it does not tread. What the verse reports is an absence.
The Jina is not the subject of any verb here. He appears only inside a compound, as the owner of the feet. This is the grammar the hymn set at verse 9 and has kept ever since: a siddha acts on nothing, so the sentence gives him nothing to do.
A run of dangers begins. From verse 38 to verse 46 the hymn names one peril per stanza, and verse 47 will list eight of them together. Verse 38 was the elephant. This is the lion. Fire, the snake, battle, the sea, disease and bondage follow. It is worth reading the nine as one movement rather than as nine detachable charms, which is what the modern manuals have made of them.
Traditional Use
The two Digambara editions and the modern healing manual do not agree, and this time the disagreement is unusually wide.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 39 siṁha bhaya nivāraka, remover of the fear of the lion; jinvani.in heads the same stanza siṁha-bhaya-vidūraṇa mantra, to the same effect. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it instead to the removal of negative karma from past lives.
We report all three and endorse none. The first two at least describe what is in front of them: the stanza is about a lion. The third is not in the verse at any level, and it sits awkwardly against the tradition’s own account of how karma is shed, which runs through conduct and austerity over time rather than through the recitation of one stanza. We are not saying the manual is dishonest. We are saying it is not transmitting this verse.
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 as one continuous picture and do not stop at the halfway line. The whole first half is scenery; the sentence does not turn until na ākrāmati.
- Notice how little is promised. The man is not saved, rescued or carried off. A movement that was about to happen does not happen, and the verse leaves it there.
- If you are using this stanza against an actual fear, use it as Rishabhanatha is described here: as something that does not move, which you have put yourself next to. That is the whole of the image.
Previous: Verse 38, the elephant coming straight at you · Next: Verse 40, a name that behaves like water.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse; vidyasagar.net and jain24.com set हरिणा-धिपोपि without the avagraha, which is orthography rather than a variant. The stanza scans as clean Vasantatilaka in all four. Recension mapping established from Jainpedia and the Wikipedia article on the stotra, which place the four disputed stanzas at 32 to 35 of the 48-verse numbering; we were unable to locate an online Shvetambara edition printing its own 44-verse numbers, so the correspondence given here is derived from the position of those four rather than read off a Shvetambara text. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net, jinvani.in and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.