A forest fire is coming at you head on and it is hungry. The stanza answers it with one metaphor and no argument.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 40. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 36. The stanza is present in both; the offset of four comes entirely from the stanzas this series numbers 32 to 35, which the Shvetambara text does not carry, and it holds to the end of the hymn.
The Verse
दावानलं ज्वलित-मुज्ज्वल-मुत्स्फुलिङ्गम् ।
विश्वं जिघत्सुमिव सम्मुख-मापतन्तं
त्वन्नाम-कीर्तन-जलं शमयत्यशेषम् ॥४०॥
Transliteration:
kalpānta-kāla-pavanoddhata-vahni-kalpaṁ
dāvānalaṁ jvalitam ujjvalam utsphuliṅgam |
viśvaṁ jighatsum iva sammukham āpatantaṁ
tvan-nāma-kīrtana-jalaṁ śamayaty aśeṣam ||40||
Meaning (literal): The forest fire, blazing, brilliant, throwing sparks, like the flame whipped up by the wind at the end of an aeon, falling upon one head on as though it meant to devour the world: the water that is the chanting of your name quiets it entirely.
What to Notice
The wind of the aeon’s end, for the third time. Kalpānta-kāla-pavana is Manatunga’s recurring extreme. It appeared in verse 4, where that wind lashed the ocean into a churn of crocodiles, and in verse 15, where it struck Mount Meru and Meru did not move. Here it fans a fire. He has now used the same apocalyptic wind to make water dangerous, to fail against a mountain, and to make fire worse. It is the hymn’s stock unit for the largest force a reader can picture.
“Jalam” is doing the work, not the fire. The whole first three lines are the fire; the fourth line is one compound, tvan-nāma-kīrtana-jalam, the water consisting of the chanting of your name. The equation is stated flat, without iva, without “as if.” Everything hedged in this stanza is on the fire’s side: the fire is like the aeon’s wind, it comes as though to eat the world. The water is not compared to anything. It is simply called water.
“Jighatsu”: it wants to eat. A desiderative form: desirous of devouring. Sanskrit gives fire an appetite easily, and the word turns a physical event into something with an intention, which is what a fire coming at you feels like. Then iva takes the intention back. It only seems to want.
“Aśeṣam”, entirely, arrives last. The same word closed verse 27, where the virtues occupied the Jina aśeṣa, without remainder. Here nothing of the fire is left. Manatunga likes to end a sentence by removing the last of something.
Fire and water are the hymn’s oldest pair, reversed. Verse 7 had the sun’s rays splitting darkness; verse 16 had a lamp with no smoke and no oil. Light has been the good thing all through the hymn. Here light is the danger and something cooler puts it out. The imagery is not fixed, and reading these stanzas as a single symbolic system will produce contradictions the poet never intended.
No one is named as being saved. Compare verse 39, where a man is at least inside the picture. Here there is no devotee in the sentence at all. There is a fire and there is the chanting, and the chanting quiets the fire. Whatever else the stanza is doing, it is not describing a rescue.
Traditional Use
The lists agree here, for once, and they agree with the verse.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 40 agni bhaya nivāraka, remover of the fear of fire; jinvani.in heads it agni bhaya-śamana mantra; the Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual gives “eradicates fear from fire.” All three read the stanza as being about fire, which it plainly is.
We report the agreement and still do not turn it into a promise. Note what all three labels actually say: they are about fear of fire. That is closer to the verse than to what a reader will assume. Nothing in the stanza tells anyone to stay in a burning building. If you are near a fire, leave, and call the people whose work it is to put it out. A stanza recited on the way out is a different thing from a stanza recited instead of leaving, and only the first of those is what any of these sources is describing.
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 first three lines fast and the fourth slowly. The stanza is built that way: three lines of accelerating danger and one line that does not hurry.
- The metaphor is worth keeping literal. Water does not argue with fire, persuade it or defeat it. It lowers the temperature until there is nothing to burn.
- The hymn is addressed to Rishabhanatha, and the tradition holds that he neither hears the chanting nor sends the water. What the verse gives you is the chanting itself, which is the only part of this that is in your hands.
Previous: Verse 39, the lion that does not take the next step · Next: Verse 41, the herb kept in the heart.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse; the editions differ only in where they place hyphens and in whether they set उत्स्फुलिङ्गम् or उत्स्फुलिंगम्, which is a matter of typesetting the anusvara and not a variant reading. 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. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net, jinvani.in and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which agree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.