The snake is red-eyed, hooded and already striking. The verse does not remove it. It says a man walks over it.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 41. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 37. The stanza is carried by both traditions; the difference of four is the gap left by the stanzas this series numbers 32 to 35, which the Shvetambara text does not carry.
The Verse
क्रोधोद्धतं फणिन-मुत्फण-मापतन्तम् ।
आक्रामति क्रमयुगेन निरस्त-शङ्कस्
त्वन्नाम-नागदमनी हृदि यस्य पुंसः ॥४१॥
Transliteration:
raktekṣaṇaṁ samada-kokila-kaṇṭha-nīlaṁ
krodhoddhataṁ phaninam utphaṇam āpatantam |
ākrāmati krama-yugena nirasta-śaṅkas
tvan-nāma-nāgadamanī hṛdi yasya puṁsaḥ ||41||
Meaning (literal): The man in whose heart your name is the nāgadamanī herb treads with his two feet, all misgiving thrown off, upon the snake: red-eyed, dark as the throat of a cuckoo in rut, reared up in anger, hood spread, falling upon him.
What to Notice
“Nāgadamanī” is a plant, not a metaphor for one. The nāgadamanī is a herb of the Indian materia medica used against snakebite, and its name means simply “the snake-subduer.” Manatunga does not say the name is like an antidote. He says the name, held in the heart, is the herb. It is the same unhedged equation as verse 40, where the chanting was called water and not likened to it. Twice in a row the hymn declines the simile it has used for thirty-nine stanzas.
The cuckoo comes back, and it is darker now. In verse 6 the kokila was the poet: an unmusical bird that sings anyway because the mango has budded. Here the cuckoo supplies a colour, the blue-black of its throat when it is in rut, and the colour belongs to a snake. Manatunga reuses his images without protecting them, and a reader who wants each figure to keep one fixed meaning across the hymn will be disappointed on almost every page.
“Ākrāmati” is the verb that verse 39 refused. Two stanzas ago the lion does not tread, na ākrāmati, on the man. Here the man does tread on the snake. The same verb, negated for the beast and affirmed for the person, two verses apart. If you read these stanzas as a run rather than as separate charms, this is the joint where the run turns.
Nothing happens to the snake. It is not killed, charmed, sent away or made harmless. It is still red-eyed and still striking in the last word of the second line. What has changed is on the man’s side: nirasta-śaṅka, his misgiving thrown off. The stanza is about a change in the person, and it is careful enough to leave the snake exactly as it found it.
“Hṛdi”, in the heart, is where the whole claim lives. Not on the tongue, not in the ear, not written on a leaf. The hymn has said something similar before, but never this economically: the working part is what a person is carrying, and it is carried internally.
Traditional Use
The two Digambara editions read this stanza as being about snakes, which it is. The healing manual reads it as being about the planets, which it is not, and that is worth stopping on.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 41 sarpa viṣa nivāraka, remover of snake venom; jinvani.in heads it sarpa-bhaya-nivāraṇa mantra, remover of the fear of snakes. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to removing the negative effects of planetary positions.
We report the manual’s label and decline it, and here we can be more specific than usual about why. The Bhaktamar Stotra is not a planetary text. It never mentions a graha; it addresses one Tirthankara across forty-eight stanzas and describes, in this section, animals, fire, water, illness and chains. The Jain tradition does have a hymn for planetary propitiation and it is a different composition, the Navagraha Shanti Stotra. Attaching a graha remedy to this stanza is an innovation of the last few decades, and the honest thing to say about it is that it is new, not that it is old.
On the two labels that do match the verse, we still do not endorse them as instructions. Snakebite is a medical emergency. The venom of a krait or a Russell’s viper is treated with antivenom given quickly in a hospital, and recitation is not a treatment. If someone has been bitten, get them to a hospital. This is the position the series took at verse 26 on childbirth and at verse 27 on leprosy and it does not change for snakes.
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 the first two lines as one long object and do not look for the subject until the third line. Manatunga withholds the man until the danger is fully drawn, and reciting it any other way loses the shape.
- The stanza describes courage and not immunity. Nirasta-śaṅka is a state of mind. Nothing in the Sanskrit says the snake will not bite.
- The name in question is a name of Rishabhanatha, and the tradition is consistent that he does nothing in response to it. What the verse describes is a herb someone is carrying, not a call someone is answering.
Previous: Verse 40, a name that behaves like water · Next: Verse 42, an army behaves like darkness.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. We print क्रमयुगेन with vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki; jinvani.in sets क्रमयुगेण, which the retroflexion rule operating within a single compound would in fact favour, and which the metre does not decide either way, so we record it rather than dismiss it. vidyasagar.net and jain24.com also set पुंस for पुंसः, which is a dropped visarga rather than a variant. The stanza scans as clean Vasantatilaka. 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 disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.