The loudest thing in the hymn is in this stanza, and it is answered by a comparison with something that makes no sound at all.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 42. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 38. The stanza is present in both; the offset of four is the gap left by the stanzas this series numbers 32 to 35, which the Shvetambara text does not carry.
The Verse
माजौ बलं बलवता-मपि भूपतीनाम् ।
उद्यद्-दिवाकर-मयूख-शिखापविद्धं
त्वत्कीर्तनात्तम इवाशु भिदामुपैति ॥४२॥
Transliteration:
valgat-turaṅga-gaja-garjita-bhīma-nādam
ājau balaṁ balavatām api bhūpatīnām |
udyad-divākara-mayūkha-śikhāpaviddhaṁ
tvat-kīrtanāt tama ivāśu bhidām upaiti ||42||
Meaning (literal): In battle, the army even of powerful kings, terrible with the noise of prancing horses and trumpeting elephants, comes apart at once at the chanting of you, as darkness does when it is pierced by the tips of the rays of the rising sun.
What to Notice
“Balaṁ balavatām”: strength belonging to the strong. Manatunga puts the same root twice in three syllables and it is not decoration. Bala is both an army and strength. The line reads, more or less, “the strength of the strong,” and the stanza then compares that doubled strength to darkness, which has no strength at all and only looks solid until something is shone at it.
Darkness returns, forty-two verses in. The very first stanza had dalita-pāpa-tamo-vitānam, the canopy of the darkness of sin split apart. Verse 7 had the sun’s rays breaking night. Verse 18 had a face that dispelled the great darkness of delusion. This is the fourth time the sun-and-darkness figure carries the weight of a stanza, and here it is applied to something as concrete as cavalry. The hymn’s most abstract image and its most physical subject meet in one line.
“Bhidām upaiti”: it goes to a breaking, not to a death. The verb says the army splits, comes apart, disperses. It does not say the army is killed. That distinction is small in English and large in a Jain hymn, and Manatunga, who could have chosen a word for destruction, chose one for dissolution. The comparison enforces it: darkness that is pierced by light is not destroyed, it stops being where it was.
The one who chants is not mentioned. As at verse 40, the sentence contains a danger and an act of chanting and nothing in between. There is no devotee, no king on the other side, no army of one’s own. Whatever the manuals do with this stanza, the Sanskrit does not put a person in it who is winning.
“Śikhā”, the tip of a ray, is the precise word. Not the ray, the point of it. The same word appeared in verse 40 as the tip of a flame, two stanzas ago. In both places Manatunga wants the very edge of the thing, the part that arrives first.
Traditional Use
Both editions and the manual read this as a battlefield verse, and each of them adds something the verse does not say.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 42 yuddha bhaya nivāraka, remover of the fear of war; jinvani.in heads it raṇa-raṅge śatru parājaya mantra, defeat of the enemy on the field of battle. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual gives “helps to control the furious king of another country and stops war.”
We report all three and endorse none of them. The three labels are not the same claim. “Remover of fear of war” stays inside the stanza. “Defeat of the enemy” and “control the king of another country” step outside it in the direction of power over other people, and the series has taken the same position on that at verses 21, 22 and 28: a boon that consists of one person prevailing over another is not one this tradition has room for, and we will not pass it on as though the hymn granted it.
It is worth saying plainly that the tension here is old and is not our invention. A hymn addressed to a Tirthankara, in a tradition whose first vow is ahiṁsā, has had victory-in-battle labels attached to it by its own commentators for centuries. We are not going to pretend those labels are absent, and we are not going to smooth them over. We record them and note that the stanza itself describes an army dispersing, not an enemy destroyed.
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 two lines aloud and the second two quietly. The stanza is an argument about volume, and it makes it by getting quieter.
- Read bhidām upaiti as dispersal every time. Reading it as slaughter is available in English and is not what the Sanskrit or the simile supports.
- The hymn’s subject is Rishabhanatha, who in the tradition’s own accounts renounced a kingdom rather than defended one. Whatever this stanza is doing, a request for military advantage sits badly beside the life of the person it addresses.
Previous: Verse 41, the herb kept in the heart · Next: Verse 43, the river the soldiers try to cross.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. We print उद्यद्-दिवाकर with jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and jain24.com; DigJainWiki sets प्रोद्यद्दिवाकर, which is a genuine variant rather than a slip, scans identically in Vasantatilaka, and so cannot be decided by the metre; we record it. jinvani.in adds a visarga to भिदामुपैति, and DigJainWiki sets वलगत् for वल्गत् and गजगजित for गज-गर्जित, all of which are typesetting errors and not readings. 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.