Battle is the only danger in this section that the hymn gives two stanzas to. The second one is much worse to look at than the first.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 43. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 39. The stanza is carried by both; nothing from verse 36 to the end of the hymn is missing on either side, and the offset of four is the gap left by the stanzas this series numbers 32 to 35.
The Verse
वेगावतार-तरणातुर-योध-भीमे ।
युद्धे जयं विजित-दुर्जय-जेय-पक्षास्
त्वत्पाद-पङ्कज-वनाश्रयिणो लभन्ते ॥४३॥
Transliteration:
kuntāgra-bhinna-gaja-śoṇita-vāri-vāha-
vegāvatāra-taraṇātura-yodha-bhīme |
yuddhe jayaṁ vijita-durjaya-jeya-pakṣās
tvat-pāda-paṅkaja-vanāśrayiṇo labhante ||43||
Meaning (literal): In a battle made terrible by warriors frantic to plunge into and swim the rushing flood of blood from elephants split open by lance-points, those who have taken shelter in the lotus-grove of your feet, the opposing side conquered though it was hard to conquer, gain the victory.
What to Notice
The worst line in the hymn is here. Kuntāgra-bhinna-gaja-śoṇita-vāri-vāha: the blood of lance-pierced elephants, running as a river. Then vegāvatāra-taraṇātura, soldiers desperate to get down into that current and swim it. Manatunga has written nothing else like this in forty-two stanzas. The hymn that argued about lamps and moons and stains stops and looks at a battlefield, and does not soften it.
Two words for water, four verses apart. Vāri-vāha, a flood of water, is what the blood is called here. In verse 40 the antidote to the fire was jalam, water. The hymn has now used water as the thing that saves and as the thing made of blood, inside four stanzas. It is not a coded system. He takes the image the sentence needs.
“Vana”, a grove, is placed against the battlefield. Tvat-pāda-paṅkaja-vana, the lotus-grove of your feet. Set that beside the river of blood in the first line and the stanza is built from two landscapes, one of them made of water that kills and one of them made of flowers. The devotee is described only by which of the two he is standing in.
“Vijita-durjaya-jeya-pakṣāḥ” is a knot on purpose. Durjaya, hard to conquer; jeya, to be conquered; vijita, conquered. Three forms of the same root stacked into one compound, in a line that also contains jayam, victory. Four appearances of ji in fourteen syllables. Manatunga did the same trick with krama at verse 39 and with bala at verse 42. In this stretch of the hymn he is working the sound of a single root hard in every stanza.
Battle gets two verses; nothing else does. Elephant, lion, fire, snake, sea, disease and chains have one stanza each. War has verses 42 and 43. When verse 47 lists the dangers it will count saṁgrāma once, which is how eight dangers occupy nine stanzas.
What “victory” means here is left open. The verse says the devotee gains jayam and that the enemy ranks were conquered. It does not say by whom, or how, or that anyone was killed, and it does not say the devotee fought. This is the most that can honestly be got out of the Sanskrit, and it is less than the labels attached to it claim.
Traditional Use
The two Digambara editions promise victory. The healing manual, dealing with the same stanza, promises something close to its opposite.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 43 yuddha meṁ rakṣaka aura vijaya dāyaka, protector in war and giver of victory; jinvani.in heads it raṇaraṅga vijaya mantra, victory on the field. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual gives “for maintaining peace and harmony between nations.”
We report all three and endorse none. The manual’s reading is the gentler one and it is no more present in the verse than the others: the Sanskrit is about winning a battle, not about preventing one, and rewriting it into a peace verse is as much an addition as turning it into a weapon. Our position on victory over other people is the one recorded at verses 21, 22, 28 and 42, and it applies here with the extra force that this stanza is describing a river of blood. A hymn can contain a battlefield without the reader being entitled to a battlefield outcome.
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
- Do not skip the first line because it is unpleasant. The stanza is constructed so that the shelter in the last line means something only against the scene in the first, and reciting the second half alone is reciting half a sentence.
- Notice that the devotee in this verse is not described as brave, skilled or armed. He is described entirely by where he has taken shelter.
- The tradition’s account of Rishabhanatha has him abdicate rather than fight, and his own sons fall into a war over the kingdom he left. Read against that, a stanza about winning battles is a harder thing than the labels make it.
Previous: Verse 42, an army behaves like darkness · Next: Verse 44, the sea is not calmed.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. jinvani.in adds a visarga to लभन्ते; DigJainWiki sets कुन्ताप्र for कुन्ताग्र, बेगावतार for वेगावतार and योभीमे for योध-भीमे, all of which the Vasantatilaka scansion rules out as readings, so they are typesetting errors. With those corrected the four editions agree on this stanza. 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.