The storm is not stilled, the sea monsters are not sent away, and the ship is still up on the crest of the wave at the end of the verse. Only one thing is put down.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 44. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 40. The coincidence of numbers is worth naming so that it does not mislead: the Shvetambara recension has 44 verses in total, and its verse 44 is not this stanza but the last one in the hymn, which this series numbers 48. This stanza is present in both, and the offset of four is the gap left by the stanzas numbered 32 to 35 here.
The Verse
पाठीन-पीठ-भय-दोल्वण-वाडवाग्नौ ।
रङ्गत्-तरङ्ग-शिखर-स्थित-यान-पात्रास्
त्रासं विहाय भवतः स्मरणाद् व्रजन्ति ॥४४॥
Transliteration:
ambhonidhau kṣubhita-bhīṣaṇa-nakra-cakra-
pāṭhīna-pīṭha-bhaya-dolvaṇa-vāḍavāgnau |
raṅgat-taraṅga-śikhara-sthita-yāna-pātrās
trāsaṁ vihāya bhavataḥ smaraṇād vrajanti ||44||
Meaning (literal): On the ocean, churned up and dreadful with its wheel of crocodiles, its pāṭhīna and pīṭha fish, and its terrible submarine fire, men whose ship sits on the crest of a leaping wave, remembering you, put fear aside and go on their way.
What to Notice
Nothing in the sea changes. Read the sentence to the end and check what has happened. The ocean is still churned. The crocodiles are still there. The submarine fire is still burning. The ship is still balanced on the top of a wave, exactly where it was in line three. The only verb that acts on anything is vihāya, having put down, and its object is trāsam, terror. This is the most exact statement in the hymn of what the tradition actually claims these stanzas do.
“Vrajanti”: they go on. Not “they are saved,” not “they reach the shore,” not “they survive.” They travel. The voyage continues. The verse ends with the ship still at sea and the sailors no longer frightened, and it declines to tell you whether they arrived.
“Nakra-cakra” is a quotation of verse 4. The wheeling mass of crocodiles appeared forty stanzas ago, in the same compound, when Manatunga asked who could swim the ocean with his arms and answered that nobody could. Verse 4 was about the impossibility of praising the Jina adequately. This stanza puts the reader in that same sea with an actual ship, and the answer this time is not swimming. It is remembering.
Three oceans in one hymn, and they do not agree. Verse 4: an ocean no arms can cross, and the poet fails at it. Verse 26: bhavodadhi-śoṣaṇa, the ocean of becoming dried up entirely. Verse 44: an ocean nobody dries or crosses, which is simply travelled through with the fear removed. Each stanza takes what it needs from the image and the three readings do not reduce to one doctrine.
He names the fish. Pāṭhīna and pīṭha are particular creatures of the Sanskrit sea, not generic monsters, and Manatunga lists them alongside the vāḍava-agni, the fire said to burn under the ocean in the shape of a mare’s head. The stanza mixes zoology and cosmology without a seam, which is how the danger would have felt to somebody who had been on that water.
Fire again, and inside the water this time. Verse 40 answered fire with water. Four stanzas later the water has fire in it. The hymn will not let a symbol settle.
Traditional Use
All three sources read this as a sea verse, and the two Digambara editions are noticeably more careful than usual.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 44 bhayānaka jala vipatti nāśaka, destroyer of terrible calamity by water; jinvani.in heads it samudra ullaṅghana mantra, for crossing the sea. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual gives “for removing fear of storms.”
We report all three and endorse none. The manual’s label is, unusually, the one closest to the Sanskrit: fear is what the verse actually removes. Even so we will not hand it on as an instruction. Weather at sea is a matter for forecasts, seaworthy boats and harbour masters, and a fisherman who goes out on a bad day because a stanza is supposed to remove storms has been given very poor advice by somebody. The verse describes people who are already out there and who stop being terrified. It says nothing about who should set sail.
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
- Ask, at the end of each recitation, what the sentence actually changed. In this stanza the answer is one word long, and finding it is most of the practice.
- This is the verse to hold against every promise made elsewhere in this section. If you want to know what the hymn thinks it is doing about danger, it is here, stated in the plainest possible terms, and it is smaller and better than the manuals suggest.
- The one remembered is Rishabhanatha, who does not calm the sea, because in this tradition he does not act. The sea stays as it is. The sailor does not.
Previous: Verse 43, the river the soldiers try to cross · Next: Verse 45, the dust called nectar.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. All four print दोल्वण; the underlying word is ulbaṇa, so दोल्बण is the etymologically expected spelling and the व here reflects a North Indian printing convention rather than a variant reading. DigJainWiki sets रङ्गतरङ्ग for रङ्गत्-तरङ्ग, which the Vasantatilaka scansion rules out, so it is a typesetting error. 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 broadly agree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.