This is the one stanza in the run of dangers that does not involve an animal, a weapon or the weather. It is about a swollen belly and a person who has stopped expecting to live.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 45. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 41. 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
शोच्यां दशा-मुपगताश्च्युत-जीविताशाः ।
त्वत्पाद-पङ्कज-रजोऽमृत-दिग्ध-देहा
मर्त्या भवन्ति मकर-ध्वज-तुल्य-रूपाः ॥४५॥
Transliteration:
udbhūta-bhīṣaṇa-jalodara-bhāra-bhugnāḥ
śocyāṁ daśām upagatāś cyuta-jīvitāśāḥ |
tvat-pāda-paṅkaja-rajo’mṛta-digdha-dehā
martyā bhavanti makara-dhvaja-tulya-rūpāḥ ||45||
Meaning (literal): Mortals bent under the weight of a dropsy that has arisen and grown dreadful, come to a pitiable state, their hope of living fallen away, their bodies smeared with the nectar that is the dust of your lotus feet, become equal in form to the one whose banner is the sea-monster.
What to Notice
Dust is called nectar, and the two words are stuck together. Rajo’mṛta: rajas, dust, and amṛta, the deathless draught, joined into one compound with nothing between them. Dust is the lowest thing in the Sanskrit inventory of substances and amṛta is the highest. Manatunga has made this move before, at verse 8, where a drop of water on a lotus leaf takes on the shine of a pearl, and at verse 20, where a piece of broken glass catches light. He does it here with the least promising material yet.
“Digdha” is a smearing word with an edge to it. It means anointed, coated, and in classical usage it is what is done to an arrow-tip with poison as readily as what is done to a body with ointment. The stanza applies it to nectar. The choice keeps the physical act sharply in view: something is being put onto the skin.
This verse prescribes contact, not recitation. Verses 40, 41, 42 and 46 all turn on the name, the chanting, the remembering. This one does not mention the name at all. What acts here is dust from the feet, applied to the body. It is the most ritual and the least verbal stanza in the section, and any account of “how the Bhaktamar works” that runs entirely through sound has to explain verse 45.
The promise is beauty, not health. Makara-dhvaja-tulya-rūpāḥ: equal in form to the one whose banner bears the sea-monster, which is Kamadeva, the god of desire. Manatunga does not say the sick are cured. He says they come to look like the handsomest figure in the Sanskrit imagination. This is a strange thing to promise a dying person and it is what the text says.
“Cyuta-jīvitāśāḥ” is the bleakest phrase in the hymn. Their hope of living has fallen away. Not been taken, not been proved wrong: cyuta, fallen off, the same word used of a leaf or of a soul leaving a body. The hymn is willing to describe a person at the end and does not soften it before it offers anything.
“Jalodara” is a symptom, and its author knew that. Water in the belly. Classical Indian medicine treats jalodara as a condition in its own right; modern medicine reads the same swelling as a sign of something else going wrong, most often in the liver, the heart or the abdomen. That distinction matters for what follows.
Traditional Use
Here the labels do the most damage anywhere in the hymn, and we are going to be blunt.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 45 sarva bhayānaka roga nāśaka, destroyer of every dreadful disease; jinvani.in heads it roga-unmūlana mantra, uprooting of disease. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual gives “for curing incurable and threatful disease like cancer.”
We refuse the last of those flatly. Cancer is a class of diseases with real treatments, and outcomes that depend heavily on how early treatment starts. A person who delays a diagnosis, stops a course of chemotherapy or declines surgery because a printed manual told them a stanza cures the incurable can be harmed in a way that cannot be undone, and the harm falls hardest on the people with the least access to a second opinion. Nothing in this verse mentions cancer. Nothing in this verse instructs anyone to stop treatment. The manual added both, and naming it is the least we owe a reader who has met the claim elsewhere.
The two broader labels get the same answer in a milder register. Abdominal swelling is a sign that something is seriously wrong and it is investigable: it has causes, tests and treatments. Recite the verse in the ward if it helps you. Do not recite it instead of going.
This is the fourth time in this series we have had to say a version of this, after verse 9, verse 26 on labour pain and verse 27 on leprosy. The position does not change with repetition: we report the claim, we name the source that makes it, and we decline it.
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 it as a verse about dignity rather than about cure. What it restores is rūpa, form, appearance, standing among other people, and that is a real thing to want at the end of an illness.
- The dust is the whole argument. Something worthless, taken from the ground where the feet were, is what the verse calls nectar. That reversal is the Jain point and it survives entirely intact whether or not anybody gets better.
- The feet are Rishabhanatha’s, and the tradition holds that he does not heal, hear or intervene. The stanza gives the sick person something to do, not somebody to petition.
Previous: Verse 44, the sea is not calmed · Next: Verse 46, free of the fear, not the chains.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. We print रजोऽमृत with DigJainWiki; jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net and jain24.com drop the avagraha and set रजोमृत, which sounds identical but reads as "dust and the dead" instead of रजस् + अमृत, so it is an orthographic loss rather than a variant. jinvani.in also sets मत्र्या, a broken conjunct for मर्त्या. 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. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.