This is the stanza the whole legend of the Bhaktamar Stotra hangs on. It is worth reading what it says before reading what has been said about it.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 46. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 42. 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
गाढं बृहन्-निगड-कोटि-निघृष्ट-जङ्घाः ।
त्वन्नाम-मन्त्र-मनिशं मनुजाः स्मरन्तः
सद्यः स्वयं विगत-बन्ध-भया भवन्ति ॥४६॥
Transliteration:
āpāda-kaṇṭham uru-śṛṅkhala-veṣṭitāṅgā
gāḍhaṁ bṛhan-nigaḍa-koṭi-nighṛṣṭa-jaṅghāḥ |
tvan-nāma-mantram aniśaṁ manujāḥ smarantaḥ
sadyaḥ svayaṁ vigata-bandha-bhayā bhavanti ||46||
Meaning (literal): Men whose bodies are wound from foot to throat in heavy chains, whose shins are rubbed raw by the edges of great fetters clamped tight, remembering without pause the mantra that is your name, at once become, of themselves, free from the fear of bondage.
What to Notice
“Vigata-bandha-bhayāḥ”: free from the fear of bondage. Not free from bondage. The word bhaya, fear, is the third member of the compound and it is not optional: take it out and the fourth line no longer scans as Vasantatilaka. The metre guarantees that the word Manatunga wrote is fear. Several English translations in circulation render this line as prisoners being unshackled and released. That is not what the Sanskrit says, and the difference is the entire subject of this page.
“Svayam”, of themselves. The change happens on the prisoner’s side and by the prisoner’s own doing. Nothing comes down, nothing is sent, nobody is released by an outside hand. The hymn has been consistent about this since verse 9, where the sun does not travel to the pond and the lotus opens by its own nature.
“Sadyaḥ”, at once, against “aniśam”, without pause. The two adverbs pull opposite ways in the same sentence. The remembering is unceasing; the result is immediate. A stanza that meant “keep this up and eventually you will be freed” would have used neither word. What is described is a state available in the moment of the remembering, and only sustained by sustaining it.
The detail is prison detail. Nighṛṣṭa-jaṅghāḥ, shins rubbed raw; koṭi, the edge or point of the fetter that does the rubbing; gāḍham, tight. Manatunga is not describing chains in the abstract. He is describing what long irons do to the skin of the leg, which is the sort of thing known either by having seen it or by having worn them.
“Bandha” is the load-bearing word in Jain vocabulary. It is the ordinary word for a chain, and it is also the technical term for the binding of karma to the soul, one of the seven tattvas. A Jain reader meets both senses in the same syllable. The verse is about iron and the doctrine is about karma, and Manatunga did not have to point that out.
And still no claim that the chains fall. The stanza has every opportunity: it is four lines long, it has described the fetters in detail, and it ends on the freedom. What it frees is named, once, precisely, and it is fear.
The Legend, and What This Verse Has to Do With It
The story is that Manatunga was chained and shut up by a king, that he composed the hymn in the cell, and that a lock or a fetter broke at each verse: forty-eight of them by Digambara count, forty-four by Shvetambara. The series index sets out how the tellings vary; the king is Bhoja in some, Vriddhabhoja or Harsha in others.
Two things are worth keeping straight. First, the legend is attached to the composition of the whole hymn, not to this stanza. Verse 46 is where the imagery of chains occurs, which is presumably why the story and the stanza have grown together in later retellings, but no version of the legend says the chains fell at verse 46.
Second, the legend is recorded late. The earliest surviving accounts are Shvetambara and roughly six centuries after the hymn’s likely date: Prabhachandrasuri’s Prabhavakacharita of 1277 CE and Merutunga’s Prabandha-Chintamani of 1305, with Gunakara’s commentary on the hymn following in 1370. Digambara accounts of Manatunga appear later still. We tell the story as a story, which is what the tradition itself does with it.
Third, and worth noticing: the number of fetters in the story is always exactly the number of verses in the teller’s own recension, forty-eight in Digambara tellings and forty-four in Shvetambara ones. That is one of the clearer signs that the count in the legend was fitted to the text rather than the text to the legend.
Traditional Use
The two Digambara editions promise release. The healing manual, unusually, reads the stanza the way the doctrine would.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 46 kārāgāra ādi bandhana vināśaka, destroyer of imprisonment and other bondage; jinvani.in heads it bandhana mukti mantra, the mantra of release from bonds. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual gives “free yourself from cycle of birth and death.”
We report all three and endorse none, but the disagreement is instructive. The manual has taken bandha in its technical sense and read the verse as being about karmic bondage, which is at least a reading the Sanskrit supports. The two editions have taken it as iron and promised a prison door.
On the prison door we have to be flat. Nobody facing a criminal charge, a detention, or a bail hearing should be told that a stanza will get them out. It will not, and the hours spent on it are hours not spent on a lawyer. Legal aid is free in India through the state and district legal services authorities, and a person in custody has a right to it. Recite the verse in the cell if it steadies you; the hymn’s own tradition says it was composed in one. Do not let anyone offer it to you in place of counsel.
That said, note how well the verse itself survives this. It never promised the door. It promised the fear would go, which is the one thing that is genuinely worth having in a cell and the one thing no lawyer can supply.
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 it slowly enough to notice that the last line is about you and not about the chains. That is the discipline the stanza is asking for and it is harder than it sounds.
- The two senses of bandha are both meant, and there is no need to choose. Iron is the picture; karma is the subject; fear is what the verse actually addresses.
- The hymn is addressed to Rishabhanatha, whom this tradition holds to be entirely beyond acting on anything. If a chain falls, the hymn does not say he pulled it.
Previous: Verse 45, the dust called nectar · Next: Verse 47, fear itself takes fright.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse; jinvani.in and DigJainWiki add a spurious visarga to भवन्ति, which is a typesetting slip. The stanza scans as clean Vasantatilaka, and that scansion is what establishes भय as part of the fourth line rather than an interpretive addition. Legend datings from the Wikipedia articles on Manatunga and the stotra, which give Prabhavakacharita 1277 CE, Prabandha-Chintamani 1305 and Gunakara's commentary 1370, with Digambara accounts appearing considerably later. 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.