The hymn ends by describing itself as an object: a garland, strung, coloured, worn. In the last line a word appears that the tradition has read for seven centuries as the poet’s name.
This series numbers by the Digambara 48-verse recension, in which this is verse 48. In the Shvetambara 44-verse recension it is verse 44. In both it is the last verse of the hymn.
The Verse
भक्त्या मया विविध-वर्ण-विचित्र-पुष्पाम् ।
धत्ते जनो य इह कण्ठ-गतामजस्रं
तं मानतुङ्ग-मवशा समुपैति लक्ष्मीः ॥४८॥
Transliteration:
stotra-srajaṁ tava jinendra guṇair nibaddhāṁ
bhaktyā mayā vividha-varṇa-vicitra-puṣpām |
dhatte jano ya iha kaṇṭha-gatām ajasraṁ
taṁ mānatuṅgam avaśā samupaiti lakṣmīḥ ||48||
Meaning (literal): O Jinendra, this garland of praise of you, bound together by me with devotion out of virtues, its flowers varied and many-coloured: whoever in this world wears it at his throat unceasingly, to him, lofty in honour, Lakshmi comes of herself, unable to do otherwise.
What to Notice
Three words in this verse mean two things each, and the whole stanza is built on them. Guṇa is a virtue and it is also a thread; a garland is bound together by guṇas in both senses at once. Varṇa is a colour and it is also a letter of the alphabet, so flowers “varied in varṇa” are variously coloured and variously syllabled. Kaṇṭha-gata, gone to the throat, is where a garland sits and is also the ordinary Sanskrit way of saying something has been learned by heart. Read one way the verse describes a wreath of flowers. Read the other way it describes forty-eight stanzas held in memory. Manatunga does not choose, and the metre carries both.
The first pun answers the fourth verse. At verse 4 he called the Jina guṇa-samudra, an ocean of virtues, and asked who could speak them. Here the same guṇas are what the finished thing is strung on. The hymn opened by declaring the material impossible to handle and closes by handing over a garland made of it.
“Avaśā” is settled by the metre. Two of the four editions print avaśa, with a short final vowel, which would attach the word to the man. But a short syllable in the eighth position breaks Vasantatilaka, and the long avaśā is feminine nominative and belongs to Lakshmi. So it is she who is avaśā, without power over herself: she arrives not because she has been summoned but because she cannot help it. The devotee asks for nothing. Nobody in this hymn ever has.
“Lakshmi” is an unexpected last word, and the tradition knows it. She is a goddess of prosperity with no formal place in Jain doctrine, and a hymn that has spent forty-seven verses on stainlessness, subtraction and the absence of action ends on her name. The commentarial tradition reads her here in two ways: as worldly prosperity, and as mukti-lakṣmī, the splendour of liberation, which is a standard Jain figure. Both readings are current. We record both and do not pick.
“Mānatuṅga” is grammatically an adjective. Taṁ mānatuṅgam: “to him, lofty in honour.” The word is a perfectly ordinary compound, māna honour and tuṅga high, and in the sentence it agrees with tam, the person wearing the garland. Nothing in the syntax marks it as a proper noun, and the hymn contains no “I, so-and-so, made this.” What the text states is that Lakshmi comes to the one who is lofty in honour. That this word is simultaneously the poet’s signature is the reading of the whole commentarial tradition, and a signature hidden inside an epithet is a well-attested habit of Sanskrit poets. It is a very strong reading. It is still a reading, and it is worth knowing that the difference between “the hymn names its author” and “the hymn contains a word the tradition has always taken as its author’s name” is real.
What the last verse does not contain. No king. No prison. No chains. No count of verses. No sect, no date, no lineage, no place. Every biographical fact anyone has about the Bhaktamar Stotra comes from outside the Bhaktamar Stotra.
The Author, and What Is Actually Known
Tradition names the author Acharya Manatunga and both major sects accept him. Beyond the name, the ground is thinner than the confidence with which it is usually stated.
What the sources say. The earliest surviving accounts of Manatunga are Shvetambara: Prabhachandrasuri’s Prabhavakacharita of 1277 CE and Merutunga’s Prabandha-Chintamani of 1305, with Gunakara’s commentary on the hymn in 1370. These make him a Shvetambara monk, and it is in them that the story of the king, the cell and the breaking fetters is first written down. Digambara accounts of him appear much later, the usual reference being Bhattaraka Vishwabhushan’s Bhaktamar Charit of 1665.
What that leaves. Scholars generally place the composition in the sixth or seventh century, which puts the earliest surviving biography six hundred years after the poet. Manatunga is claimed by both traditions and the earliest claim on record is one of them. The series has no interest in adjudicating that, and it does not need to: the hymn is recited in both and the four disputed stanzas fall nowhere near this one.
What is tradition and what is text. The text gives a word, mānatuṅga. Tradition gives a man, a sect, a king, a cell and forty-eight or forty-four broken locks. The first of those is on this page. The rest is on the series index, told as what it is.
Both Recensions End Here
The whole recension question, set out once at the end, since this is where it closes.
Verses 1 to 31 are word for word identical in both traditions. The four stanzas the Shvetambara recension does not carry are the ones this series numbers 32 to 35: the divine drums, the rain of flowers, the halo and the divine speech, which are the last four of the eight pratihāryas. Every stanza from 36 to the end is present in both, numbered four lower on the Shvetambara side, so that Digambara 36 is Shvetambara 32 and Digambara 48 is Shvetambara 44. The two texts arrive together at this closing verse. Whichever recension a reader recites, the hymn finishes with the same garland, the same Lakshmi and the same name.
Which tradition is right about the four stanzas is not something this series decides. Neither text is a corruption of the other; they are two lines of transmission of one hymn, and this last verse is the clearest demonstration of how much they share.
Traditional Use
The labels attached to the closing verse are about money, and the verse is at least half about something else.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 48 manovāñchita siddhi dāyaka, giver of the accomplishment one has wished for; jinvani.in heads it jina-stuti-phala mantra, the fruit of praising the Jina. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual gives “for attaining wealth, prosperity and liberation.”
We report all three and endorse none. Two observations, though, are simply textual. First, the hymn’s own tradition reads lakṣmī here in two senses, and a label that keeps only the wealth is keeping the smaller half. Second, the verse’s condition is not that you recite the stanza; it is kaṇṭha-gatām ajasram, that the whole garland is at your throat unceasingly, which means the forty-eight verses held and repeated. A promise of prosperity for a single recitation is not a compression of this verse. It is a replacement of it.
If you are in financial trouble, the hymn is not a plan. Recite it because you want to recite it. That is the only ground the series has ever put under any of these forty-eight pages.
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. Verse 48 is where that gap is most conspicuous, since the ritual tradition attaches a yantra to every one of the forty-eight; the yantras are widely reproduced and the riddhis are not consistently printed, and we have left them out on the same terms as everywhere else.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- Recite it last and only last. It is a colophon, and a colophon read out of order is a signature on a blank page.
- Hear the double sense at least once. A garland of flowers and forty-eight verses in the memory are the same object in this stanza, and the poem’s final claim is that one of them can be worn.
- Notice that nothing is requested, even here. Lakshmi is not invoked, addressed or asked. She is described as arriving, and as having no choice about it.
- The hymn began with gods bowing their crowned heads at Rishabhanatha’s feet and ends with a poet handing over a wreath he made himself. Between those two images there are forty-eight verses that never once ask him for anything.
Previous: Verse 47, fear itself takes fright · This is the last verse of the hymn. The complete series is at the Bhaktamar Stotra index.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. Three genuine points of difference. We print विविध-वर्ण with jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki's own transliteration; DigJainWiki's Devanagari sets रुचिर-वर्ण, which is a real variant found in other editions, scans identically in Vasantatilaka and so cannot be decided by the metre; we record it. We print अजस्रं with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki's transliteration; vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki's Devanagari set अजसं or अजत्रं, which the scansion rules out, since the thirteenth syllable of that line must be heavy. We print अवशा with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki; vidyasagar.net and jain24.com set अवश, which the scansion also rules out and which would additionally attach the adjective to the wrong noun. The metre settles the second and third of these and is silent on the first. Author and legend datings from the Wikipedia articles on Manatunga and the stotra. 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.