Here is the verse that separates Jain devotion from every other kind. Manatunga says, plainly and without hedging, that those who praise the Jina become his equals.
The Verse
भूतैर्गुणैर्भुवि भवन्तमभिष्टुवन्तः ।
तुल्या भवन्ति भवतो ननु तेन किं वा
भूत्याश्रितं य इह नात्म-समं करोति ॥१०॥
Transliteration:
nātyadbhutaṁ bhuvana-bhūṣaṇa bhūta-nātha
bhūtair guṇair bhuvi bhavantam abhiṣṭuvantaḥ |
tulyā bhavanti bhavato nanu tena kiṁ vā
bhūtyāśritaṁ ya iha nātma-samaṁ karoti ||10||
Meaning (literal): O ornament of the world, O lord of beings — it is no great wonder that those on earth who praise you with the qualities that are actually yours become equal to you. What, after all, is the use of one who does not make a dependant who has come to him equal to himself?
What to Notice
“Tulyā bhavanti bhavataḥ”: they become equal to you. No Indian devotional tradition says this as flatly. In Jain terms it is not a poetic exaggeration but a doctrinal statement: every soul is, in its own nature, already identical to a siddha, and liberation is the removal of what obscures that, not the granting of a new status. There is no permanent gap between the worshipper and the worshipped, and therefore nothing to be humbly resigned to.
Bhūtair guṇaiḥ: with the qualities that are really there. This is the safeguard, and the verse does not work without it. Praise a real quality and you have spent that time contemplating a real quality; do it long enough and you begin to take its shape. Flattery praises what is not there and produces nothing, in either direction. The clause is Manatunga’s way of saying that the mechanism is contemplation, not compliment.
The argument from patronage. The second half is startlingly worldly. A lord who does not raise his dependants to his own level, Manatunga says, is not worth having as a lord. That was a real standard in the courts he lived among, applied to patrons who were judged by what became of the people who came to them. He holds the Jina to it, and finds the standard met absolutely — which, on the Jain account, is the only place it ever could be met.
Eleven bh-. Bhuvana-bhūṣaṇa bhūta-nātha bhūtair guṇair bhuvi bhavantam… bhavanti bhavato… bhūtyāśritam. The alliteration is relentless and it is not decoration. Verse 9 said light makes the lotus open. Verse 10 shows the language itself blooming in the presence of what it describes.
And a caution the verse contains. Nothing here says the Jina raises anyone. He is siddha and does nothing; the elevation is what happens on the devotee’s side. Read the line as a favour granted and you have turned Jainism into something it is not.
Traditional Use
Two independent lists agree on this one. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 10 kūkar viṣa nivāraka, the remover of the poison of a dog; the Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to the same. Both are naming what an earlier world called dog-poison and we call rabies.
Say the obvious thing plainly: rabies is essentially always fatal once symptoms appear, and post-exposure vaccination given promptly is essentially always effective. A dog bite is a same-day trip to a clinic. The manuals were compiled by people who used every remedy they had; recitation was never meant to replace one.
No riddhi is printed here. The verse-by-verse manual this series cites stops at shloka 6, and we do not reproduce mantras we cannot check against a second source.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- This is the verse to recite when devotion has started to feel like self-abasement. The Jain frame is the opposite: you are looking at what you are, in a form that has finished becoming it.
- When you read the life of Rishabhanatha, notice how much of it is ordinary before it is anything else — a king, a father, a man who had to learn what he taught. The equality this verse claims is not a metaphor about distant divinity.
- Praise only what is actually there. Bhūtair guṇaiḥ is a working instruction, not a flourish, and it applies well outside the shrine.
Previous: Verse 9, the sun that never comes to the pond · Next: Verse 11, the eye that will not settle for anything else.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse apart from typographic slips in single editions (jinvani.in's भूूत, DigJainWiki's अभिष्टुचन्तः). Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.