Renunciation is usually described as something you decide to do. This verse describes it as something that happens to your palate.
The Verse
नान्यत्र तोषमुपयाति जनस्य चक्षुः ।
पीत्वा पयः शशिकर-द्युति-दुग्ध-सिन्धोः
क्षारं जलं जलनिधेरसितुं क इच्छेत् ॥११॥
Transliteration:
dṛṣṭvā bhavantam animeṣa-vilokanīyaṁ
nānyatra toṣam upayāti janasya cakṣuḥ |
pītvā payaḥ śaśikara-dyuti-dugdha-sindhoḥ
kṣāraṁ jalaṁ jalanidhe rasituṁ ka icchet ||11||
Meaning (literal): Having once seen you — you who are to be gazed at without a blink — a person’s eye finds satisfaction nowhere else. Having drunk the water of the milk ocean, bright as moonlight, who would want to taste the salt water of the sea?
What to Notice
Animeṣa cuts both ways. Animeṣa-vilokanīya means “to be looked at without blinking,” and animeṣa, “the unblinking ones,” is also a standard epithet for gods, who in Sanskrit convention do not blink as humans do. So the compound says two things at once: worthy of a gaze you do not interrupt, and worthy of the gaze of those who never interrupt theirs. Both readings are old and neither cancels the other.
Payas is both. The word Manatunga uses for what is drunk from the milk ocean, payas, means milk and water equally. That is why the second half lands: you drank payas from one ocean, and now you are offered jala from another. The same substance, and nothing like the same thing.
Nobody is forbidden anything. Read the verse for what it does not say. It does not command the eye to look away from other sights, or set a rule, or threaten a consequence. It reports a change: the eye simply stops finding satisfaction elsewhere. Vairagya here is not an act of will but an alteration in what tastes like anything. That is a specific and unusually humane account of renunciation, and it explains why the tradition puts contemplation before discipline rather than after it.
Two oceans again. Verse 4 held both the ocean of rebirth and the ocean of virtues in a single word. Verse 11 does it again with two seas that are both, physically, water. The difference is never the container. This hymn returns to that idea often enough that it has to be deliberate.
A Note on the Text
The last line is printed as one continuous string, जलनिधेरसितुं, in some editions and split as जलनिधे रसितुं in others. The split is the sense-making one: jalanidheḥ + rasituṁ, “to taste the ocean’s [water],” from the root ras, to taste. Read as one word it would have to be asituṁ, which does not carry that meaning. The two spellings sound identical and scan identically in Vasantatilaka, which is exactly how such things happen, and every standard translation renders it “to taste.”
Traditional Use
The modern manuals diverge on this verse, and the divergence is instructive.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 11 icchita-ākarṣaka, that which draws what is desired. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to turning salt water into drinking water — which is a literal reading of the simile in the second half rather than of the verse’s subject. We record both; a reader will find both in print. The verse itself is about the eye, and about what happens to appetite after it has met something better.
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 in front of an image, if you have one to hand, and hold the gaze. The verse is about seeing, and it names the practice it wants: darshana, looking, before any other observance.
- The pattern this verse describes is the argument for spending time with the life of Rishabhanatha rather than with rules about him. Taste changes by exposure, not by instruction.
- If nothing has changed in your appetites, the honest conclusion is that you have not looked long enough — not that you have failed a test. The verse sets no standard to meet.
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Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki; the word division जलनिधे रसितुं follows vidyasagar.net and jain24.com against the continuous spelling in the other two. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.