Manatunga now praises the Jina’s body, which in a tradition built on non-attachment is a strange thing to do. The way he does it is stranger, and better.
The Verse
निर्मापितस्त्रि-भुवनैक-ललाम-भूत ।
तावन्त एव खलु तेऽप्यणवः पृथिव्यां
यत्ते समानमपरं न हि रूपमस्ति ॥१२॥
Transliteration:
yaiḥ śānta-rāga-rucibhiḥ paramāṇubhis tvaṁ
nirmāpitas tri-bhuvanaika-lalāma-bhūta |
tāvanta eva khalu te’py aṇavaḥ pṛthivyāṁ
yat te samānam aparaṁ na hi rūpam asti ||12||
Meaning (literal): O you who became the one ornament of the three worlds — those atoms of stilled-passion lustre out of which you were formed, those atoms too were on earth exactly that many and no more; for there exists no other form equal to yours.
What to Notice
It is an argument from supply. Jain physics holds that matter, pudgala, is built from paramāṇu, indivisible atoms. Manatunga takes that seriously enough to reason with it. There exists a kind of atom whose lustre has no passion in it. The world contained exactly enough of them to make one body, and they were used. That is why there has never been a second form like this one. The uniqueness is not asserted; it is deduced from a stock that ran out.
Rāga is colour and rāga is desire. The compound śānta-rāga-ruci holds both at once: a radiance whose colour is subdued, and a radiance in which craving has been put to rest. Manatunga is not saying the Jina was good-looking. He is saying the material of that beauty had no wanting in it — which is a claim about substance, not about appearance.
A beauty measured by the desire it does not cause. In nearly every poetic tradition, beauty is rated by the longing it produces in whoever sees it. This verse inverts the instrument. The highest beauty here is the one that leaves the beholder with nothing to want. Verse 11 said the eye stops being satisfied elsewhere; verse 12 explains what kind of thing could do that to an eye.
“Nirmāpitaḥ” has no agent. The verb is a causative passive: you were caused to be made. By whom? The verse never says, and cannot, because Jainism has no creator. The body of a Tirthankara is the outcome of karma running its course, not the work of a maker. A grammatical gap where every other tradition would put a god is the most Jain thing in the stanza.
Why praise a body at all. Because in this system the body is evidence. What a soul has done to itself shows in what it is wearing. The verse does not admire the form; it reads it.
Traditional Use
The manuals part company here. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 12 hasti-mada nivāraka, the subduer of an elephant’s rut — the dangerous frenzy of a bull elephant in musth. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual instead assigns it to harmony in relationships and to difficulties in marriage. We report both; neither is in the Sanskrit, and both are the sort of association that accretes around a hymn over centuries of use.
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 while looking at an image, and notice what the image is doing: Jain iconography is deliberately expressionless, unadorned, and without ornament, because an image whose beauty provoked anything would have failed at its job. The convention and this verse are the same idea.
- Read it against the biography. The body Rishabhanatha is said to have kept through a thousand years of austerity is not being praised for having been spared anything.
- The useful transfer is small and daily: notice, once, that you have called something beautiful when what you meant was that you wanted it. The verse is asking for a different instrument.
Previous: Verse 11, after the milk ocean, who wants brine · Next: Verse 13, your face and the stained moon.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse; we print the avagraha in तेऽप्यणवः with jinvani.in and DigJainWiki. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.