The Jina’s qualities are here given legs. They travel, they cross frontiers, and the verse asks, quite practically, who is supposed to stop them.
The Verse
शुभ्रा गुणास्त्रि-भुवनं तव लङ्घयन्ति ।
ये संश्रितास्त्रि-जगदीश्वर-नाथमेकं
कस्तान्निवारयति सञ्चरतो यथेष्टम् ॥१४॥
Transliteration:
sampūrṇa-maṇḍala-śaśāṅka-kalā-kalāpa-
śubhrā guṇās tri-bhuvanaṁ tava laṅghayanti |
ye saṁśritās tri-jagadīśvara-nātham ekaṁ
kas tān nivārayati sañcarato yatheṣṭam ||14||
Meaning (literal): Your virtues, white as the whole array of the digits of the full-orbed moon, overleap the three worlds. They have taken refuge with the one Lord, the master of the three worlds — who is to stop them going wherever they please?
What to Notice
The argument is political, not poetic. Manatunga makes the guṇas into a travelling retinue. They belong to the sovereign of all three worlds; therefore no frontier post in any of the three worlds has standing to detain them. Anyone who has watched a royal party wave through a checkpoint knows exactly the image. The rhetorical question at the end is not rapture. It is jurisdiction.
“Laṅghayanti” has an edge. The verb means to leap over, and it carries the sense of overstepping something one is not supposed to overstep. He does not say the virtues fill the three worlds or pervade them. He says they vault the boundary.
The moon comes back, but only its colour. In verse 13 the moon was dismissed twice over: stained, and beautiful only against night. Here Manatunga uses it again, and it is worth noticing exactly how much he takes. Only the whiteness, and only of the full orb with its complete set of digits. The blemish is not mentioned and no comparison of form is being made. He rejected the moon as a standard for the face and then borrowed nothing from it but a colour for the qualities. Sanskrit poets rarely economise this carefully.
Qualities are the portable part. The doctrinal payload sits under the image. A person is not transmissible. A quality, once actually realised, is: it can be seen, described, recognised, imitated, and it does not stay where it was made. That is why this hymn’s method — praise the guṇas, not the biography — is not a stylistic preference. The virtues are the only thing that can reach the reciter at all, given that the Jina himself is liberated and beyond contact.
Ekam: one. Set against the retinue of virtues moving in every direction, the object they have taken refuge with is emphatically single. Multiplicity radiating from one still point is a shape this hymn keeps returning to.
Traditional Use
The manuals overlap here without matching. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 14 ādhi-vyādhi-nāśaka, lakṣmī-pradāyaka: destroyer of ādhi and vyādhi — mental affliction and bodily disease, a pair Sanskrit habitually names together — and giver of prosperity. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns the verse to fear of enemies and to vāta-related illness. Both point at affliction; they differ on which kind, and we report both rather than merge them.
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 when a quality you admire seems to belong to someone else and to be locked inside their life. The verse’s claim is the opposite: qualities travel, and admiring one accurately is already the beginning of receiving it.
- The corollary is uncomfortable and worth sitting with. Your own qualities, good and bad, are equally portable, and they cross into other people’s lives without asking your permission.
- Read the list of virtues the tradition actually attributes to Rishabhanatha rather than reciting the word guṇa in the abstract. The verse is about specific qualities getting loose in the world.
Previous: Verse 13, the moon that only works at night · Next: Verse 15, the peak that does not move.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki; we read सञ्चरतो with jinvani.in and vidyasagar.net against a typographic slip in DigJainWiki. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which overlap but do not agree. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.