Devotional poetry usually praises an ascetic for withstanding temptation. Verse 15 refuses the compliment on the grounds that nothing was withstood.
The Verse
नीतं मनागपि मनो न विकार-मार्गम् ।
कल्पान्त-काल-मरुता चलिताचलेन
किं मन्दराद्रि-शिखरं चलितं कदाचित् ॥१५॥
Transliteration:
citraṁ kim atra yadi te tridaśāṅganābhir
nītaṁ manāg api mano na vikāra-mārgam |
kalpānta-kāla-marutā calitācalena
kiṁ mandarādri-śikharaṁ calitaṁ kadācit ||15||
Meaning (literal): What is remarkable in this, if your mind was not led even slightly onto the road of disturbance by the women of the gods? Was the summit of Mount Mandara ever moved, even by the wind of the age’s end — the wind that has moved mountains?
What to Notice
“Citraṁ kim atra”: what is surprising about that. The opening is almost dismissive, and it is aimed at the reader’s expectations rather than at the temptation. We are used to hearing about the ascetic who held firm, and the drama of that story lives entirely in the holding. Manatunga removes the drama by removing the holding.
Suppressed and destroyed are not the same state. This is the doctrinal core and the reason the verse is not merely a compliment. In the Jain analysis, deluding karma can be held down or it can be finished. Held down, it is still there, still loaded, and it will surface again when conditions change; that is a real achievement and it is not this one. What the verse describes is the other case, where the disturbance does not arise, because the thing that would have produced it is gone. A mountain is not exercising restraint in a storm.
He gives the wind its full strength. Calitācala — “by which mountains have been moved.” Manatunga concedes, in one compound, that the deluge wind genuinely does move mountains, and that the celestial women genuinely are irresistible. He is not minimising the force. He is saying that force and this particular summit are simply not in a relation.
Vikāra-mārga: the road of alteration. Not “sin,” not “desire.” Vikāra is change, modification, a departure from a thing’s own state. The Jain vocabulary for what goes wrong is consistently about the soul being deflected from its own nature rather than about wickedness. Even by a little — manāg api — is the standard, and it is a stricter one than resistance.
Mandara. The mountain that the shared Indian story sets in the middle of the ocean as the churning-rod, standing still while everything around it turns. Four verses ago the milk ocean supplied the image for a taste that cannot be improved on. Here the thing standing in the middle of that ocean supplies the image for a mind that cannot be moved.
Traditional Use
Two independent lists agree here. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 15 rāja-sammāna-saubhāgya-vardhaka, that which increases royal honour and good fortune; the Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to the attainment of honour and respect. The link is not arbitrary: in the courtly world these manuals came out of, immovability under pressure was precisely the quality that earned standing.
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. Nor does the verse promise honour to a reciter; it describes a mind, and leaves the reader to draw the inference.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- Recite it when you are congratulating yourself on having resisted something. The verse’s quiet suggestion is that resistance is the intermediate stage, not the destination, and that noticing the difference is more useful than the congratulation.
- Do not read it as a rebuke of effort. Suppression is how anyone begins, and the tradition prescribes vows and restraints precisely because the mountain state is not available on request.
- The long arc of the same idea is in the life of Rishabhanatha: a thousand years of austerity before the state this verse describes, which is a useful correction to any reading of it as effortlessness arriving for free.
Previous: Verse 14, virtues that cross every border · Next: Verse 16, the lamp with no smoke and no oil.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki; we read मन्दराद्रि with three editions against DigJainWiki's मन्दाद्रि, which also breaks the Vasantatilaka metre. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.