Verse 4 measured the ocean honestly and found it uncrossable. Verse 5 is Manatunga stepping into it, and telling you exactly why.
The Verse
कर्तुं स्तवं विगत-शक्तिरपि प्रवृत्तः ।
प्रीत्यात्म-वीर्यमविचार्य मृगी मृगेन्द्रं
नाभ्येति किं निज-शिशोः परिपालनार्थम् ॥५॥
Transliteration:
so’haṁ tathāpi tava bhakti-vaśān munīśa
kartuṁ stavaṁ vigata-śaktir api pravṛttaḥ |
prītyātma-vīryam avicārya mṛgī mṛgendraṁ
nābhyeti kiṁ nija-śiśoḥ paripālanārtham ||5||
Meaning (literal): O Lord of sages, that same I, though my power for it is gone, have nonetheless set out to make a hymn, compelled by devotion to you. Does a doe not go straight at the lion, out of love, without weighing her own strength, for the sake of protecting her own young?
What to Notice
“So’ham”: that same I. Manatunga does not withdraw the confession of verses 3 and 4. He picks it up and carries it forward. That one, the one without the intellect, the one who cannot cross the water — that one is starting. Nothing in the hymn ever repairs his qualifications. It simply proceeds without them.
Mṛgī and mṛgendra. The doe and the lion are the same word in Sanskrit. Mṛga is the deer, the beast; mṛgendra, “lord of beasts,” is the lion. Manatunga sets them next to each other in the line, one syllable apart, so the ear hears how small the difference in the name is and how absolute the difference in the encounter. The whole distance between a devotee and a Jina fits inside a suffix.
She does not win. The verse is careful. It does not say the doe defeats the lion or saves the fawn. It says she goes toward him — abhyeti, she goes to meet. Devotion, in this image, does not change the odds. It changes what you are willing to walk toward.
Avicārya: without calculating. Jain practice ordinarily prizes viveka, discernment, weighing an act before doing it. Here Manatunga praises an act done without any weighing at all. The two are not in conflict. Discernment governs conduct. Devotion is not a transaction to be priced, and a love that first checked whether it was likely to succeed would not be the thing this verse is about.
Traditional Use
Two independent modern lists agree on this verse. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels it netra-roga nivāraka, the remover of eye disease, and the Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual likewise assigns verse 5 to the eyes and to sight. The riddhi printed for it in the Tattva Gyan edition is:
That continues the sequence running through verses 2, 3 and 4 — ohi, paramohi, savvohi, now aṇaṁtohi — the grades of avadhi-jñāna, the direct knowledge of things at a distance. Whatever the manuals intend by attaching it here, the underlying word is about seeing far, which is at least a coherent reason for a tradition to have linked this stanza to the eyes.
As always on this site: one documented modern tradition, not scripture. The manuals differ; the medieval manuscripts differ; nothing here is a substitute for an ophthalmologist, and the tradition never claimed it was.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- Recite it when what you have to do is for someone other than yourself and the odds are honestly bad. That is the exact situation the image describes.
- Note that the doe’s act earns her nothing. Jain devotion is not petition, and Rishabhanatha neither needs the hymn nor grants favours in exchange for it. The verse works by holding up a quality — protective love that does not stop to calculate — until the reciter starts to resemble it.
- If you are reciting for someone who is ill, recite with them where you can, and keep the doctor.
Previous: Verse 4, the ocean no arms can cross · Next: Verse 6, the cuckoo and the mango bud.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki; where those editions disagree on orthography we follow the reading that all four support and that scans in Vasantatilaka (मृगेन्द्रं accusative, against DigJainWiki's मृगेन्द्र). Riddhi as printed by tattvagyan.com. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com.