In verse 2 Manatunga decided to sing. In verse 6 he admits it is no longer a decision.
The Verse
त्वद्-भक्तिरेव मुखरीकुरुते बलान्माम् ।
यत्कोकिलः किल मधौ मधुरं विरौति
तच्चाम्र-चारु-कलिका-निकरैक-हेतुः ॥६॥
Transliteration:
alpa-śrutaṁ śrutavatāṁ parihāsa-dhāma
tvad-bhaktir eva mukharī-kurute balān mām |
yat kokilaḥ kila madhau madhuraṁ virauti
tac cāmra-cāru-kalikā-nikaraika-hetuḥ ||6||
Meaning (literal): Devotion to you alone makes me vocal, and by force — me, of little learning, a standing joke to the learned. That the cuckoo sings sweetly in spring: the one cause of that is the mass of lovely mango buds.
What to Notice
Balāt: by force. This is the hinge of the verse and the reason it is not a repeat of verse 2. There he announced an intention — stoṣye, I shall praise. Here devotion has taken the decision away from him. Mukharī-kurute, “makes me loud-mouthed,” is not a flattering verb, and it is in the active voice with bhakti as its subject. He is the object of his own hymn’s grammar.
Parihāsa-dhāma, the house of ridicule. He names the social cost with precision rather than bravery: the learned will laugh, and he is the address they will laugh at. Then he publishes. A tradition that has kept this stanza in daily recitation for over a millennium has effectively answered the learned on his behalf.
The cuckoo has no training. Kokila sings, in the Sanskrit poetic convention, as reliably as spring arrives, and knows nothing of music. Manatunga is precise about the mechanism: the single cause (eka-hetu) of the song is not the bird’s skill but the mango bud. The song is a response, not an accomplishment. This is the verse’s whole claim about devotional speech, and it is a claim about causation, not about modesty.
Where the sweetness lives. Read against verse 2, the argument completes itself. Verse 2 conceded that the gods praise better because they know the scriptures. Verse 6 answers that the beauty of a song was never located in the singer.
A Note on the Text
The last line has two old readings. Every Digambara edition we checked prints तच्चाम्र- (tac cāmra-, “that… of the mango”). A widely circulated reading instead has तच्चारु-चूत- (tac cāru-cūta-), using cūta, the other Sanskrit word for mango. Both scan perfectly in Vasantatilaka and both mean the same thing. Commentators note that cūta is the reading of the older manuscripts, and that āmra was substituted more recently because cūta had acquired an obscene sense in modern Gujarati, Hindi and Marathi. We print the āmra reading because it is what the editions this series follows print, and we record the other because a reader will meet it.
Traditional Use
Two independent lists agree here. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels the verse vidyā-pradāyaka, giver of learning; the Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns it to education, memory and mental steadiness. The riddhi printed in the Tattva Gyan edition is:
The name in it is koṣṭha-buddhi (Prakrit koṭṭha, a granary), one of the buddhi-riddhis in the Jain lists: the intellect that holds everything it has heard the way a storehouse holds grain, and can produce any part of it on demand. Whoever attached it to this stanza was reading closely. The verse is about a singer with no store of learning at all.
One documented modern tradition, not scripture. The manuals differ from one another and from the medieval manuscripts. Nothing here is a study method, and no verse has ever been a substitute for reading the book.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- This is the verse for anyone who has stayed quiet in a room because better-read people were in it. Recite it and then speak.
- The Jain frame is worth keeping straight: nothing is being asked of Rishabhanatha, and nothing is being promised in return. The cuckoo does not petition the mango tree. It responds to it.
- Pair it with svadhyaya, scriptural study, which the tradition ranks among the internal austerities. The verse defends the unlearned singer; it does not recommend staying unlearned.
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Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki. Riddhi as printed by tattvagyan.com; koṣṭha-buddhi identified from the standard Jain riddhi lists. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com. On the cūta/āmra variant, see the discussion summarised at jaingpt.org.