The first six verses were about whether Manatunga is fit to sing. From here the hymn turns outward and begins to say what the singing does.
The Verse
पापं क्षणात्क्षयमुपैति शरीर-भाजाम् ।
आक्रान्त-लोकमलि-नीलमशेषमाशु
सूर्यांशु-भिन्नमिव शार्वरमन्धकारम् ॥७॥
Transliteration:
tvat-saṁstavena bhava-santati-sannibaddhaṁ
pāpaṁ kṣaṇāt kṣayam upaiti śarīra-bhājām |
ākrānta-lokam ali-nīlam aśeṣam āśu
sūryāṁśu-bhinnam iva śārvaram andhakāram ||7||
Meaning (literal): By praise of you, the sin of those who bear bodies — sin bound up across a whole succession of births — goes to destruction in a moment; swiftly, as the darkness of night goes, black as a bee, entire, having overrun the world, once it is split by the rays of the sun.
What to Notice
Śarīra-bhājām: of those who bear bodies. Not “of sinners.” Manatunga locates liability in embodiment itself. Anyone carrying a body is carrying the account. In a tradition whose entire soteriology is about getting free of embodiment, this phrase is doing real work in four syllables.
The accounting is long. Bhava-santati-sannibaddham — bound up along the chain of births. He is not offering to clear this morning’s ledger. The debt he names is the one Jain cosmology actually describes, accumulated across a series of lives, and it is that debt he says goes in a kṣaṇa, an instant.
Ali-nīla: black as a bee. The unexpected word. Not black as ink or as soot, but the blue-black of a bee — glossy, alive, in motion, and arriving as a swarm. Sin here is not a stain. It is something that moves and settles and hums.
Read the simile precisely. Darkness has no substance. Nothing is carried away when the sun rises; there was never anything there to carry. Jain doctrine, by contrast, holds that karma is real — subtle matter, pudgala, actually bound to the soul, and actually shed. So the simile is not a claim that sin is an illusion. It is a claim about speed and effortlessness at the moment of shedding: the change, when it comes, does not look like a fight. Sunrise does not struggle with the night.
And the mechanism stays Jain. Rishabhanatha is liberated and does nothing at all; he does not receive praise, forgive, or intervene. What the recitation acts on is the reciter’s bhava, the disposition of the mind, and it is that change of disposition that produces nirjara, the shedding. Nothing in this verse is a transaction, and nothing in it is bought.
Traditional Use
Two independent lists agree. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels this verse sarva-viṣa va saṅkaṭ nivāraka, the remover of all poison and calamity; the Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns verse 7 to the neutralising of snake venom and of what it calls negativity.
We do not print a riddhi for this verse. The verse-by-verse manual this series has been citing (Tattva Gyan) publishes only through shloka 6, and we would rather leave a gap than copy a mantra out of a list we cannot check against a second source. The same rule applies for the rest of the verses in this series until a second attestation is available.
And a caution the tradition itself would make. No stanza treats a snakebite. Antivenom does. The older manuals were written in a world that used these recitations alongside every remedy available to it, not instead of them.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- Recite it when the weight you are carrying feels older than this life. That is exactly the weight the verse names.
- Do not read kṣaṇāt, “in a moment,” as a promise of a quick fix. Sunrise is instantaneous and it is also the end of a long night. The verse describes the moment the change becomes visible, not the length of the practice.
- Pair it with pratikraman, the formal review and retraction of one’s own faults. The hymn supplies the light; pratikraman is where you actually look.
Previous: Verse 6, the cuckoo and the mango bud · Next: Verse 8, the dewdrop on the lotus leaf.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree on this verse throughout. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.