Verse 8 closes the hymn’s long opening. Manatunga has finished arguing with himself, and he ends the argument with a drop of water.
The Verse
मारभ्यते तनु-धियापि तव प्रभावात् ।
चेतो हरिष्यति सतां नलिनी-दलेषु
मुक्ता-फल-द्युतिमुपैति ननूद-बिन्दुः ॥८॥
Transliteration:
matveti nātha tava saṁstavanaṁ mayedam
ārabhyate tanu-dhiyāpi tava prabhāvāt |
ceto hariṣyati satāṁ nalinī-daleṣu
muktā-phala-dyutim upaiti nanūda-binduḥ ||8||
Meaning (literal): Having thought this, O Lord, this praise of you is begun by me, slight of intellect though I am; and by your power it will steal the hearts of the good. Surely a drop of water, on the petals of a lotus, takes on the lustre of a pearl.
What to Notice
The drop does not become a pearl. This is the point, and it is easy to read past. Nothing happens to the water. It is the same water it was in the pond. What changed is what it is resting on. Manatunga is saying that the hymn will be beautiful, and saying in the same breath that none of the beauty is his — tava prabhāvāt, by your power. It is the most exact statement of authorship in the poem.
And the observation is literally correct. A lotus leaf is water-repellent to an unusual degree; a drop landing on it pulls itself into a near-sphere rather than spreading. That is precisely why it catches light the way a pearl does. Manatunga is not reaching for a pretty comparison. He looked at a pond.
The drop stays itself. It beads. It does not soak in, and it does not merge. For a tradition whose central claim is that the soul is never actually the thing it rests on, a droplet sitting whole and separate on a leaf is not a decorative image.
“Ceto hariṣyati satām.” In verse 6 he said the learned would laugh at him. Here he says the hymn will steal the hearts of the good. The two are not in tension. The learned assess the craft. The good respond to what the craft is pointed at.
The arc completes. Verse 2: I will sing. Verse 3: a child grabbing at a reflection. Verse 4: an ocean no arms can cross. Verse 5: the doe goes at the lion anyway. Verse 6: devotion has taken the choice away. Verse 8: and it will work — for a reason that has nothing to do with me. Eight stanzas to get to the first line of actual praise, which begins in verse 9.
Traditional Use
Two independent lists agree on this verse. Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels it sarvāriṣṭa nivāraka, the remover of all misfortune; the Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual assigns verse 8 to the clearing of troubles and disturbances generally.
As with verse 7, we print no riddhi here. The manual this series cites verse by verse stops at shloka 6, and we will not reproduce a mantra we cannot check against a second source. A gap is more honest than a guess.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- Recite it when something you made has been received better than you think you deserved. The verse is the correct response to praise, and it is not self-deprecation: it is an accurate account of where the light came from.
- Keep the direction right. Rishabhanatha is not lending anyone his power in the sense of granting a favour. A liberated soul acts on nothing. What the verse calls prabhāva is what happens in a mind that has spent an hour attending to a set of qualities. The lotus leaf does not decide to make the drop shine either.
- The practice is not “recite until misfortune leaves.” It is: rest something small on something great, and let it be changed by contact.
Previous: Verse 7, what light does to darkness · Next: Verse 9, the sun that has not arrived yet.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki, which agree throughout on this verse. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.