This is the verse that answers the hardest question a Jain devotee can be asked: if the Jina is liberated and does nothing whatever, what is the point of praising him?
The Verse
त्वत्सङ्कथापि जगतां दुरितानि हन्ति ।
दूरे सहस्र-किरणः कुरुते प्रभैव
पद्माकरेषु जलजानि विकास-भाञ्जि ॥९॥
Transliteration:
āstāṁ tava stavanam asta-samasta-doṣaṁ
tvat-saṅkathāpi jagatāṁ duritāni hanti |
dūre sahasra-kiraṇaḥ kurute prabhaiva
padmākareṣu jalajāni vikāsa-bhāñji ||9||
Meaning (literal): Let a hymn to you stand aside — a hymn in which every fault has been put down. Even talk about you destroys the evils of the worlds. The thousand-rayed one is far off; his light alone makes the lotuses in the ponds come to their opening.
What to Notice
“Āstām”: never mind that. The verse opens by waving away the thing it has spent eight stanzas preparing. Set the formal hymn aside, he says; mere conversation about you does the work. It is the hymn’s characteristic move — escalate by minimising — and it quietly licenses something the tradition actually does. Saṅkathā is talk, discussion, the thing that happens between people. Not only recitation counts.
The sun is far away, and that is the argument. Dūre. Manatunga puts the distance in the verse deliberately. The Jina is siddha: removed from the world, beyond action, incapable of receiving a request or answering one. That is not a difficulty the hymn skirts. It is the premise the simile is built on. The sun does not travel to the pond, does not touch the lotus, and does not know the lotus exists.
The lotus does the opening. Read the grammar. The sun’s prabhā, its radiance, is what “makes” the blooming — but what blooms is the flower, by its own nature, in response to conditions. Nothing is inserted into it. This is exactly the theology of verse 1, where the Jina’s feet were an ālambana, a handhold and not a rescuer. Jainism has no grace that reaches down. It has a light that is simply there, and beings who open in it.
A resonance in “asta.” The word Manatunga uses for the faults that are “put down” is asta, and the same word elsewhere names the setting of the sun. Whether or not he intended it, a verse that ends in sunrise begins with a word for sundown.
Traditional Use
Here the modern manuals part company, and we report the split rather than pick a winner.
Vidyasagar.net’s arrangement labels verse 9 sarva-bhaya nivāraka, the remover of all fear. The Bhaktamar Mantra Healing manual instead assigns it to the boon of a male child. We record the second because it is what that manual prints; we do not endorse a gendered boon, and we would note that nothing in the Sanskrit points at children in either direction. The first label at least follows the verse’s own imagery, where darkness gives way to light without a struggle.
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 verify against a second source.
Practicing It the Jain Way
- Recite it when devotion feels pointless because its object is unreachable. That objection is correct, and this verse is the tradition’s answer to it.
- Take the licence in saṅkathā seriously. Talking about Rishabhanatha with someone else — his life, his renunciation, what he actually taught — counts as the practice, not as a break from it.
- Do not wait to feel qualified for the formal hymn. The verse explicitly ranks the informal thing as sufficient.
Previous: Verse 8, the water drop that looks like a pearl · Next: Verse 10, why the praiser becomes the equal.
Sanskrit collated across jinvani.in, vidyasagar.net, jain24.com and DigJainWiki; we follow सहस्र-किरणः and विकास-भाञ्जि, the readings supported by jinvani.in and DigJainWiki against the सहस्त्र spelling in two other editions. Verse-use labels from vidyasagar.net and bhaktamarmantrahealing.com, which disagree here. No riddhi printed: not verifiable against two sources.