Navkar Mantra

The central formula of Jainism is remarkable for what it withholds: it names no god, no founder, no individual at all.

It offers homage to five categories, the arihants, those who have conquered the passions and teach; the siddhas, the liberated; the acharyas, heads of orders; the upadhyayas, teachers; and all sadhus, ascetics, everywhere. The last clause is the striking one. It salutes every ascetic in the world without restriction of sect, which means that as recited it includes ascetics of other Jain lineages and, on some readings, of other traditions entirely.

This is consistent with the doctrine behind it. Jainism has no creator god, and the liberated souls it venerates neither intervene nor respond. Homage to them is not petition; it is orientation. The formula's closing verses, which are added in recitation, say explicitly that this homage destroys all sin and is the foremost of auspicious things, and the mechanism intended is the effect on the reciter.

It is one of the very few things both major Jain communities, Digambara and Svetambara, hold in common without variation, which given the depth of their disagreements, about whether ascetics may wear clothes, whether women can attain liberation, and which texts are canonical, is worth noting.

The language is Ardhamagadhi Prakrit, not Sanskrit: a vernacular of the region, and the choice of it reflects the tradition's early commitment to teaching in the language people spoke.

Dating it is harder than the tradition's confidence suggests, and the evidence usually cited needs handling with care.

The formula is not the composition of a named author and appears in no single originating text; it is recited across the canonical literature and treated as always having been there. That is a claim about status, not a date.

The evidence most often advanced is epigraphic. The Hathigumbha inscription at Udayagiri in Odisha, of the Jain king Kharavela and usually placed in the second or first century BCE, opens with homage to the arihants and the siddhas, the first two lines of the formula. That is a genuine and important attestation of those clauses in that period, on stone, in a datable royal inscription. It is not attestation of the full five-clause formula, and sources that present it as such are overreaching.

The full formula in its recited form, with the five clauses and the closing verses, is attested in the manuscript and commentarial tradition considerably later. The reasonable statement is that the core is demonstrably very old, that the complete version cannot be dated as precisely as the core, and that the difference between the two claims is the kind of distinction this collection exists to make.

Jain practice treats the formula as the first thing said on waking and the last said before death, and as the formula recited into the ear of the dying. Its use is not confined to ritual occasions.