History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v6.c81.567

v6.c81.567

The first is that in the ritual of Kṛṣṇāṣṭamī contained in some digests (that said that they borrowed the passage from Bhaviṣyottara) the image of Kṛṣṇa was to be shown³⁵⁸ as suckling at the breast of Devakī, that this is a unique direction, that in the Rāmanavamī festival which is similar to Janmāṣṭamī the image of Rāma is not required to be suckling at the breast of Kausalyā, that this detail was copied from the representation of the Madonna Lactans. Weber relied (*vide* I. A. vol. III p. 51) on one De Rossi who said that pictures of infant Christ at the breast existed in 2nd century A. D. Weber brushed aside the testimony of other scholars that the Madonna with the child was a subject little known to the early Christian centuries and the opinion of other scholars that the representations of the Madonna Lactans are extremely rare in Byzantine and Russian art (I. A. vol. III p. 48) and almost always of very late date Weber makes a mountain of a molehill. The image of Rāma is also described as lying on the lap of the mother Kausalyā.³⁵⁹ Further, all purāṇas do not provide that the image of Kṛṣṇa was to be suckling at the breast. Hemādri, in describing the Jayantīvrata from the Purāṇas, shows that the image was to be on the lap of the mother Devakī.³⁶⁰ Was the Hindu imagination so poor that when they could describe the image of Rāma or Kṛṣṇa as lying on the mother's lap they could not also imagine that it could be shown as suckling at the breast and had to run to the West to copy that detail from representations of the Madonna and the child thousands of miles away?