Indian Antiquary Vol 03

Author(s): Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 29

JANUARY, 1874.]
WEBER ON THE KRISHNAJANMASHTAMI.
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE ORIGIN OF THE FESTIVAL OF KRISHNAJANMASHTAMI.
Translated from the German of Prof. A. Weber. *
The most difficult point in connection with the festival of the birthday of Krishna, as we have now described it, lies clearly in the description, and particularly in the pictorial representation, of him as a suckling at his mother's breast, and in the homage paid to the mother, represented as lying on a couch in a cow-house, who has borne him, "the lord of the world," in her womb. Such a representation of the god is a strange contrast to the other representations of him-to that of the epos, for example, in which he appears as a warrior hero and is, moreover, the only thing of its kind in Indiat. Again the pictorial representation of the festival differs in various details from the usual legends about Krishna's birth in a way which it is difficult to explain. The inquirer is therefore not surprised if external grounds present themselves in explanation of this unique phenomenon, which give probability to the supposition that we have in this festival something transferred from outside, and retained, in spite of the incongruities it has given rise to, in the form in which it was received. And such grounds are, as a matter of fact, sufficiently numerous.
For the various points of contact which, apart altogether from the hitherto unnoticed festival of his birthday, the legends of Krishna have in common with Christian legends, attracted, centuries ago, the notice of Europeans, especially of the missionaries. P. Georgi, who expressly raised this question in his Alphabetum Tibetanum (Rome, 1762), pp. 253-263, hegins by appealing to a P. Cassianus Maceratensis and to De Guignes as agreeing with him in the opinion that Krisnu' is only "a corruption of the name of the Saviour; the deeds correspond wonderfully with the name, though they
This is the third section of Prof. Weber's paper on the Krishnajanmashtami, read before the Berlin Akademie der Wissenschaften on the 17th June 1867. In the two preceding sections the Professor gives (1) the sources for the festival and (2) an account of the ritual of the festival. In the fourth and last section he discusses the pictorial representations connected with it.
+Rama's birthday is celebrated by the Indians, and the Ramayana gives a detailed account of his birth. In fact the festival of the Ramanavami presents such striking analogies to the Krishnajanmashtami that we may suspect imitation. But nowhere do I find Rama represented as a "suckling at the breast;" once only is he represented as "resting in the lap of his mother" (matur ankagata). Of Buddha's birth the Buddhists give many accounts; nay, there are pictorial representations of the subject (see in Foncaux Lalita Vistara 1, pl. 5, from a bas-relief in the Calcutta Museum); but Buddha does not appear as a suckling: I am unable to say whether the Buddhists keep his birthday. Of the Brahmanical gods legend speaks often of the birth of Skanda and his childhood, and especially of his nurses, the six Krittikas (conf. e. g. Sansk. Kaust. fol. 596: gauriputroyatha Skandaḥ sisutve rak
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have been impiously and cunningly polluted by most wicked impostors." He supposes that the borrowing took place from the "apocryphal books concerning Jesus Christ," and especially from the Manichæans; but his proofs are very wild. He derives the names Ayodhya, Yudhishṭhira, Yadava, from Juda, Gomatt from Gethsemane, Arjuna from John (Joannes), Durvâsas from Peter (Petrus). Sir Willian Jones also, though of course holding aloof from such extravagances, goes the length of asserting (As. Res. I. 274) that "the spurious gospels, which abounded in the first ages of Christianity, had been brought to India, and the wildest part of them repeated to the Hindus, who ingrafted them on the old fable of Cesava, the Apollo of Greece." But against this view § considerations of all kinds presented themselves, and especially, as is evident, of a theological kind, resting on the unwillingness to recognize in the lascivious Krishnacult any reflex of Christian ideas; considerations confirmed by the opinion then prevalent of the high antiquity of the Indian mythology, and so justified for the time.
The Carmelite monk P. Paullino à S. Bartolomaeo, in his Systema Brahmanicum (Rome, 1791, pp. 147, 152) was the most vigorous opponent, and his chief argument was that "these events must be referred to a thousand years and more before Christ." It is noteworthy that Kleuker, in his treatise on the history and the antiquities of Asia (Riga, 1797), 4, 70. after giving an account of the polemic directed by P. Paullino against "those who find all sorts of things in the story of Krishna, and especially the false account given in the apocryphal gospels of the history of Jesus," says very shrewdly, "I can easily believe that the story did not take
shitaḥ pura | tatha mâmâ'nyayam bilah Shashthike! rakshyatâm, namah ). But I know of no representation or worship of him as a suckling.
I do not know where De Guignes expressed himself to this effect...
§ Polier, Mythologie, I. 445, sought at least in the victory over Kaliya "a travesty of the tradition of the Serpent, the tempter who introduces death into the world, and whose head the Saviour of the human race shall crush."
In the second volume of his treatise (Riga, 1795), pp. 233, 234, Kleuker was more undecided, for he says there, with reference to the above passage from Sir W. Jones, which he had translated in his first volume: "P. Georgi, who is fond of referring everything to the history of Manes and the Manichæans, maintains that Krishna is a corruption of Christ, and that this Indian demigod owes his origin entirely to the apocryphal gospels. This opinion is certainly exaggerated; the former [that of Jones], however, seems to have more on its side. There is a very great similarity between the accounts of the youth of the child Jesus and of that of Krishna. See La Croze, Hist. du Christianisme dans les Indes. [In the edition of this work which appeared at the