Text, folio 12 (verso), from a Kalpa-sutra
1488
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1488
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Text, folio 12 (verso), from a Kalpa-sutra is a 1488 unspecified by Unknown, a Mughal Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a small, colorful painting of a goat-headed god cradling a glowing embryo in his hands. Above, a woman lies on a bed; below, a queen waits to receive the unborn child. This scene tells a sacred Jain story—the transfer of the religion’s founder from one mother to another. The tiny Sanskrit captions explain what’s happening, turning the image into a kind of illustrated text. If you’re curious about more works like this, look up western india, gujarat.
The tiny captions written in Sanskrit to the right of the painting identify the subject of this scene: “abduction of the embryo” and “transfer of the embryo.” The embryo is the unborn founder of the Jain religion. In this miraculous episode, a goat-headed divinity who presides over miscarriage and childbirth gently takes the embryo in his cupped hands away from the reclining Brahmin lady in the scene above. Below, he carries it to a queen, who will be his birth mother.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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