isis unveiled, vol 2: chapter xi (fishers of men and their doctrines)

“Turning again from the historical to the mythical narratives, invented alike about Christna, Buddha, and Christ, we find the following:

Setting a model for the Christian avatar and the archangel Gabriel to follow, the luminous San-tusita (Bodhisat) appeared to Maha-maya ‘like a cloud in the moonlight, coming from the north, and in his hand holding a white lotus.’ He announced to her the birth of her son, and circumambulating the queen’s couch thrice… passed away from the dewa-loka and was conceived in the world of men.

The resemblance will be found still more perfect upon examining the illustrations in mediaeval psalters, and the panel-paintings of the sixteenth century (in the Church of Jouy, for instance, in which the Virgin is represented kneeling, with her hands uplifted toward the Holy Ghost, and the unborn child is miraculously seen through her body), and then finding the same subject treated in the identical way in the sculptures in certain convents in Tibet.

In the Pali-Buddhistic annals, and other religious records, it is stated that Maha-devi and all her attendants were constantly “gratified with the sight of the infant Bodhisatva quietly developing within his mother’s bosom, and beaming already, from his place of gestation, upon humanity “the resplendent moonshine of his future benevolence.”

Ananda, the cousin and future disciple of Sakya-Muni, is represented as having been born at the same time. He appears to have been the original for the old legends about John the Baptist. For example, the Pali narrative relates that Maha-maya, while pregnant with the sage, paid a visit to his mother, as Mary did to the mother of the Baptist. Immediately, as she entered the apartment, the unborn Ananda greeted the unborn Buddha-Siddhartha, who also returned the salutation; and in like manner the babe, afterward John the Baptist, leaped in the womb of Elizabeth when Mary came in. More even that; for Didron describes a scene of salutation, painted in shutters at Lyons, between Elizabeth and Mary, in which the two unborn infants, both pictured as outside their mothers, are also saluting each other.”

H. P. Blavatsky