The painting recalls the events around the birth of Siddhārtha Gautama, the later Buddha Śākyamuni. The central scene shows Queen Māyādevī standing on a lotus giving birth to the Buddha-to-be in a grove named Lumbini, not far from Kapilavastu, the capital of the Śākyas. Standing upright and holding with her right hand onto the branch of a flowering śala tree, the child emerges from the right side of her body and is received in a divine silk cloth by the gods Indra and Brahmā. The sandalwood stūpa depicted to her right represents the place that the Bodhisattva occupied in the womb of Queen Māyā and was later carried away by Brahmā to the Brahmā heaven to be worshipped as a sacred shrine. The elephant that appears in the clouds above Queen Māyā alludes to her dream about a white elephant entering her body. The scene in the lower left corner shows the new-born Bodhisattva taking seven unaided steps in each direction from which lotuses sprang up.