The conception is announced by a dream, and the dream is one of the most frequently carved scenes in Buddhist art. Maya sees a white elephant with six tusks, carrying a lotus, circle her three times and enter her right side. Brahmin interpreters at the court tell Suddhodana that his queen will bear a son who will become either a universal monarch or a fully awakened one. The elephant is the standard sign of royal power in Indian iconography, and six is the number of directions with the zenith and nadir added, so the image says both that a king is coming and that his reach will not be territorial.
The birth is told with equal deliberation. Ten months later Maya sets out for her parents' house to give birth there, as custom required, and stops at a pleasure grove at Lumbini. She takes hold of the branch of a sala tree, gives birth standing, and the child emerges from her right side without pain and takes seven steps. The elements of the scene, the tree, the standing posture, the grasped branch, belong to older Indian imagery of the fertile woman and the tree spirit, and Buddhist sculptors used that vocabulary consciously.
She dies seven days after the birth. The Pali commentaries explain that this is not misfortune but the rule: the womb that carries a Buddha is not used again, and the mother of a Buddha always dies on the seventh day. The child was raised by her sister Mahapajapati Gotami, who was also Suddhodana's wife and who, decades later, asked her stepson to admit women to the monastic order and became the first bhikkhuni. Lumbini itself is a fixed point in the history rather than the legend: Ashoka set up a pillar there in the third century BCE recording that the Buddha was born on that spot, and the pillar still stands.