In the earliest Indian Buddhist art, the Buddha is represented without ever actually depicting the person, who is replaced by symbols referring both to his presence and to the so-called Great Miracles. In the sculpted decoration of the stūpas of Bhārhāt, Sāñcī and Bodh Gayā, the tree represents the Reawakening, the wheel the First Sermon at Benares, and the stūpa the death of the Blessed One or Parinirvāṇa, which occurred at Kuśināgarā. However, the miracle of the birth has yet to find a corresponding symbol that is unanimously accepted by scholars. James Ferguson and Alexander Cunningham, among the first to take an interest in ancient Buddhist art, failed to identify a symbol corresponding to the first moment of the Buddha's life. Towards the mid 1930s, in his essay On the Iconography of the Buddha's Nativity, Alfred Foucher identified the lotus as the symbol of the Nativity, also linking to this miracle the figurative theme of the woman aspersed by two elephants, known as abhiṣeka. The last iconography had formerly been interpreted by Cunningham and Ferguson as a depiction of the Hindu goddess Śrī-Lakṣmī, included in an aspersion scene. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, in his Elements of Buddhist Iconography, re-proposed the latter thesis and thus identified the female figure as Lakṣmī and the lotus as the goddess' emblem.