Kuberaकुबेर

Kubera is the treasurer of the gods and lord of wealth: the keeper of the earth's buried treasures, of minerals and hidden hoards, and king of the yakshas, the nature spirits associated with trees, water and the ground.

He is distinct from Lakshmi in an important way. She is shri — fortune, flourishing, the condition of things going well, which moves and cannot be held. Kubera is the treasury: stored wealth, accounted and guarded. Business worship at Diwali addresses both, and the division of labour is real — Lakshmi is asked to come, Kubera to keep.

He is guardian of the north, one of the eight Dikpalas, and the direction is associated with wealth in Vastu on account of him.

His narrative position is unusual: he is Ravana's half-brother, and Lanka was his city before Ravana took it by force. He withdrew to Alaka in the Himalaya, beside Shiva's Kailasa, and the two are neighbours and friends.

He is shown pot-bellied, ornamented and often ugly — deliberately so, in a tradition whose deities are otherwise beautiful.

Kubera's origins lie outside the Vedic mainstream, among the yakshas — the tree and earth spirits of popular religion, worshipped in India well before the Puranic pantheon consolidated.

He appears in the Atharvaveda in a somewhat sinister light, associated with darkness and with beings of the shadows, and the earliest material treats him as a chief of spirits rather than a god of the orthodox order. His rehabilitation into the pantheon as treasurer and Dikpala is a later development.

Yaksha worship is well attested archaeologically: the monumental yaksha statues of the Mauryan and Shunga periods, such as those from Parkham and Patna, are among the earliest large stone sculptures in India, and they predate anthropomorphic images of the major Hindu deities.

He is prominent in Buddhism and Jainism as well — as Vaishravana or Jambhala he is one of the Four Heavenly Kings in Buddhist cosmology, guardian of the north, and travelled with Buddhism into Tibet, China and Japan, where he is Bishamonten. His profile outside Hinduism is in some respects higher than within it.

The Ramayana's Uttara Kanda gives the Lanka narrative: Kubera, son of Vishrava, rules Lanka until his half-brother Ravana, having won boons, drives him out and takes both the city and the pushpaka vimana, the flying chariot.

Kalidasa's Meghaduta is set in his city Alaka, and is the source of much of the later imagery of that place.

Kubera is shown pot-bellied, short, richly ornamented and conspicuously unhandsome — sometimes with uneven eyes and broken teeth, which the texts attribute to a curse.

This is deliberate. In a pantheon of beautiful deities, the lord of wealth is the one who is not, and the tradition made him so.

He holds a money bag or a pot of coins, and often a mongoose (nakula) which disgorges jewels when squeezed — an image carried into Buddhist Jambhala iconography as well. The mongoose is his most distinctive attribute.

His vahana is the nara, a man — the only major Hindu deity carried by a human being, which has attracted comment and is generally read as wealth being borne on human labour.

He is seated rather than standing in most depictions, and surrounded by heaped treasure.

As a Dikpala he guards the north, and appears there on temple walls across India.

Vaishravana — son of Vishrava, his patronymic; the name under which he passes into Buddhism.

Dhanapati — lord of wealth, the functional title.

Yakshraja — king of the yakshas, his older identity.

Jambhala — his Buddhist form, particularly in Tibetan traditions, holding the jewel-yielding mongoose.

Bishamonten — his Japanese Buddhist form, one of the Seven Lucky Gods, where he is a warrior rather than a treasurer.

Kubera as Dikpala — guardian of the north, his most widespread architectural presence.

Sarvanubhuti / Kubera in Jainism — a yaksha attendant of the Tirthankaras, with his own iconography.

The austerities and the boon. In one account Kubera performs long austerities and is granted the office of treasurer of the gods, the guardianship of the north, and the friendship of Shiva.

The lamp at the shrine. A well-known story has him as a thief who, breaking into a Shiva temple, relights a lamp that has gone out so he can see — and is rewarded, in a later birth, with the treasurership. The point is that the act counted even though the intention was theft.

Losing Lanka. His half-brother Ravana, son of the same father Vishrava by a rakshasa mother, wins boons through austerity and drives Kubera from Lanka, taking the city and the pushpaka vimana. Kubera withdraws to Alaka. Rama later returns the vimana to him after Ravana's defeat.

The curse of the eye. In some accounts he looks at Parvati with envy or presumption and is cursed to have one eye disfigured — the tradition's explanation of his unevenness.

Lending to Venkateswara. Vishnu, as Srinivasa, borrows from Kubera to fund his wedding to Padmavati, on terms requiring repayment with interest until the end of the age. The offerings at Tirumala are understood as helping repay that loan — which makes Kubera the creditor in the theology of the most visited temple on earth.

Alaka. Kalidasa's Meghaduta describes his city in the Himalaya, where a yaksha exiled from it sends a message home by way of a cloud.

Dhanteras, two days before Diwali, is his principal day, shared with Lakshmi and Dhanvantari. Metal is purchased, account books prepared, and Lakshmi-Kubera puja performed in homes and businesses.

At Diwali he is worshipped alongside Lakshmi in the evening puja, and the pairing is standard in commercial contexts: Lakshmi for the arrival of fortune, Kubera for its safekeeping.

He is invoked in Vastu, where the north is his direction and is prescribed for the safe, the treasury or the cash box. The Kubera yantra is kept in shops and offices.

His long mantra — ॐ यक्षाय कुबेराय वैश्रवणाय धनधान्याधिपतये नमः — is among the more widely recited wealth invocations, and the Kubera Ashtakam and Kubera Stotra are used.

As a Dikpala he is invoked with the directional guardians at the opening of rites.

His worship is markedly practical rather than devotional: he is approached by traders, and there is very little poetry addressed to him.

Kubera has few dedicated temples, and is more often a subsidiary figure.

Kubera shrines within Dikpala schemes — on the northern face of temples across India, his commonest presence.

Kubera Temple, Kubera Bhandari, Gujarat — on the Narmada near Bharuch, among the few dedicated shrines.

Alakapuri and Badrinath area, Uttarakhand — the region traditionally associated with Alaka, his city.

Kubera shrines at Tirumala and Tirupati — reflecting the loan narrative.

Ellora and Khajuraho carry significant Kubera sculpture within Dikpala programmes.

Yaksha statues from Parkham, Patna and Vidisha — Mauryan and Shunga period, now in museums, representing the older stratum of his worship.

Bishamonten temples in Japan and Jambhala shrines across the Himalaya preserve him in Buddhist form, in some cases more prominently than any Hindu temple does.

Kubera is worth reading alongside Lakshmi, because the pair divides a single subject. She is fortune in motion — arriving, departing, incapable of being held. He is the treasury: counted, stored, guarded, static. A tradition that made these two different deities was making a real distinction, and Diwali's practice of worshipping both, in that order, follows it exactly.

His appearance is the most pointed thing about him. He is short, pot-bellied, uneven-eyed and unhandsome in a pantheon of beautiful figures, and he is the lord of wealth. Whether this is a comment on accumulation or simply an inheritance from his yaksha origins, the tradition kept it, and the contrast with Lakshmi's beauty is hard to read as accidental.

His vahana is a man. No other major Hindu deity is carried by a human being. Whatever the original reason, it is difficult not to notice that the god of stored wealth rides on a person's back.

His origins outside the pantheon are visible throughout. He begins as a chief of yakshas, spirits of trees and earth and buried things, worshipped in India before the great gods had images. He was absorbed and given an office. That the tradition made room for him — and that Buddhism and Jainism kept him too, sometimes more prominently — is a good illustration of how Indian religion has generally handled popular deities: not by displacing them but by employing them.

And his role at Tirumala is quietly remarkable: the most visited temple on earth operates on a theology in which its deity is in debt, and Kubera is the one owed.