Kuberaकुबेर

Kubera (कुबेर) is the god of wealth and the guardian of the north among the Aṣṭa-Dikpāla, the eight direction-keepers. He is lord of the yakṣas, the ancient spirits of treasure, waters and the wild, and master of the riches hidden in the earth. Unusually among major Hindu deities he is neither a great ascetic nor a great warrior but a proprietor, and his standing among the powers of life reflects a plain truth the tradition never denies: prosperity too is a divine dispensation.

Lord of Lanka, then of Alaka

The epics make Kubera a son of the sage Vishravas, whence his patronymic Vaiśravaṇa. He first ruled the golden city of Lanka and possessed the Pushpaka, the flying chariot; both were seized by his half-brother Ravana, the rakshasa king whose defeat is the matter of the Ramayana. Dispossessed, Kubera withdrew north and established Alaka in the Himalaya, near Kailasa, becoming the neighbour and devoted friend of Shiva. The geography is doctrine in miniature: wealth driven out by rapacity finds its lasting home beside the great renouncer.

Iconography and treasures

Kubera is portrayed as a stout, dwarfish figure, richly ornamented, pot-bellied with good living, holding a money-pot, a mace or a citron, often with a jewel-spitting mongoose, and attended by the nidhis, the personified treasures, of which Shankha and Padma are chief. His ungainly body is the point: he is abundance itself, not its advertisement.

Worship

As dikpala of the north, Kubera receives his quarter in temple ritual and in vastu, where the north is the direction of wealth. He is invoked alongside Lakshmi at Dhanteras, the opening of the Diwali season, when households honour the powers of prosperity. A popular tradition attaches him to the great shrine of Venkateshwara at Tirupati, holding that Vishnu borrowed from Kubera for his wedding and that pilgrims' offerings service the debt. Kubera also crossed sectarian lines early, entering Buddhist and Jain cosmology as Vaiśravaṇa, guardian king of the north, one of the most widely travelled gods of the Indian world.