Lord Kubera

About

Who Kubera is, and why he is rarely kept alone Kubera is one of the few deities a great many households keep without ever having visited a temple of his. There are very few. He tends to arrive in someone else's company, on Dhanteras, in a pair with Lakshmi, and he is often put not in the mandir at all but on the shelf where the cash box sits. That is the whole logic of him. Lakshmi is prosperity itself and Kubera is its custody: he is the treasurer of the gods and the king of the yakshas , who in the older texts guard the wealth lying in the earth and in the roots of trees. He keeps rather than gives. Which is why the tradition sets him beside her rather than in place of her, and why the pair is the more usual thing to buy. Kuber and Kubera are the same name and both spellings are in ordinary use. He is Vaishravana after his father Vishrava, which is the name Buddhism generally uses, and Dhanapati, lord of wealth. Kuberan in Tamil and Malayalam. In Tamil the north corner of a building is itself called the kubera moolai , after him. Where to keep a Kuber idol at home or in a shop This is what almost everyone arrives asking, so it is worth separating the part that is old and textual from the part that is custom. The textual part is simple. Kubera is a dikpala , one of the guardians of the directions, and the direction he guards is the north. That association is genuinely ancient and it is not something the internet invented. Everything after it is convention, sincerely kept and very widely observed. The murti goes on the north side of the room or against the north wall. In a shop or an office it goes at the counter, at the till, or on the shelf beside the safe, and where there is a locker the custom is for its door to open toward the north. He is set facing into the room or into the house rather than out through a door. Nothing in any of this confines him to a business, either: the home shelf is as usual as the shop counter. These are the things people do, and we can