Kubera is the god of wealth and the treasurer of the gods, guardian of the north among the directional deities (Lokapalas), shown short, pot-bellied and heavy with jewels, sometimes accompanied by a mongoose that vomits gems from its mouth. He rules the yakshas, nature-spirits associated with the earth's hidden riches. His myth gives him a fall: Lanka was his golden city until his half-brother, the demon-king Ravana, seized it and his flying chariot from him, after which Kubera withdrew to Alaka, a paradise-city in the Himalaya. He is among the oldest Indian deities to remain in continuous worship, present already in early Buddhist and Jain material as well as Hindu.
Kubera's iconographic type, pot-bellied and heavy with ornament, developed out of the broader class of yaksha images that are among the earliest large freestanding stone sculptures to survive from India: the colossal Parkham Yaksha, found near Mathura and generally dated to around the second century BCE, shows the kind of powerful, corpulent nature-spirit from which images of Kubera as king of the yakshas later crystallised, well before his more familiar seated, crowned temple form became standard.