Kubera

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.

Kubera travels further across Asia than almost any other Indian deity, and changes character as he goes. As Vaishravana (a patronymic, son of Vishravas) he is one of the Four Heavenly Kings of Buddhist cosmology, the guardian of the north, and in that role his cult spread through Central Asia, Tibet, China and Japan.

In Japan he becomes Bishamonten, one of the Seven Lucky Gods (Shichifukujin), but there, remarkably, the Indian god of wealth has been reimagined as an armoured god of war and defender of the faith, so that a single deity is worshipped for riches at one end of Asia and for victory in battle at the other. This transformation is one of the clearest illustrations of how a god's meaning can shift as a tradition is carried across cultures. In Japan the transformation went further still: as one of the Shichifukujin, the Seven Lucky Gods whose grouping was popularised in the Edo period, Bishamonten is honoured as a martial guardian at sites such as Kurama-dera near Kyoto, while along the Silk Road the same guardian king, as Vaishravana, was claimed as divine ancestor by the royal house of the Buddhist kingdom of Khotan, whose kings traced their line to a miraculous birth from the god's forehead, a legend recorded by the seventh century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, showing how thoroughly the Indian wealth god's iconography and myth were reforged as royal and martial ideology across Central and East Asia.