Śrī Sūkta — the hymn to Lakṣmī, and what it actually asks for
The popular claimFifteen Ṛgvedic verses to Śrī. Cattle, horses, gold — and the sending away of her sister.
At Lakṣmī Pūjā on Dīwālī night, after the lamps, someone opens a book and reads fifteen verses beginning hiraṇya-varṇāṁ hariṇīṁ. This is the Śrī Sūkta. It is one of the few Vedic hymns to a goddess that the household tradition kept in use, and it is worth reading for what it asks, because what it asks is concrete.
Where it is
Not in the Ṛgveda proper. It is a khila — a supplement — attached to the fifth maṇḍala, after the hymn 5.87, in the Bāṣkala and some other recensions. The khilas are old but later than the Saṁhitā they supplement; the Śrī Sūkta's language and its pairing of Śrī and Lakṣmī place it at the end of the Vedic period, perhaps in the same layer as the later Brāhmaṇas. Sāyaṇa commented on it. The common text has fifteen verses; longer versions run to twenty-nine, the extra verses being visibly later additions.
The two names
In the Ṛgveda proper śrī is a quality — splendour, prosperity, the lustre of a king — and lakṣmī is a mark, a sign, good or bad. The Śrī Sūkta is the text where they become a goddess. In the first verses she is Śrī; by the fifth she is Lakṣmī; by the end the hymn uses both names as one. The Taittirīya Āraṇyaka, of about the same period, pairs Lakṣmī with Alakṣmī — the mark of good fortune with its opposite — and the Śrī Sūkta keeps the pair.
Verse by verse
1–2. To Agni, the fire, the hymn opens: bring me Lakṣmī, golden-coloured, deer-like, garlanded in gold and silver, moon-like, resplendent. Bring me the one who does not go away — anapagāminīm — and in whom I shall find gold, cattle, horses and men. The hymn asks the fire to fetch her, and says what it wants her to bring.
3–4. She who is preceded by horses and surrounded by chariots, whom the trumpeting of elephants delights — may she come to me. She who is the golden one, the wet one, the shining one, garlanded, seated on the lotus, the colour of the lotus. Ārdrām — moist, or damp: the word recurs, and the commentators connect her to water and to the fertility that water is.
5–6. Candrāṁ prabhāsāṁ yaśasā jvalantīṁ — moon-like, shining, blazing with fame; here she is named Lakṣmī for the first time, and the speaker says: I take refuge in her; may my misfortune — alakṣmī — be destroyed. The sixth verse invokes the sun and the fruit-bearing tree, and asks that by their power the inner and outer alakṣmī be driven off.
7–8. Kubera, Kīrti and Maṇi are called with her; the speaker asks to be born in this land in the company of fame and wealth. Then the verse the whole hymn turns on: kṣut-pipāsā-malāṁ jyeṣṭhām alakṣmīṁ nāśayāmy aham — hunger, thirst and dirt, the elder one, Alakṣmī — I drive her out. Jyeṣṭhā — the elder sister — is the tradition's name for the goddess of want, who is born before Lakṣmī in the churning-of-the-ocean story, and the hymn's request is that she, and the hunger, thirst and dirt she is, leave the house.
9–12. Fragrant, unassailable, ever full, the one who is in cow-dung — karīṣiṇīm — the mistress of all beings: the hymn is not embarrassed by the byre; a Vedic household's wealth stood in it. Then the plain list: may the desire of my mind be granted, the truth of my speech; cattle, food, wealth of many kinds; may Lakṣmī, mother of Kardama and Ciklīta, dwell in my house. The sons are named — the mud and the wet — because she is the goddess of a fertile field.
13–15. The closing verses return to the opening image — golden, garlanded, lotus-seated, moist — and ask the fire once more to bring her, and end with the wish for wealth in cattle and horses and for the hymn to be granted. The fifteenth is the one most recensions close on.
What it is
A household hymn that asks for prosperity in the terms a farming household understood — herd, horses, gold, food, sons, fame — and that names want as a goddess in order to ask her to leave. It is not allegorical in its own terms; it is a request. Later devotional reading spiritualises it, and a reader may do so. The words are about cattle.
What this page does not say
It does not say the Śrī Sūkta brings wealth, and it does not say the reader should recite it at a particular time, though the tradition has it on Dīwālī night and on Fridays. It gives the verses, the two names and how they merged, the elder sister who is driven out, and the concreteness of what the hymn asks. A reader who has heard it every Dīwālī now knows what was being asked for.
Source — Rigveda Khila 2.6 (the Shri Sukta, an appendix to Mandala 5), fifteen verses in the common recension, up to twenty-nine in longer ones; Taittiriya Aranyaka for the Lakshmi–Alakshmi pair; the Shri Sukta commentary tradition (Sayana's on the khilas)
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