As Kerala tells it
Shankara tradition, Swarnathu Mana at Punnorkode · 3 min read
When Shankara was a small boy in Kerala, not long after his sacred thread was tied, he lived the way a student must, on alms. Each day he went from door to door with his bowl and stood at the threshold and said the words students say. "Mother, give alms."
One morning he stood at the door of a Brahmin's house in a village not far from his own. The husband was away, begging himself, because the family had nothing. His wife came to the door and saw a child there, glowing like a little sun, and she wanted badly to give him something. She went back into the house and searched it, every pot and every corner. There was no rice. There was nothing at all except a few dried amla fruits, gooseberries, which she had kept to break her fast with, because the day before had been a fast day.
She stood behind the door with one gooseberry in her hand, ashamed. Then she came out and dropped it in his bowl, and wept.
Shankara looked at the gooseberry and at the woman, and understood. She had given him the last thing in the house. Then and there, standing at her door, he began to sing to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth.
"As the bee comes to the flowering tamala tree," he sang, "come, Lakshmi, to Vishnu's dark chest, and let one glance of yours fall on this house. Let the cloud of your mercy rain on this poor bird, which is burning in the summer of its poverty."
Verse followed verse. And the story says that Lakshmi came, and stood before the boy, and answered him.
"This woman did not give in her past lives," she said. "That is why she is poor now. What she sowed, she reaps. How can I change it?"
"She has given now," said Shankara. "She has given me the only thing she had, and she gave it gladly. Is that not enough to wipe out a whole life of not giving? Mother, look at her."
He went on singing, and Lakshmi listened, and smiled.
As the last verse ended, there was a sound on the roof, like the first drops of the monsoon. Then a heavier sound. Gooseberries were falling out of the sky into the courtyard, hundreds of them, bouncing off the tiles, and every one of them was made of gold. They piled up against the walls and in the doorway.
The woman stood among them with her hands over her mouth. Shankara picked up his bowl, with the one dried gooseberry still in it, and walked on to the next house.
That evening the husband came home with his own little bowl of rice and found his wife sitting in a courtyard full of gold. "A boy came to the door," she said. "I gave him a gooseberry."
The family were never poor again, and their house was called Swarnathu Mana, the house of gold. The hymn was called Kanakadhara, the stream of gold, and it is said to have been the first hymn Shankara ever made.