Akshaya Tritiya

Overview

Akshaya Tritiya — Akha Teej in the north — is Vaishakha Shukla Tritiya, a day tradition holds to be auspicious in itself, on which anything begun does not diminish (akshaya). It is kept with a morning puja to Vishnu and Lakshmi, with giving, and with beginnings: marriages, house-warmings, new ventures, and in the last generation the buying of gold. It is also Parashurama Jayanti, the birthday of Vishnu’s sixth avatar, and the day the Char Dham pilgrimage opens at Yamunotri and Gangotri.

Story and scripture

The Bhavishya and Matsya Puranas describe the Akshaya Tritiya vrata — a bath, a fast, the worship of Vishnu, and daan — and promise that its merit does not decay. The Skanda Purana’s Vaishakha Mahatmya treats the whole month as sacred to Vishnu and this day as its peak.

Several stories are told on it. The Mahabharata’s Vana Parva has Krishna give Yudhishthira the Akshaya Patra, the vessel that fed the Pandavas in exile and did not empty until Draupadi had eaten. Vyasa is said to have begun dictating the Mahabharata to Ganesh on this day. Ganga’s descent to earth is placed on it by some traditions, and the Puri Jagannath temple begins building the Rath Yatra chariots on Akshaya Tritiya each year. The story of Sudama — Krishna’s poor school-friend who brings a handful of flattened rice and returns to find his hut a palace, told in the Bhagavata Purana (10.80–81) — is read on the day as the story of a small gift returned without limit.

How the day is kept

Morning: a bath, the Vishnu and Lakshmi puja with tulsi, and the reading of the Sudama story or the Vishnu Sahasranama. The fast, where kept, is broken with the cooling foods of early summer — barley, sattu, cucumber, buttermilk.

Daan: the observance the Puranas prescribe — water pots, fans, umbrellas, sandals, grain and clothes given away in the heat, the jal daan of drinking-water stalls set up for the season.

Beginnings: weddings (the day is one of the year’s busiest for them in Rajasthan and Gujarat), the first sowing in farming communities, the opening of account books in some trading families, and the purchase of gold or a new vessel.

Jaap. Vishnu’s name — Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya — and Lakshmi’s; the Parashurama connection makes the day a Vishnu day rather than a Goddess one. The texts are linked below.

Regional forms

• Rajasthan: Akha Teej, the year’s largest wedding date; kites in Jaipur.
• Odisha: Akshaya Trutiya, the ceremonial first sowing (Akhi Muthi Anukula) and the start of the Jagannath chariot construction at Puri.
• Bengal: Halkhata, the opening of new account books in shops, with a Ganesh–Lakshmi puja.
• Konkan, Kerala, Goa: Parashurama Jayanti, with pujas at the Parashurama temples of the coast tradition holds he reclaimed from the sea; see the Parashurama page.
• Uttarakhand: the Char Dham yatra opens — Yamunotri and Gangotri on this day, Kedarnath and Badrinath in the days after.
• Jain communities: Varshi Tap ends on this day, marking Rishabhanatha’s first meal after a year’s fast.

The date

Tritiya at sunrise in one’s own city. Calendars sometimes prefer the day on which Tritiya covers the morning puja hours, so a Tritiya that begins mid-afternoon can put the festival a day apart between almanacs; the table gives New Delhi and flags such years.