Nearly every rule in popular Vastu, where the kitchen goes, where the door may be, why the centre of the house should stay open, comes from one diagram: the Vastu Purusha Mandala. Before arguing about any single rule it helps to see the diagram itself, what the old texts say it is for, and how much of what is sold under its name they actually contain.
This page describes the mandala as the texts give it, and marks plainly where they disagree with each other and where a later convention has been added. It is a description of a tradition, not a forecast about your house.
The story of the figure
The Brihat Samhita of Varahamihira, written in the sixth century, opens its chapter on house-building with a short account. A monster appeared with a body so vast that it hid the earth and the sky. The gods caught hold of his limbs and laid him face down, and each god now presides over the part of the body he pinned. The figure is called the Vastu Purusha, the being of the dwelling place, and by Brahma’s order he carries all the gods within him (Brihat Samhita 53.2 and 53.3).
The Matsya Purana tells the origin differently. In its telling, which a scholars’ discussion of the diagram in 2024 places in chapters 252 and 253, the being is born from the sweat of Shiva in his fight with the demon Andhaka, and the next chapter gives the method of drawing an 81 square grid on the floor. Scholars such as Hans Bakker have traced the figure to older Vedic ideas of a sacrificial victim, which is a reminder that the diagram grew out of ritual before it became a planning tool.
The two accounts agree on the point that matters for practice: the ground is treated as a living body, every part of it is owned by a deity, and building on it begins with respect paid to those deities.
Two grids, and thirty more
The Manasara and the Mayamata, the two great south Indian treatises of perhaps the fifth to seventh centuries, each devote a chapter to the subject, the seventh in both, called the padavinyasa, the laying out of the squares. The Manasara, in P. K. Acharya’s summary, distinguishes thirty-two grids, each named and each the square of its serial number, from a single square up to 1,024. The eighth is the 64 square grid and the ninth, the Paramashayika, has 81.
Those two are the ones in use. The 64 square grid, often called the Manduka, is associated with temples and with sites where exact symmetry is wanted. The 81 square Paramashayika is the grid for dwellings and for towns and villages. Varahamihira describes only these two. That is worth remembering, because much of what is written today speaks as though a single 81 square diagram were the whole of Vastu, when the texts treat it as one chosen from a family, picked to suit the building.
The 45 devatas of the 81 square grid
The 81 squares are divided among 45 deities. Thirty-two stand on the outer ring of squares, eight to a side, and thirteen stand inside. The outer thirty-two are the ones that matter for the entrance, and the entrance article takes them one by one.
The inner thirteen are these. Brahma holds the central nine squares. Around him, on the four sides, stand Aryaman to the east, Vivasvan to the south, Mitra to the west and Prithvidhara to the north. Between them, in the four diagonal directions, stand Savita, Savitra, Indra, Jaya, Rudra and Rajayakshma, with Apa and Apavatsa in the north-east. Varahamihira’s verses 46 to 48 give the positions square by square, and they account for all thirteen.
The deities do not all hold the same amount of ground. The Brihat Samhita sorts them by the number of squares they command: five at each of the four corners hold a single square each, twenty on the outer ring hold two, and the four around Brahma hold a larger share. The exact square counts vary with the translator and the counting convention, so this page gives the structure and not a number for each god.
The Brahmasthana, the centre
Brahma’s nine central squares, the Brahmasthana, are the part of the diagram that modern practice has taken most to heart: keep the middle of the house open, light and free of weight. The classical texts support the general idea and differ in their reasons.
Varahamihira says the householder who wants prosperity should take particular care of the portion that belongs to Brahma, and that if it is defiled by impurities the master of the house will suffer (53.66). Acharya’s summary of the Manasara says the central square is unfit for a residential building and is where the temple of the family’s god is placed, with the other houses of the compound built around it. The two texts agree that the centre is set apart. Neither says anything about a stair, a pillar, a toilet or a kitchen in a modern flat. Those are later extensions, and the room-by-room article sorts them out.
Where the head goes
Here the sources disagree, and the disagreement is easy to check. The Brihat Samhita places the Vastu Purusha with his face down and his head in the north-east (53.51). Acharya’s summary of the Manasara has him lie with his head in the central square of the east side, the square of Surya, so that his right and left hands fall in the south-east and north-east and his feet in the south-west and north-west.
The popular picture, with head to the north-east and feet to the south-west, is the Brihat Samhita’s. It is an honest reading of one classical text, not a universal rule of Vastu, and a reader who is told it is the only way the figure lies has been told less than the texts say.
What the grid was for
In the texts the mandala is a tool for three jobs. It fixes where the ritual offerings to each deity are made, before and during construction: the Manasara devotes its eighth chapter to the offerings, with a particular offering for each deity. It lets a builder allot the buildings of a large compound, a palace, a temple or a village, among the squares. And it provides a set of sensitive points, the marmasthalas, where a pillar, a nail or a heap of refuse is to be avoided: Varahamihira lists the crossings of diagonal lines and warns against building in such a way that these points are pierced (53.57 to 53.64).
It is not a template that a building must be fitted into. Scholars describe the mandala as a guideline, and the texts themselves have a whole chapter on houses of different shapes and sizes, which cannot all be square.
What is classical and what is modern
| Idea | Status | What the texts say |
|---|---|---|
| The ground is a being whose parts belong to deities | Classical | Brihat Samhita 53.2 to 53.3; Matsya Purana |
| 64 and 81 square grids | Classical | Brihat Samhita 53.42 and 53.55; Manasara and Mayamata, chapter 7 |
| 45 devatas, 32 outer and 13 inner | Classical | Brihat Samhita 53.42 to 53.48 |
| Centre kept special | Classical | Brihat Samhita 53.66; Manasara |
| Head of the figure in the north-east | One classical reading | Brihat Samhita; the Manasara differs |
| Laying the 81 grid over a flat’s floor plan | Modern practice | Not in the texts, which describe plots and compounds |
| Sixteen 22.5 degree compass zones | Modern practice | The 32 padas are squares on a plot, not compass sectors |
A sober way to use the diagram
If you find the mandala interesting, treat it as what it is: a beautiful, very old way of thinking about a plot as an ordered whole. Learn the names, read the verses, and notice that the tradition itself is more varied than the summaries sold to home buyers. If a consultant tells you that a certain square of your flat is fatal, ask which text says so and in which verse. The honest answer is often that it does not.
Frequently asked questions
↳ What is the Vastu Purusha Mandala?
A square grid laid over a plot, usually 8 by 8 (Manduka) or 9 by 9 (Paramashayika), in which each square belongs to a deity. It represents the ground as the body of a being laid face down, every part of which is held by a god, and it is used to plan offerings, the placing of buildings and the points to be left undisturbed.
↳ How many devatas are there in the 81 square grid?
Forty-five: thirty-two on the outer ring, eight to a side, and thirteen inside, with Brahma holding the central nine squares. The Brihat Samhita lists them in chapter 53, verses 42 to 48.
↳ Does the Vastu Purusha lie with his head in the north-east?
In the Brihat Samhita, yes. In Acharya's summary of the Manasara, the head is in the central square of the east side instead. The north-east head is one classical reading, not the only one.
↳ Must the centre of a house be kept empty?
The texts set the centre apart and ask for care of it, and the Manasara says it is unfit for a residential building. Nothing in the texts we have read speaks about a modern flat, so advice about stairs or toilets at the centre is a later extension rather than a classical rule.
↳ Is the mandala the same as the Vastu compass zones?
No. The mandala is a grid of squares laid over a plot. The 16 or 32 compass sectors used by many consultants today are a later convention that turns the grid into angles from the centre. The two agree only approximately, and exactly only for a square plot.
Sources
Classical and scholarly sources used on this page. Verse numbers are those of the English translations named, which differ from each other and from editions of the Sanskrit in places.
- Varahamihira, Brihat Samhita, chapter 53 (Vastu-vidya), verses 2 to 3, 42 to 54, 55 to 64 and 66. English translation by N. Chidambaram Iyer (1884), at wisdomlib.org, compared with the translation by V. Subrahmanya Sastri (1946), scanned at archive.org.
- Prasanna Kumar Acharya, Summary of the Manasara, at archive.org, for the content of chapters 3 to 8 and the chapter on houses in a compound.
- Bruno Dagens, Mayamatam: Treatise of Housing, Architecture and Iconography (IGNCA, 2007), described at ignca.gov.in. Only the description of chapter 7 as the padavinyasa, with its 32 diagrams, was checked. The text itself was not available to this site.
- Matsya Purana, chapters 252 and 253, as discussed on the Indology list, March 2024. The chapters were not read directly for this page.
- Wikipedia, Vastu shastra, for the list of surviving texts and the scholarly comments on modern practice.