The Brihat Samhita and Its Chapter on Houses: A Reader's Guide

The Brihat Samhita is an encyclopaedic Sanskrit work by Varahamihira, written in the sixth century in the Ujjain region of India, on astronomy, portents, weather and many practical arts. Its fifty-third chapter, on Vastu-vidya, is the text this site knows best and cites most. It names four rooms with their directions, gives a result for each of the 32 entrance squares, and says much less than modern Vastu does about the rest of a house.

This is the page to read first if you want to look a verse up for yourself.

Who wrote it and when

Varahamihira is usually placed in the sixth century CE. A common dating gives about 505 to 587, and he is associated with Ujjain, a great centre of astronomy. He wrote several works, of which the Brihat Samhita is the longest and most general. The date of the book is firmer than that of the southern craft treatises, because it is tied to a known author, though even here the dates of his life rest on later statements and are given as approximate.

The word samhita means a collection. The work gathers what an educated person of the time might want to know about the sky and the earth: what the planets do, what omens mean, how to forecast rain, how to choose a gem, how to find water, how to build.

What the whole book covers

It is in about a hundred chapters. Without trying to list them, its subjects include:

• the movements of the sun, moon and planets, and eclipses;
• portents and omens, and the reading of the weather and of rainfall;
• the qualities of gems, of perfumes and of cloth;
• the marks of men and women, horses, elephants and other animals;
• the care of plants;
• the finding of underground water, in chapter 54;
• the building of temples, houses and the making of images.

House-building is one chapter of many. The Vastu in this book is a part of the surveying and building arts of the sixth century, set among other practical subjects. That is a reason to be careful of any claim that this text is a complete system of Vastu.

Chapter 53: a verse finder

These are the verses this site cites, in the translations of N. Chidambaram Iyer (1884) and V. Subrahmanya Sastri (1946). Verse numbers differ between translations and editions, so check yours.

That is most of what the chapter gives for a householder. It is a short list for something described as the foundation of a whole subject.

What the chapter does not contain

In the translations we read, the chapter has no rule for a master bedroom, a toilet, a staircase, a study, a living room or a balcony. It has no colour scheme, no mirror rule and no object to place in a corner. It does not name a remedy product. It does not describe a flat.

These absences are the most useful finding on this site. They do not make modern advice wrong. They mean that a reader who is told “Varahamihira says” about any of those things should ask for the verse. The honest answer, in most cases, is that the modern chart was built later around the four rooms and the entrance table that the chapter does give.

Language and attitude in the text

Some results in the chapter are stated in the vocabulary of its day: sons, wealth, the favour of the king, the conduct of women, caste. This site reports that those verses exist and does not repeat them as guidance, as the method page says. Where two translators read a verse differently, as at the first pada, Yama and Roga, the entrance article shows both. We have not read the Sanskrit.

How to read the chapter yourself

1. Find a translation. The Iyer text is freely available online, and the Sastri translation is scanned in a public library collection. Our method page names both.
2. Read the whole chapter once for its flow. It moves from the origin of the Vastu Purusha, through the grid and the entrances, to trees, rooms and the ceremonies of entry.
3. Look up the verse numbers in the table above against your own copy.
4. Read the neighbouring verses before you quote one. A verse taken alone can say more than the sentence around it allows.
5. Compare with chapter 54 on water, which is a separate chapter on a related subject.

What cannot be known, and what helps

We cannot tell you what the Sanskrit says word by word, or how the other major texts handle each point in full. We can tell you what two English translations say, and where they differ.

What helps is to keep the chapter’s size in mind. It is a short and valuable source, and the modern subject is much larger than it is. For the other texts, see the Manasara, the Mayamatam and the Samarangana Sutradhara.

Frequently asked questions