Most Vastu advice asks you to trust a person or a chart. This site asks you to check a source.
That is a deliberate choice. A name and a confident manner are quick to produce and impossible to verify. A verse can be looked up. Every classical claim on this site names the text it comes from, and where a verse can be cited, the page gives its number.
This page applies to every guide, table and tool result here.
The texts we read
The main texts we could read in full or in part are:
- Brihat Samhita, chapter 53 (Vastu-vidya), of Varahamihira, sixth century, in the English translations by N. Chidambaram Iyer (1884) and V. Subrahmanya Sastri (1946). We compared the two verse by verse.
- Manasara, in P. K. Acharya’s English summary.
Some further works are named and described in the guides but we did not have their full text, and the guides do not claim more than we read. These are the Mayamata, in Bruno Dagens’ translation, the Samarangana Sutradhara of King Bhoja (eleventh century), the Vishvakarma Prakasha and the Matsya Purana.
A limitation worth stating plainly: we work from English translations and a summary, not from the Sanskrit. Where two translators read a verse differently, we show both and do not choose one. The entrance table has a few such cases, and the entrance guide and the entrance checker mark them.
Three labels on every page
- Classical means we found it in a verse of a named text.
- Modern means it is a convention of recent practice and we did not find it in the verses we read. That does not make it wrong. It means nobody should call it ancient.
- Disputed means the sources, or the translators, disagree, and the page says how.
Where something is our own reasoning, such as a practical reading of why a rule might make sense, the page says that it is.
What this site will not claim
These are standing limits, not case-by-case judgements.
No predictions of harm. Nothing here predicts illness, loss, failure or death from the position of a room or a door. A door in a cautioned square is not a curse.
No guarantees. No remedy is promised to bring a result, and nobody is told they must spend money to correct a layout.
No products. We sell nothing, and we do not present an object, a yantra or a crystal as a cure you have to buy.
No demolition. None of the texts we read asks anyone to demolish or rebuild a home on the strength of a table, and neither do we.
No medical, structural or financial advice. Vastu is not a substitute for a doctor, a structural engineer, an architect or a financial adviser. If a symptom or a safety concern is real, see the right professional first.
No repeating what reflects its age. Where a verse reflects the assumptions of its time, about caste or about women, we report that the verse exists and do not repeat it as guidance.
What we do not know
Whether any of it works. This site is careful about what the tradition says. That does not establish that the results it describes are true of any home. We have not run a test, and we will not pretend the question is closed because the tradition is old.
How far the compass method is faithful. The classical table locates a door along a wall. The entrance checker uses equal compass sectors of 11.25 degrees instead, which is exact for a square plot and approximate otherwise. The checker says so.
What the texts we did not read say. The conclusions here are about the translations we could read. A different edition or a text we have not seen may say something else.
Our correction policy
When something here is wrong, the page is fixed and the error is logged with a date on the corrections page. We correct our own errors on the same terms as anyone else’s, and factual errors are fixed as fast as we can verify them.
How to report an error
Tell us what is wrong and, if you can, what it should be. A source helps and is not required. Write to [email protected] or use the contact page.
This site belongs to a family of sites with their own method pages. The standards for the Vedic astrology material are on the Vedic site’s method page.