The Geography of Vastu

When we look to India for wisdom, we find it easily. With millennia of history, and knowledge systems from Yoga to Ayurveda, it's tempting to rush into a Vastu home design scheme, apply it exactly as it was envisioned in ancient India and ask a Vastu guru for all the answers. If traditional Indian exercise and nutrition keep us healthy, wouldn't a Vastu home do the same? Well, yes and no.

A quick look online will tell us much about India's size, geography and climate. Located between 8° and 37° north of the equator, India is a fairly large country, with a latitudinal range similar to that of Mexico plus the northern countries of South America. India's northern latitudes are on par with Egypt, one of the hottest countries on earth. Vastu, in practice, responds to India's pleasantly warm to dangerously hot climate.

If you live, or want to live, in a similarly warm-to-hot climate, asking your guru for Vastu advice may make a lot of sense. But what if you want to design a home in England, Ireland or northeastern United States? What if you're in the southern hemisphere? Does that traditional Vastu guru have all the answers? Well, again, yes and no. In most habitable places on earth, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. The eastern and western components of Vastu may most easily be translated globally for practically any location. So far so good.

As people in the southern hemisphere are aware, the further south you travel, the closer you get to the south pole and colder it gets. It's the exact opposite to the northern hemisphere, home of the north pole. Swapping north and south Vastu correspondences for buildings in the southern hemisphere may be necessary. Similarly, the further the home site is from the equator, the more the weather conditions change. In place of dangers from summer heat exposure, the most vital concerns become wintery cold weather. May we replace the beautiful, open courtyard of Vastu with a central heating system?

When interpreting ancient systems, we now have a dilemma. Is Vastu, when reinterpreted for a non-Indian climate still Vastu? Will our traditional Vastu guru understand and agree with the new interpretation? That's a bit of a tricky question and it may depend on whether or not you're a purist.

For a Reiki version of a Vastu Clearing, please visit my Metaphysics for Architecture webpage.

This article may be updated from time to time.

Vastu and the Home Site

There are land lots which provide the perfect location for a Vastu home, according to Vastu expert Monica Bakshi.

Universal Truth: planning for cities and towns is often organized in a grid created by streets bounding square or rectangular shaped land lots.

Fortunately, the perfect Vastu home site is square in shape, with a second choice being a rectangle with a maximum ratio of 2:1; the shape of two equal sized square sites side-by-side. Plenty of imaginative theories for why sites of other shapes aren't ideal are prevalent in the study of Vastu. However; even if your site is less than perfect, with a little ingenuity you may still be in luck. Vastu design remedies abound for these less-than-ideal sites. For example, a very long, thin site may be sectioned off into a buildable rectangular area that has a ratio of 2:1, with separate planting areas in front or behind, making it an excellent garden or tree house.

Universal Truth: the sun rises in the east, which has spiritual significance in many belief systems. In the northern hemisphere, the north side of a home or building is naturally cooler, just as the darkness of night is also associated with cooler temperatures. The rising sun may symbolically be seen as warming the coolness of the north direction through the eastern sky.

Although the ideal Vastu home site is a square or 2:1 rectangle with perfect 90° angles, if the North-East corner of the site extends out toward the North or North-East direction, perhaps as an acute angle of a quadrilateral, this is the only exception which may be seen as auspicious for the residents.

For a Reiki version of a Vastu Clearing, please visit my Metaphysics for Architecture webpage.

This article may be updated from time to time.