Part One of Chapter Two dealt with whether to build at all — the dream test, the slope of the land, the timing, and whether the house's chart agrees with yours. Having settled that, the Vishwakarma Prakash turns to the floor plan.
Grihavinyas is the planning and configuration of the home: which room goes where, what a verandah is for, and what proportions a building should hold to. It is the most directly usable material in the chapter, and much of it survives unchanged in Vastu practice today.
This is Part Two of a two-part summary of Chapter Two of The Ancient Science of Vāstu I: The Vishwakarma Prakash Retold. Read Part One first.
Where each room belongs
The text assigns every function to a direction, and the list is more detailed than most modern Vastu summaries:
- Northeast — the temple or place of worship
- East — bathrooms
- Southeast — the kitchen
- North — the storeroom
- East to Southeast — the room for processing milk
- Southeast to South — storage for ghee
- South to Southwest — the toilet
- Southwest to West — the study or library
- West to Northwest — the koap bhavan, a room for grieving
- Northwest to North — the ratighar, the room for a married couple
- North to Northeast — medicines and the sickroom
- Southwest — the delivery room
Two of these deserve a pause. A dedicated room for grief is not something modern floor plans make space for, and the assumption behind it — that sorrow needs somewhere to go, and that it should not be the same place as everything else — is quietly humane.
The delivery room comes with its own timing instruction: build it in the ninth month of pregnancy, or at the time of delivery, on a day chosen with care. Not years in advance. The room is made when it is needed.
Notice too how the logic tracks the sun. The kitchen sits southeast where the morning fire catches. Storage and medicines go north, the coolest aspect. The study faces west, away from the harsh middle of the day.
The sixteen houses
This is the most striking passage in the chapter. The text takes a single-block dwelling — an Ekshaal bhavan, rooms along one side with a porch — and enumerates every possible arrangement.
The method is notation. Each of the four sides is marked either guru (a room) or laghu (an alind, the verandah or porch). Four sides, two states each, and you get sixteen combinations. Every one is named and given an outcome:
| # | Name | Alind on | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dhruv | none | Wealth and vehicles |
| 2 | Dhanya | East | Grain and happiness |
| 3 | Jay | South | Triumph |
| 4 | Nand | East & South | Detrimental to women |
| 5 | Khar | West | Loss of property |
| 6 | Kaant | East & West | Growth of lineage |
| 7 | Manoram | South & West | Wealth creation |
| 8 | Suvakra | East, South & West | Carnal pleasure |
| 9 | Durmukh | North | Suffering |
| 10 | Krur | East & North | Ominous for all |
| 11 | Ripud | South & North | Fear of enemies |
| 12 | Dhanad | East, South & North | Provider of riches |
| 13 | Kshay | West & North | Loss and misery |
| 14 | Aakrand | East, West & North | Sorrow and grief |
| 15 | Vipul | South, West & North | Wealth and fame |
| 16 | Vijay | all four | Triumphant |
Position is read by moving clockwise around the main door, beginning from the east. A house with no auspicious alind at all has its own name: Kapaal.
In an apartment, the balcony is the alind. Which makes this table more usable than it first appears — a modern flat with balconies on two sides is an Ekshaal variant, and the framework still reads it.
What exactly is an alind?
Then comes something unusual for a scripture: the text stops to survey a disagreement.
Some hold that the main door is the alind. Others say it is the room itself. Others still say it is the canopy or sunbreaker — the overhang at the roof's lower edge.
The Vishwakarma Prakash gives its own answer. The alind is the wooden canopy or sunbreaker, whether inside or outside the house; a lateral canopy counts; so does an unpillared wooden structure outside the main door that rises in the middle. Best of all, the main door should be placed where there is an alind.
And then a firm line: a house without an alind and a main door is not auspicious, and intellectuals should not build one lacking alind, door and room together.
What the passage really says is that a threshold matters. There should be something between outside and inside — a covered place to arrive, pause, and shed the street before entering. Anyone who has stood at a doorway in monsoon rain understands the argument without needing the verse.
Proportion
The rules here are short and strict:
- The height of a house should equal its width.
- The length should never be twice its breadth or more. Such a house is called meaningless and is said to bring misfortune — and, the text adds, trouble from the king, which in current terms means trouble from the authorities.
- A single-room house may be twice as long as it is broad, but its height still matches its width.
- A Shook house is the exception, built twice as high as it is wide.
- Ten-room and four-room houses keep height equal to width.
- The shikha, the crest, should be one third of the total height.
Houses are also classified by how many sides carry rooms: Ekshaal (one), Dwishaal (two), Trishaal (three), Chaarshaal (four, wrapping a courtyard). A two-room house should sit west or south; a three-room house should leave the north clear. Ekshaal is called suitable for everyone.
A boundary wall, the parkota, is expected — a house of rooms alone, with no enclosure, is not to be built. And the ground must be even.
The navel and the pole points
Before a plan is finalised, two reference points are established.
The nabhi, or navel, is the centre of the house. Following Saint Parasar, divide the elevation into five parts, leave three from the top and two from the bottom, and what remains in the middle is the navel.
The dhruva points — pole points — are then located around the plot, moving anticlockwise from the east, by adding one unit to the length and breadth and working from the left of the northwest.
Only once the navel and the pole points are fixed is the plan drawn. Everything in the house is positioned relative to them.
Doors and the zodiac
Finally, the signs are distributed across the four faces of the house:
- North door — Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces (the water signs)
- East door — Aries, Leo, Sagittarius (fire)
- South door — Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn (earth)
- West door — Gemini, Libra, Aquarius (air)
The elemental grouping is exact, and it connects the entrance of the house back to the chart-matching of Part One. The door is where the building meets the world, so the text asks which sign governs it.
The chapter closes with dimensions for particular kinds of residence — the king's house, the army chieftain's, the minister's and queen's, the prince's, the courtiers', houses for artists and dancers, and for the astrologer, head priest and physician — along with the proportions of a treasury and the inner apartments. Rank and function set the scale.
What Grihavinyas is really doing
Read as a list of rules, this is a floor plan handed down as law.
Read as a method, it is something better. It fixes a centre before anything else is decided. It insists on a threshold between outside and in. It puts each activity where the light and air suit it. It refuses proportions that would make a building feel like a corridor. And it names all sixteen possibilities rather than prescribing one, so the builder chooses knowing what each choice brings.
That is not superstition. That is a design method with fourteen centuries of use behind it.
Read the full text
The Ancient Science of Vāstu I: The Vishwakarma Prakash Retold carries all 13 chapters and 1,400+ verses in English, with explanation alongside the verses — including the complete Ekshaal diagrams, the dimensional tables and the full Grihavinyas material summarised here.
The series continues with the Manushyalaya Chandrika, the Rajvallabh, and the two volumes of the Samrangan Sutradhar.
Next in this series: Chapter 3, Griha Arambh Muhurat — Auspicious Time for Construction.
