Chapter Nine of the Vishwakarma Prakash is, for the most part, a timber manual. It concerns tensile strength, shearing capacity, compression, joints and seasoning. Wood with high compression strength goes into columns. Wood with good shearing capability goes into the foundation.
And then, before the axe touches anything, it asks you to say this:
“If there is any soul or element present in this tree, I request you to accept my offering presented to you with due process. I apologise for uprooting you from here. Please make your dwelling at another place. I salute you.”
An engineering chapter that stops to apologise to its raw material.
This is a summary of Chapter Nine of The Ancient Science of Vāstu I: The Vishwakarma Prakash Retold.
Use one wood if you can
The chapter's central instruction on selection is unusually simple.
Use one type of wood for a house, and the text says it eliminates all grief. Two types is average. Three is poor. Never more than three.
If you are building with arjun, build with arjun throughout — doors, frames, columns, the lot.
There is a plain building logic here. Different species move differently as they dry and age. Mix four or five through one structure and the joints between them work loose at different rates. A single species shrinks and swells as one thing.
Three kinds of tree to leave standing
Three categories are ruled out, and the manuscript gives the reasoning for each:
- Trees that secrete a milky liquid — the wood contracts. The text adds that such timber is said to diminish the household's milk production.
- Thorny trees — said to generate a negative aura, and their wood to create conflict and hostility.
- Fruit-bearing trees — because they are a source of food. Their wood is said to bring harm to children.
That third one carries the clearest ethic. A tree that feeds people is worth more standing than felled, and the tradition made that a rule rather than a suggestion.
The long list of trees to avoid
Then comes a catalogue, and it rewards a second reading.
Do not use a tree that is: in a graveyard or burial ground, damaged by fire, struck by lightning, partly broken by wind, growing on a highway or roadside, covered in climbing vines, standing at a holy site, planted by ancestors, dedicated to a deity, half-burnt, half-rotten or dried up, badly slanted, out of shape, very old, three- or many-headed, conjoined with another tree, or carrying a feminine name.
Each has a stated consequence — a lightning-struck tree brings the same effect into the house, a wind-damaged one brings fear, a roadside tree destroys the family, an ancestor's tree can be fatal, a vine-covered tree makes one a pauper.
Set the consequences aside and look at what the list actually describes. Almost every item is either structurally compromised — burnt, rotten, split, wind-damaged, lightning-struck, twisted, over-mature, hollowed — or socially claimed: a tree at a temple, a tree planted by someone's grandfather, a tree by the road that a whole village walks past.
Bad timber, or timber that is not yours to take.
The bird verses work the same way. A tree where crows have settled brings loss of wealth; where vultures roost, fatal illness. Scavenging birds gather at trees that are dying or already hollow — and a hollow tree makes a poor beam whatever else you believe.
How the cut is made
The procedure begins the evening before, with prayer, flowers, incense and fragrances offered to the tree, and an appeal to the souls, demigods, serpents and Lord Ganesha to receive the offering. Then the apology, spoken with a hand on the trunk.
At dawn: water the tree. Smear it with honey and ghee. Take the axe and begin from the northeast, working clockwise, marking the line of the cut, and make it perfectly round.
Then watch which way it goes.
| Falls toward | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Northeast | Most favourable of all |
| East | Good fortune for the owner |
| North | Gain in money |
| West | Growth of cattle |
| Southeast | Fear of fire |
| Southwest | Discord |
| Northwest | Fear of thieves |
| South | Fatal |
And then the manuscript offers its own explanation, which is the most interesting line in the chapter:
The tree is heavier on the side where it has been nourished better, therefore it falls towards that side.
That is not mysticism. That is an observation about canopy growth, light and weight distribution — and it means the direction of the fall is genuinely telling you something about where the tree found its sun and water. A tree leaning northeast has been feeding from the northeast.
The same principle governs the shanku, the direction-finding gnomon of Chapter Four, whose wood must come from a tree that falls north.
Counting the joints
The text grades timber by its faces — which the manuscript glosses as the number of joints.
- One-faced — superlative. Increases wealth, good for children and wife, overall well-being.
- Two-faced — second best.
- Three-faced — an inciter of grief.
- Four- and six-faced — binds one to something unpleasant.
- Five-faced — fatal.
Anyone who has worked timber will recognise this immediately. Every joint is a knot, and every knot is a weak point and a place where the grain turns. Clear, straight-grained, knot-free timber is the best there is — then and now.
The chapter's summary verse says the same thing without arithmetic: a symmetrical, healthy young tree is most suitable, and the results are always desirable.
Keeping the wood
Two lines on storage, both of which hold up.
Sprinkle wood with water and it stays termite-free. Water-seasoning is a real and ancient practice; soaking leaches out the sugars and starches that insects feed on.
Chop in the waning moon, not the waxing. Timber fellers across many cultures have held that moon-phase timing affects sap content and durability, and the belief survives in parts of European forestry to this day.
Watching the delivery
The chapter ends with omens, all of them concerning the journey from forest to site.
If the cart carrying the wood breaks down, it is a bad omen. If the axe is damaged during the work, it is said to blunt the owner's strength. If a wheel splits or comes away, loss of wealth.
Colour is read too — whitish wood gives victory, yellowish triggers ill health, multicoloured brings glory, reddish brings dread of weapons.
And one verse that is oddly touching: tender words spoken by a young boy at the arrival of the wood often come true. If a child is hurt as the timber arrives, it is a bad omen, and the instruction is to postpone the work, fast, pray, and begin again.
A load of timber arriving at a building site, and the tradition says: watch how it arrives. Was anything broken? Did anyone get hurt? Then think again about today.
What the chapter really is
Three things braided together.
It is forestry — which trees are sound, which are hollow, how to read decay from the birds that gather.
It is structural engineering — compression wood for columns, shearing wood for foundations, knot-free timber above all, one species throughout.
And it is an ethic. Do not take the tree that feeds people. Do not take the tree someone's grandfather planted. Do not take the tree the village walks past. And when you do take one, water it, feed it honey and ghee, tell it where you are sending it, and apologise.
You can build a house without any of that. The chapter's position is that you should not.
Read the full text
The Ancient Science of Vāstu I: The Vishwakarma Prakash Retold carries all 13 chapters and 1,400+ verses in English — including the muhurat rules for felling, the Mas Dagdh table of inauspicious dates and the complete tree-selection verses summarised here.
Earlier in this series: Chapter 1, Chapter 2 Part 1, Part 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8.
Next: Chapter 10, Griha Pravesh — Housewarming.
