Chapter Six of the Vishwakarma Prakash sets out how much merit accrues to whoever commissions a temple, and it scales by what the temple is made of.
A temple of mud earns the blessings described. Build it in stone and brick and they multiply tenfold. In metal, tenfold again. Copper is worth a hundred times that. Silver a thousand times copper. Gold a thousand times silver. A temple set with jewels and precious stones is said to carry benefits without limit.
It is, on the face of it, a ladder only the very rich can climb.
And then, a few verses later, this:
If a child in his adolescence playfully makes a Lord Vishnu temple with sand, it opens up the path to Lord Vishnu's abode.
The entire ladder, and a child in the sand arriving at the top of it.
This is a summary of Chapter Six of The Ancient Science of Vāstu I: The Vishwakarma Prakash Retold.
Why placement is a town's business
The chapter opens by stating that temples to Lord Shiva, Lord Vishnu and Lord Brahma must be established in appropriate places — else it causes dread for all.
Not dread for the builder. For everyone.
A temple, in the scheme these texts describe, is not a private building. It is the energy source of a settlement and the abode of the town's deity. Its placement is a town-planning decision, and a misplaced one is treated as a civic misfortune rather than a personal error.
The land requirements are the same as for a house — free of troughs, with favourable colour, smell and taste. The text says so explicitly: land suitable for a house is equally suitable for a temple. Chapter One's six field tests apply unchanged.
Four stones, not five
Temples follow the same Shilanyas procedure as houses, with one clear difference: a house takes five foundation stones, a temple takes four.
They are installed clockwise starting from the southeast:
| Shila | Direction | Invoked as |
|---|---|---|
| Nanda | Southeast | Provider of success and joy |
| Bhadra | Southwest | Daughter of Kashyap, who looks after the welfare of the world |
| Jaya | Northwest | Bringer of swift victory |
| Purna | Northeast | Holder of eternal knowledge, who completes all work |
Each has its own mantra, and the address to Nanda is worth quoting for its tone: Occupy this space till there are sun and moon in the sky. Bless us with long life, happiness, prosperity and wealth. Protect this temple from adversity.
Beneath the stones go four kalash — Padh, Mahapadh, Shankh and Makar — filled with panchagavya, fragrances and herbs, gems from the oceans, eight metals, and water from the holy rivers, with fig leaves attached at the mouth.
The grid differs too. A house is laid out on eighty-one cells. A temple is laid out on sixty-four, with Lord Brahma occupying four cells at the centre rather than one.
Choosing the stone
The chapter is unusually particular about what a foundation stone should look like, and the criteria divide cleanly.
Auspicious: square, uniform in colour and texture on all sides, one hasth in length, thickness one third of width, with an even base. Embossed with couch grass, flags, trellis, flabellum, elephants, a hand mirror, weapons, auspicious birds, deer, a bull, the swastika, Nandhavrat, a lotus — or the footprints of a cow or horse.
To be discarded: stones bearing carnivorous birds or deer feet. Stones skewed at the corners, old and shabby, irregular, dilapidated, damaged, cracked, discoloured, or carrying no auspicious element at all.
Bricks get the same treatment. Uniform in colour and texture and properly baked is acceptable. Time-worn and powdery, partially burnt, blackish, mixed with pebbles, uneven or inconsistent — rejected.
Read plainly, this is quality control. A cracked, half-fired, discoloured brick is a bad brick, and a building founded on bad bricks fails. The text attaches consequence to it so that nobody economises at the one point where economising is fatal.
The proportions of a temple
Here the chapter becomes a design method, and the whole thing derives from one division.
Divide the land into sixteen cells. The four at the centre are the garbhagriha — the sanctum. The remaining twelve carry the walls and everything else.
From there:
- Wall height equals the length of four cells.
- The shikhar — the spire — is twice the height of the walls.
- Wall thickness is one quarter the length of the garbhagriha.
- The pradakshina, the circumambulation passage, is one eighth the height of the shikhar. So are the doors.
Every dimension traces back to the size of the sanctum. Nothing is chosen independently. The room where the deity sits sets the height of the spire visible from the next village.
In one variant the garbhagriha is divided into nine parts, with a seat for the linga at the centre and eight bright pillars around it. The chapter also specifies an exhaust passage in the east, one fifth the size of the spire — and notes that gold is placed securely inside the Haar to energise it, the same principle met in Chapter Four.
A taxonomy of spires
The closing section names the temple types, and it reads like a field guide.
Meru is the largest — a hundred shring, four doors, sixteen storeys, fifty hasth tall. Mandar has twelve floors and stands five hasth shorter. Kailash rises nine storeys at forty hasth. Vimanchandak has many spires across eight floors. Nandivardhan is seven. Nandan is six storeys with sixteen andak, the dome-like structures. Sarvatobhadra is five, with many spires and a Chandrashala.
Others are named for what they resemble. Simha looks like a lion, Gaj like an elephant, Kumbha like an urn and stands nine storeys. Valbhi Chandak is shaped like a parrot's nostril, tall as a bull, and carries no depictions at all. Garuda rises ten storeys with eighty-six hasth of open land around it.
And in the middle of this list, a note that the fuller treatment appears in the Samrangan Sutradhar — Volume IV of this same series. The texts cross-reference each other.
Who gets paid, and who gets fed
One short passage near the end is easy to skim past and shouldn't be.
After the stones are laid, the head priest receives a cow, a calf and gold. Other priests and assistants receive what the commissioner can afford. And then: special pujan must be performed for the astrologer and the architect.
In this period they were frequently the same person — the one who made the building energy-compliant. The text places them among those formally honoured at the founding of a temple, not among the hired trades.
The instruction that follows is plainer still. Feed Brahmins according to your status — and make the poor and handicapped happy by offering food and grains.
A ceremony about establishing a deity ends with an instruction to feed whoever is hungry.
The sand temple, again
It is tempting to read the material ladder as a fundraising device — build in gold, earn more merit, and someone somewhere benefits from the donation.
But the verse about the child does something the rest of the chapter cannot undo. A temple of sand, made in play, by someone with nothing to give and no intention of earning anything, is said to open the same door.
Which suggests the ladder was never really about the material. Gold is simply what devotion looks like when someone has gold. Sand is what it looks like when someone has sand.
The chapter spends a hundred verses on stone selection, wall thickness and spire proportion — and every one of them matters, because a badly built temple falls down. But it opens the door on something else entirely.
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 complete shila mantras, the full temple-type dimensions and the mandap calculations summarised here.
The temple material continues in Volume IV B — The Samrangan Sutradhar Retold, whose chapter on Prāsāda Laks̥an̥am takes up temple architecture and the concept of Vimāna.
Earlier in this series: Chapter 1, Chapter 2 Part 1, Chapter 2 Part 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5.
Next: Chapter 7, Dwar Nirman — Door Architecture.
