Temple Vāstu and Cultural Life: Classical Prescriptions, Historical Forms, and Contemporary Zoning Claims

This study asks how temple Vāstu differs from residential Vāstu and what is lost when either is reduced to a directional classification. It combines source-specific textual comparison, documentary case analysis, a bounded examination of contemporary promotional claims, and an exact geometric audit. The textual corpus comprises architectural and installation passages of the Bṛhatsaṃhitā, selected Mānasāra chapters in P. K. Acharya’s translation, and the Kāmikāgama’s gnomon procedure, with Ṛgvedic and Purāṇic passages contextualizing sacred inhabitation and traditional authority. The comparison identifies shared site and orientation concerns alongside distinctions in doorway position, subdivision, proportional design, and installation. Counterevidence prevents a universal equation of sixty-four padas with temples and eighty-one with houses. Thanjavur, Bhojpur, and Hampi illustrate different relationships among institutional organization, design knowledge, and ceremonial space; a documented contemporary design project tests the assumption that authenticity excludes innovation. Four public commercial pages provide a defined sample of zoning and outcome claims. None explicitly establishes equivalence between sixteen sectors and a classical grid. Exact polygon intersections nevertheless show what a sector-only representation retains and discards: for an aligned eight-by-eight grid, optimal recovery of the exact cell from the sector label is 23.10 percent, while membership in a concentric central square is statistically independent of direction under uniform area sampling. The pada-level placement of the vāstu-devatās, integral to the classical maṇḍala, is likewise not recoverable from a sector code. These are properties of representations, not tests of religious efficacy. The study proposes that temple Vāstu is best evaluated through the correspondence among a specified textual or craft tradition, an architectural programme, a spatial scale, and a documented ritual institution.