The relationship to actual practice of the vastuśāstras (or vāstuśāstras) and śilpaśāstras, the canonical Indian texts on architecture and sculpture, is a complex one. Scholarly attitudes to these texts range between an uncritical assumption that, traditionally, these texts set the rules for making buildings and sculptures, thereby holding the key to understanding them, and complete denial of their utility, on the basis that they were probably composed by Brahmans who were cut off from practical experience. The truth must lie somewhere in between. To establish the extent to which any particular text may have been useful for creating architecture, it must be shown whether it can be used for this purpose – if not by actually building, at least by drawing. This, surely, should be a prerequisite for any sensible discussion of the nature of these texts.

Surprisingly, the one sustained attempt to illustrate a vastuśāstra is that of Ram Raz, whose 1834 essay is the first work of modern scholarship on Hindu temples. On the basis of a fragment of the south Indian Mānasāra, Ram Raz was assisted by a contemporary practitioner in interpreting its prescriptions through lucid drawings, done in a florid latter-day Drāviḍa style. Successors to this enterprise are extremely rare.

This article is an attempt to interpret one vastu text through drawing, and in so doing to reach some conclusions about its usability. It is a first fruit of a collaborative study of the Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra by Mattia Salvini and me. Salvini has transliterated the chapters on temple architecture and translated them from the Sanskrit, and we have begun to refine the translation through discussion. Our eventual aim is to produce a critical, annotated, and illustrated translation of these chapters.

A large proportion of the text consists of technical terms, which must always have rendered it meaningless to anyone unable to visualise what is being conveyed. Access to this vocabulary would be impossible if scholarship in the past two centuries had not unearthed much of its meaning, especially in the last fifty years, and particularly through the work of M.A. Dhaky encapsulated in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture (EITA) produced by the American Institute of Indian Studies. While it is widely realised that most of the time these terms are interchangeable, and are varied just to avoid verbal monotony. A given width or height is divided into so many bhāgas or padas, and a number or fraction of these is then ascribed to its various sections. Bhāga, pada, and aṁśa, therefore generally signify a part or a module. ‘Stara’ implies a layer, and this too, where vertical divisions are concerned, is often used synonymously with the other terms.