420 entries
Stairs represent Mercury (Budh), the planet that lifts people up and gives success in business; they join underground energy with cosmic energy. Wrongly placed stairs stall business, obstruct children's education and spoil relations with sisters, daughters and paternal aunts.
Stairs must turn clockwise, have an odd number of risers, include landings and equal risers, arrive facing North or East, and have nothing harmful built beneath them.
Use wood for stairs in NNE, ENE and East; green Kota stone, pink marble, Lakha granite or vitrified glass tiles in ESE, SE and South; yellow or Dholpur stone in SSW and SW; and white stone or vitrified tiles in the West.
Stairs are excellent in SSW (the heavier the better) and good to very good in South, SW, WSW, West, WNW and NW; they must never be in the NE zone, the Brahmasthan, the North or right in front of the main door.
Stairs right in front of the main door invite accidents and mishaps, but stairs that start at least twice the door height away (14 feet for a 7 feet door) are not treated as facing the door.
Study room colours follow the zone, but education belongs to Jupiter, so ivory, golden yellow, green (Mercury) and white suit study, as does the colour of the 5th house lord when it is well placed.
WSW, West, SW, East, North and NE are strong study zones and ESE suits research, while SE, SSE, South, WNW, NW and NNW disturb concentration.
A study room needs its door in the NE, East, North or West, cross-ventilation, a correct slope, a perfectly level study table and bookshelves on a North or East-facing wall.
Children who cannot concentrate on studies often have a study table that is not level, so the gravitational force on it is not balanced. The same applies to a shop counter and the owner's seat (gaddi).
The East belongs to the Sun. Its interior uses light orange, greens, pink, yellow and ivory white, sandstone, copper or gold-polished showpieces, sunrise pictures and sun-loving plants.
Pictures of the Sun, including the popular Sun with running horses, belong only in the East. A Sun-like figure with a moustache is Shani Dev, and installing his image on gates facing the house brought incurable illness to one family member after another.
When the Sun sits in the 10th house it becomes karak and very strong; the direction of that house should be painted in sunrise orange or light yellow-orange, never in blue, black or white.
Swar vigyan (the science of breath) works even where Vastu and other sciences fail: a pinch of dust placed in a house at the right swar works like gold. Starting work, griha pravesh, treatments and land testing should all be done by swar.
A house with only the E4 door open is a swastik dwar house; the residents are good and religious, wealth and grain grow, and they are service-minded.
The best place for a swimming pool is NNE and the North-East through ENE up to the East, leaving out the exact North-East diagonal (Shikhi devta); a sunken pool in the North-West is not good.
A tall building close to the North or East of a plot blocks its energy: in the North it causes money problems and in the East loss of name and fame. A tall building on the back side, in the South, South-West or West, gives strong progress.
A building to the North that is only a little taller than yours does no harm, but one more than about four to five feet taller causes trouble. A taller building or a raised hill has no effect if it stands at a distance of at least double your building's height.
The shadow of a temple's shikhar or dhwaj must never fall on a house during the second and third pahar, 9 am to 3 pm. It ruins the household, whatever the temple: Jain, Vaishnav, Ram, Brahma, Mahadev or Durga.
There are ten directions: the four main directions, the four corner directions (vidisha), the upward (urdhva) and the downward (adho), each with its own dikpal. To master them a practitioner needs knowledge of about ten subjects beyond Vastu itself.
A house breathes through its main door just as a person breathes through the nostrils, so the main door has the greatest importance for the air element of the house.
Early morning sun brings positive ultraviolet rays rich in vitamins and metals, while after about 2 pm the rays turn infrared. Openings and wall thickness are planned accordingly so the building admits good energy and blocks harmful energy.
E3, N4 and W4 are the three vipul sampada (abundant-wealth) doors. Virtual doors marked on these padas are heavily promoted, but they give only a tiny fraction of the result of an actually opened door.
Interior colours are selected in three ways: from the kundali (the planets ruling education, business, wealth and luck), from the element of the zone (its own colour or a friendly element colour), and from the work done in the space.
The universe is an ocean of prana shakti (life force), which reaches people in three forms: fire or light from the sun, air (vayu), and bhu shakti (earth energy).
Zone-by-zone results of a toilet: SSW and WNW are workable, NW and ESE only in an emergency, and every other zone damages what that zone governs.
Vedic Vastu texts assign no place to a toilet inside the house and say its wall should not even touch the house foundation; toilets were built outside, and palaces placed them at the rear in the West-North-West.
A toilet should be lined with glazed ceramic tiles, well ventilated, kept in white or grey, and should have no mirror facing the seat.
Four positions are forbidden for a toilet whatever the zone: the Brahmasthan, directly opposite the main door, directly opposite the kitchen and under the staircase.
Vedic vastu never put toilets inside the house; today they go where positive energy ends. SSW is the main toilet zone, WNW and a well-ventilated NW are acceptable, ESE only in an emergency with a south-facing seat, and a toilet in any energy zone such as the NE brings serious harm.
A large study found that people whose toilet seats were not at water level suffered kidney damage, and many with heart disease, cancer and especially stomach problems had seats out of level. A level seat matters even more than the zone of the toilet.