Place the garbhagriha (the small dark chamber that houses the image) over the Brahmasthana, with its walls on the ring of the gods and its door on the axis, usually to the east.
Rules · Proportion · Use · Cities
Houses sized by rank
Give each house a breadth according to the rank of its owner, the largest for the king and for each varṇa less than the one above: thirty-two cubits for a Brahmin, then twenty-eight, twenty-four and twenty.
breadth = 32 − 4 k cubits (k = 0 … 3)
Varāhamihira gives a table of house sizes from the king’s palace down through the commander, the ministers and the crown prince to the four varṇas, and a length for each in proportion to its breadth. In the model the lots are 14.4, 12.6, 10.8 and 9 metres wide, taking the cubit as about 45 cm.
Related rules
Provide a path for circumambulation (pradakshina) in the clockwise direction, keeping the sacred object on the right, and enclose it with a railing that separates the sacred ground.
Raise over the sanctum a tower whose faces curve inward towards the top (rekha), divided into storeys (bhumis) that are marked on the corners by small ribbed discs (bhumi-amalakas).
Lay the halls along the east–west axis in front of the sanctum (porch, hall, great hall, vestibule), each larger and more lofty than the one before, so that the roofs rise in a continuous range to the shikhara.
Choose the plan of a village from eight types named for their figures (daṇḍaka, sarvatobhadra, nandyāvarta, padmaka, svastika, prastara, kārmuka and caturmukha), according to its size, its site and who is to live in it.
Make the sarvatobhadra village square, walled, with a gate in the middle of each side; run the main streets from gate to gate to cross at the centre, and put the temple there, with streets round it and round the inside of the wall.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Houses sized by rank”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/brihat-samhita-house-widths. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.