A square walled village “auspicious on every side”, laid out on the eighty-one-square Vāstupuruṣa diagram: the temple on the central squares of Brahmā facing east, ring streets between the zones of gods, men and spirits, four gates on the axes, Śiva and the tank in the north-east, and houses of each varṇa in its own quarter, sized by rank.
The Mānasāra and the Mayamata begin the planning of a village as they begin a temple: the ground is tested, the cardinal directions are found with a gnomon, and the site is squared into a diagram of padas, here the eighty-one-square paramaśāyika. The central nine squares belong to Brahmā; round them lie rings for the gods, for men and for the lesser spirits. The Mānasāra names eight village plans after their figures: daṇḍaka (the staff), sarvatobhadra (auspicious on all sides), nandyāvarta, padmaka (the lotus), svastika, prastara, kārmuka (the bow) and caturmukha (four-faced). This one is a sarvatobhadra: a square, walled, with a gate in the middle of each side and the temple at the heart.
The streets follow the lines of the diagram: a street round the inside of the wall, ring streets between the zones, and two main streets crossing at the temple. The chief temple stands on the Brahmasthāna facing east; Śiva has the north-east corner, the quarter of Īśāna, beside the tank, for Varāhamihira says the gods love to dwell near water. The houses are grouped by varṇa (priests to the north, warriors to the east, merchants to the south, labourers to the west, the order the Arthaśāstra gives for a royal city), and their breadths fall, as Varāhamihira prescribes, by four cubits from one order to the next.
The village is an ideal, like the texts themselves: surveys of real villages rarely match the diagrams exactly, and scholars disagree how literally they were meant. The temple is the book’s Nāgara model, after Khajuraho. Click a building to see its rule.