Setting out the maṇḍala
Vāstu · Śilpa Śāstra
Three shrines, three regional rules for turning a square into a mountain. Sweep the pointer across the bells — each is a different casting, and rings its own svara.
One
The Sanskrit vocabulary is not decoration on top of the building — it is the design method. A temple is described from the ground up as trunk, neck and head, and the proportions of every stage are derived from the height of the plinth mouldings set first.
GARBHAGṚHA
A small, dark, windowless cube holding the image. It is deliberately the least impressive room in the building: everything outside it exists to mark where it is.
ŚIKHARA / VIMĀNA
The superstructure is a stone mountain raised over that cave — Meru, Kailāsa. North India curves it, South India steps it. Both are corbelled: stone oversailing stone, no true arch anywhere.
MAṆḌAPA
Pillared halls strung along the axis, growing in number and openness as you move outward. The visitor is compressed from a bright open hall into a dark cell — the whole plan is a diminuendo.
ĀMALAKA · KALAŚA
A ribbed stone cushion, then a pot finial. The kalaśa is the last stone set, and the moment it goes up the tower is structurally complete — but the building is still not a temple.
Two
No mortar, no arch, no centring, and — until the very last step — no temple. The sequence below is the one the śilpa texts give, and it is as much agricultural and ritual as it is structural.
Before a stone is cut, the site is divided into a square grid of padas — the vāstu-puruṣa-maṇḍala. Walls, doorways and pillars all land on its lines, which is why plans across a thousand years and two thousand kilometres remain commensurable.
The nine central padas are the Brahmasthāna, and they are left empty. The sanctum is built around a void that is never occupied by structure — the courtyard floor of the scene above is set out on exactly this grid.
Three
Every tradition below solves one problem — put a mountain over a cave — under different stone, rainfall, patronage and mathematics. Each diagram is generated from that tradition's own rule, not traced from a photograph, so the differences you see are the differences that mattered on site.
Four
Width falls as a power curve from the first course. There is no storey line anywhere on it, so the eye reads one unbroken vertical gesture.
Each tala is the last one multiplied by a constant. The profile is a staircase, and the horizontal eaves are emphasised rather than hidden — a stack, not a sweep.
The bāḍa runs straight up for nearly half the height before the gaṇḍi turns in hard. It is the most muscular of the three silhouettes and the easiest to identify at distance.
AND THE HYBRIDS
Vesara puts Drāviḍa storeys inside a Nāgara envelope. Hoysaḷa rotates the plan until the wall surface itself is the point. Kerala abandons stone for timber because it rains too much for anything else.