Vastu & Feng Shui

About

Vastu and feng shui are two traditions, not one subject Almost every Indian shop selling these pieces runs the two words together as though they described one thing. They do not, and the difference takes a minute to explain and saves a great deal of confusion later. Vastu Shastra is Indian, and it is a body of architectural literature. What those texts govern is buildings: plot orientation, proportion, where rooms sit, the open centre of a plan, water, the layout of a town. They read as architecture manuals because that is what they are. Feng shui is Chinese, a separate geomantic tradition with an entirely different vocabulary of chi, the bagua map and the Four Celestial Animals. The consequence sellers rarely mention is that the classical vastu texts say a great deal about where to put a wall and nothing at all about where to put a brass tortoise. Object placement of the kind sold as vastu today is largely modern practice. That does not make it worthless, since plenty of custom is younger than people assume and still means something to the households that keep it. It does mean we will not cite a Sanskrit text at you for a rule that was written on a blog. You will also read, on nearly every page that compares the two, that vastu is thousands of years older and that feng shui descends from it. We have not found a source for that beyond other pages repeating it, so we leave it alone. Where a piece comes from Chinese practice we name it. The horse with coins is a Chinese motif, and calling it Indian would be easy and untrue. The feng shui objects we do not make Worth saying early, because most people searching for feng shui items in India arrive with a specific list in mind and a good part of it is not here. We do not make a laughing buddha. We do not make wind chimes, a money frog, a dragon or a lucky bamboo. If that is the shelf you are assembling, a general feng shui shop will serve you better than we will, and we would rather you knew now than after the parcel arri