HISTORY

Vasati - The Most Ancient Way of Living in Harmony with Nature

If you enter edifices of the old like Andrea Palladio´s famous Florentine villas, you feel a profound well-being unknown with modern rooms in our contemporary Western buildings. This same feeling of energy and harmony is present with almost any masterpiece of the old architectural traditions, be they in Europe, in India, South America or still another part of the world. Modern Western buildings usually cannot convey this special feeling anymore. The masters of the old knew how to build according to the universally valid laws of nature and how to erect their buildings in unison with these laws. These same laws are fundamental to the Chinese Feng Shui, to European geomancy and to the architectural style of the old Mesoamerican people called the Maya, to name a few.

The Vasati scriptures date from a time about 5,000 years ago and carry the earliest known descriptions of these universal laws of nature. Scarcely any other architectural tradition lasted 5,000 years while staying unaltered and still being applied today.

Buildings withstanding natural disasters, destructions and dilapidation are for the most part those which have been built exactly after the Vasati principles. Just have a glance on India.

Obviously, the renown Roman architect Vitruvius knew the Indian Vasati scriptures, for even the chapters in his legendary opus De re architectura are in the same sequence as they are in the Manasara, a classic Vasati scripture. Vitruvius lived 2,000 years ago. His works inspired Andrea Palladio who incorporated the Vasati principles in his world-famous 16th century Renaissance edifices.

The knowledge behind his work, the origin of this art, is revealed only today. What sources did those precursors of occidental architecture take their knowledge from? You will see it here. The mystery of why we feel so well in Palladio´s villas is finally unveiled.

Vasati is an integral architectural concept. Since millennia, houses, temples, and even whole cities are built by this concept in India. Its basis are the natural laws of spatial energy, and this knowledge is used to bring the living space in resonance with nature and its inhabitants.The house is like man´s second body. It is a lens focussing the natural environmental influences. The living space´s quality influences the health of man as well as his mental and emotional status.The old Indian geomancy Vasati has been shaped into a scientific system after millennia of experience and observation, and with it you can find out the effects of environmental influences on man.

By this are meant especially those influential factors you do not think of at first that they could in any way influence your health, for example Earth´s magnetic field, the subtle energies from Earth and Sun, the paths of Sun and Moon as well as gravitation. All those influences define, taken together, the quality of the room you are living in. You can view the room as a bio-field which interacts with the bio-energetic field of the human body.

These interactions underlie laws of nature which are taken in respect when building a house in Vasati style. The Indian scientist A. R. Hari did an investigation on this and found out that most chronic diseases are a reflection of the living situation. If the natural laws of spatial energy are violated, the manifestation of chronic diseases seems to be furthered, while a strong bioenergetic living field strengthens the power of resistance of its inhabitants.

If the science of Vasati is applied to the climatic and cultural living conditions of contemporary Europe, it is called Vasati, the modern form of Vasati.

Vasati - the Origin of Feng Shui

India and China are separated by the huge Himalayan mountain range, but inspite of that, these two ancient cultures always have had a cultural interchange. For example, Martial Arts and also Buddhism originated in India and were later transferred to China. Even in Kung Fu, the original Sanskrit designations for the various fighting positions are still known to some masters.

Through many similarities we can see that Vasati and Feng Shui must have been influencing each other over a long period of time. While Feng Shui is considered to be at least 4,000 years old, Vasati has already been systematically described in early parts of the Vedic scriptures like the Rig Veda, and those scriptures are more than 5,000 years of age.

Even more impressive witnesses of the historic age of Vasati are the ancient cities of the 5,500-years-old Indus-Sarasvati Culture which were discovered in the year 1921.

 The first city was found close to the village Harappa, and because of that this culture became known as the Harappa civilization. One of the most well-known cities from this era is Mohenjo-Daro, which has been planned in a grid system with streets going perpendicularly from north to south and from west to east, dividing the city into rectangular blocks. The houses of Mohenjo-Daro were built pointing to the main directions, and each of them possessed a central courtyard.

These features are found in every city of the Harappa civilization. All of them were planned like chessboards and were divided into squares of like dimensions, forming various city areas with different functions. The temple was placed in the city center. All of this is strictly following the Vasati guidelines – this suggests that the science of Vasati existed even before the cities of the Harappa civilization had been constructed. The cities did not grow organically but were planned systematically following a clear geometrical concept.

From this we can conclude that Vasati is even older than Feng Shui, and it is highly probable that it has influenced the development of a similar science in China. The different cultural and climatic conditions in China may be responsible for the differences between Vasati and Feng Shui.

In China the cold winds from the North and the constant military threat from the Mongols in the North were the cause for the North generally being considered as a direction of lesser quality whereas in the Vasati system the North is considered a direction from which the most important organic energies flow into the house and the plot.

This corresponds to the energetic principles known to European geomancy and its modern scientific traditions (Viktor Schauberger, Wilhelm Reich, K. F. von Reichenbach) since hundreds of years. Therefore Vasati is more relevant to the building and living practice in the Western countries.

Vasati seems to be the original natural art of invoking positive energies to one´s house, and it has already been applied in the Western hemisphere since the time of the famous Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius – without us being aware of it.