Vastu & Feng Shui

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 arrives.

The Buddha we do keep is the meditating figure rather than the laughing one, and the two are not the same subject: one is the historical Gautama seated in dhyana, the other is Budai, a Chinese folk figure. Those are in Buddha statues, where the range is small at present.

What this page holds is the Indian half of the shelf. Kamdhenu, elephants, a tortoise and horses, in gold and silver plate and antique finish.

Kamdhenu with her calf is what this page is built on

It is the largest part of the collection by a wide margin, in gold plated and silver plated finishes, and in combinations with a pooja chowki, a charan paduka or a pocket temple. Kamdhenu, also called Surabhi, is the wish granting cow of Hindu tradition, described across the epics and the Puranas and counted among the treasures that rose from the churning of the ocean. The cow with her calf is the form nearly every household chooses, and it is the piece bought here most often for a new home or a wedding.

Sizes run from about 2.5 inches, which is a pooja shelf object, up to 5 inches, which holds its own on a console or a mandir step. Photographs flatten scale badly at this size, so measure the shelf before you choose rather than after.

Elephants, the tortoise and the horses

Elephant pairs come trunk up in gold and silver plate, at desk size and at shelf size. Elephants go back a very long way in Indian art: Gaja Lakshmi, the goddess flanked by elephants, is carved in stone from the last centuries BCE, and Airavata, Indra's white elephant, is named in the Gita. In that iconography elephants belong with rain, and through rain with abundance. Trunk direction is a separate and much more recent matter, with no basis we can find in the classical Gaja Lakshmi carvings. We make them trunk up because that is the form people want, which is reason enough without inventing a scripture for it.

The tortoise here is the Ashtalakshmi tortoise in silver plate. It has an old Indian pedigree that almost nobody mentions, since Kurma, the tortoise avatar of Vishnu, bore Mount Mandara on his back while the ocean was churned, which is a story about steadiness under weight. The instruction you will more often read, that it must face north and sit in a shallow bowl of water, comes from elsewhere: the Black Tortoise governs the north among the Four Celestial Animals of Chinese feng shui. Both traditions are real. They are simply not the same one.

The horses run larger. There is a running horse and a standing white horse in antique finish, at a foot and at fifteen inches, and a gold plated feng shui knight horse. The horse carries speed and vitality in Indian tradition too, and Uchchaihshravas, the divine white horse, also came from the churning of the ocean, but the coins are Chinese and we say so. The wider range of animal figures, including meenakari peacocks, parrots and camels, is in animal statues and figurines.

Where people put them, reported as convention

These are the habits Indian households actually keep, given as convention rather than as instruction. A pair of elephants near the entrance, usually facing into the room rather than out of it. The tortoise facing north or north east. Kamdhenu on the pooja shelf or a living room shelf, above floor level, which is the one habit here that is close to universal. Horses on a console, a landing or an office desk, where a larger piece has room to work. The pooja shelf itself in the north east, which is the single idea on this page with a real textual lineage, since ishanya is a genuine category in the vastu literature.

For a bedroom the usual advice is to keep symbolic pieces few and small, and that one is plain good sense about a room you sleep in. Follow the rest if they matter in your family. Apart from the north east we cannot trace them to a text, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

What positive energy items can honestly mean

It is the phrase most people use when they arrive here, so it deserves a straight answer. We will not tell you that any object on this page will make you wealthier, healthier, luckier or safer. We do not know that, nobody selling these knows it, and a page that promises it is selling you something other than the object in the photograph.

What is true is smaller and still worth something. A form your family has kept for generations, placed where you pass it every morning, does change how a room feels to the people living in it. That is the honest version of positive energy. It is a good enough reason to buy a well made piece and a poor reason to buy a badly made one.

What they are made of, and how to keep them

Most of what is here is plated, which means a resin core, a layer of copper over it, then gold or silver electroplated on top, and on some pieces both. The copper is the part worth understanding, because resin cannot be plated directly and the copper is the layer the precious metal keys onto. It is also why these pieces are light, why the detail stays crisp at two and three inches, and why water is the one thing they will not survive. A dry cloth and nothing else. An acidic paste of the kind used on brass strips plating, and that cannot be undone.

The antique finish horses want the same care for the same reason. That patina was applied on purpose rather than earned with age, so a paste takes it off instead of bringing it up, and nothing puts it back. A dry cloth there too.

Solid brass behaves the opposite way. It darkens with oxidation, which is surface and not damage, and lemon and salt or tamarind brings it back, then rinse and dry it fully. Ours is poured slowly into a mould made for that one idol and broken open once the metal has cooled, so every casting gets its own mould, which is why the detail holds where a reusable sand mould softens it, and why the alloy has to be high grade. The brass range is in brass idols and the plated range in gold and silver plated idols.

Every piece is checked at our own warehouse before it goes out, and everything ships in our own packaging, which is made to be opened rather than merely to survive the journey. That matters here, because a good share of these are handed over at a griha pravesh and unwrapped in front of the room.

Choosing by budget, and choosing as a gift

Nothing on this page falls under 1,000, which is worth knowing before you start. Under 3,000 covers most of it: the silver plated tortoise, Kamdhenu at its common sizes, the twelve inch running horse and the smaller trunk up elephant pair. Under 5,000 adds the fifteen inch white horse, the gold plated knight horse and the Kamdhenu combinations with a pooja chowki. Above 10,000 the page turns to a large Kamdhenu paired with a six inch elephant set, which is a wedding scale present rather than a shelf object.

As gifts these go mostly to new homes. Kamdhenu with her calf and a trunk up elephant pair are the two given most often for griha pravesh, and both suit a couple, since neither is specific to one deity or one region. See housewarming and griha pravesh gifts, wedding gifts and corporate gifts, and for Diwali and Dhanteras the wider set is in Diwali gifts. The rest of the decor range is in home decor and table decor and showpieces. For quantity, send the details through the bulk order enquiry page.