Feng shui — Indian style: Vaastu Shasti is slowly making its way into Western culture
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We recognize the delights of Indian curry, tandoor chicken and papadum. We love the sari look for our bed linens. Yoga class has replaced aerobics as the exercise du jour. And, thanks to Madonna, we have experimented with Mehndi, the ancient art of henna body painting once reserved for weddings and special events.
No doubt about it — India is prime real estate for fashionistas these days.
With all this attention to Indian culture, it is no surprise we have seen the introduction of Vaastu Shasti, the ancient Indian philosophy of architecture and design that assumes a powerful connection between man and his environment.
Vastu or Vaastu (pronounced vahs-thu) is similar in many ways to feng shui, the Chinese art of placement whose concepts are marketed everywhere from bookstores to mall kiosks. But Vaastu may be even more mystical and more spiritual than its younger Chinese counterpart. And that factor may be a barrier to its rapid acceptance here.
Both these ancient Eastern philosophies espouse the belief that badly designed homes can cause problems for those who live in them. They both use astrology and geomancy to calculate the right site and the proper design.
And proponents of both believe it is essential to understand how cosmic energy flows in the home in order to achieve good health, happiness and prosperity.
At first, these may seem like strange Eastern philosophies that bear little relation to how we live in the West, but they do make very good sense. Many of their principles translate into beautiful architecture and pleasing interior design.
While mainstream America has been exposed to feng shui since the 1990s, Vaastu, which some people call Indian feng shui, is just starting to gain a following in the West.
The signs are just beginning to emerge. More books are being published — 23 are listed on Amazon.com for Vaastu compared with 368 for feng shui.
Vaastu experts are traveling from India to the United States and Europe to share their knowledge.
One of these experts is Sashikala Ananth, an architect from Chennai in southern India and author of "The Penguin Guide to Vaastu" (Penguin, $20). Ananth taught two-day Vaastu courses in Orlando and Delray Beach, Fla. The Delray Beach segment, sponsored by the Florida School of Feng Shui, attracted about 40 students, including designers, architects and regular folks interested in design.
Ananth's four-hour-plus lecture started with the history of Vaastu, which was translated from Sanskrit and is thought to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old. She ended with examples of the space-clearing rituals, a sacred cleansing ceremony to remove negative energy from an area.
Each design, according to Ananth, must satisfy in three layers. It must be useful. It must be aesthetic with pleasing colors, forms, textures and shapes. And it must evoke sensuous delight or spiritual satisfaction.
"The sacred relationship of geometric forms creates an inner vibration," she said. "When something satisfies on all three levels you will say, 'Ah, that's what it's all about.' "
Unfortunately, many Westerners are likely to give up figuring out what Vaastu is about. Even I, who took a graduate-level course in the "History of India," have meditated, practiced yoga and studied feng shui, find it difficult to translate Vaastu to something Westerners can easily digest. It may as well still be written in Sanskrit.
I wasn't alone. When I looked around during the second session of Ananth's class, only about half of the original students had come back. The women who sat on either side of me the first night, a designer and a psychologist, were among the deserters.
Just like the early days of America's introduction to feng shui, Ananth and other experts decry simplification.
But Americans want a quick fix. We won't plow through something that reads like a college textbook. We want pictures, tips, quick cures. And when a system is further complicated by Hindu gods and mythology that are foreign to our culture, we'll go on to something with more sizzle.
What Vaastu really needs now is a translator who can make it more understandable, like author Nancilee Wydra did with feng shui. Although Wydra thought it was possible to change someone's luck and emotional well-being through proper placement of the home and the objects inside it, she also realized that feng shui needed to be adjusted for modern life in the United States. Her answer was the Pyramid School, a system that filters ancient Chinese philosophy through contemporary culture, climate and social conditions.
Until Vaastu gets the equivalent of a Nancilee Wydra, it will remain a mysterious Eastern science.