Mayamata: An Indian Treatise on Housing, Architecture and Iconography

Mayamata, in Bruno Dagens's scholarly translation, is a Sanskrit architectural and iconographic treatise from South Indian temple-building tradition, one of the vastu-shastra texts prescribing proportion, orientation and iconographic detail for temple and house construction. As a translated primary source it carries the authority of the tradition's own technical prescriptions, valuable for understanding the theological logic Hindu temple architects were meant to follow. Its limit is that a prescriptive treatise describes an ideal, not necessarily universal built practice, and actual temples across South India show considerable regional variation from any single text's prescriptions, so Mayamata should be read as one influential textual authority within a plural tradition of shastra literature rather than as a description of how every temple was actually built.