The One and the Many: Will the Real Sri Yantra Please Rise?

Figure 1. Two slightly different Sri Yantras.

Look carefully at the two images above. At first sight they seem identical. After looking carefully you will notice that they are slightly different. The angles written on the right side of the image shows that the two figures are indeed different.

If you have ever tried to draw a Sri Yantra you know how difficult it is to achieve a figure where all the lines match precisely at the triple intersections. That's what makes the Sri Yantra so interesting, all the triangles are interlocked and you can't change one triangle without changing many of the others.

The Sri Yantra figure has been around for quite a while. We don't really know how long but many hundreds of year if not thousands. When drawn by hand it's a process of trial and error. After a while if you are lucky you end up with a figure where all the lines match up fairly precisely. Most people assume at this stage that they have achieve the goal of producing a correct Sri Yantra.

It turns out that it's not that simple. The criteria of achieving lines that match precisely at the triple intersections (concurrency) is essential but in itself it is not enough to fully define the figure. What this mean is that you can draw an infinite number of Sri Yantras that will be concurrent.

This video shows a sequence of different Sri Yantras that are all perfectly concurrent. As this shows cleary, concurrency is not enough to fully define the geometry of the Sri Yantra. The criteria of concurrency (no extraneous triangles at the triple intersections) allows an infinite amount of variation.

Since none of traditional methods are precise enough we are left guessing. Which one of the many hundreds of variations in use is the original figure if any? We are obviously assuming that there is an optimal and original configuration that was lost and distorted with time.

Obviously other criterias are needed to better define the configuration. So far in our research we have found three criterias that we consider essential. For more on this see the article The optimal Sri Yantra.