How to draw the Sri Yantra

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Enjoy, Expanding, inside, Painting, Yoga

Introduction

I’ve played with the Sti Yantra over the years numerous times. In the beginning there were few and hard to find instructions. Today there are many more, especially video tutorials. I’ve been through quite a few and it is very difficult to find a clear and good one:

Symmetry. The yantra is perfectly symmetrical side to side however perfectly asymmetrical top to bottom. No two triangles are the same. Watch out for videos that begin with symmetry of the first two, large triangles. They look similar but they are not.
Orientation. The yantra has a top and a bottom. One of the better videos I encountered was, I later learned, inverted (probably because of the camera placement). By the time I discovered this I had already internalized some of the process with reliance on visual orientation … which I now had to invert.
There is a measurement based approach which, while probably also correct, I found to be more tedious and less flexible. It was mechanistic to calculate, measure, draw and count notches in order to establish the positions of the bases of the triangles. It is, for me, much more fluent and organic to have one triangle lead into the next … it feels alive and unfolding. Also being able to draw it as described below allows you to easily draw in size yantra. Just open up your compass and establish the circle size and you are good to go.

Please note that the instructions focus on the triangles in the middle of the yantra and do not include the rest of it (the circles of petals and the four gates). For that I recommend Zak Korvin’s video (and rich and inspiring channel). I created these instructions because I found it hard to follow Zak’s instructions for making the triangles.

Instructions

The step by step guide uses the following color coding:

Light gray lines: faded guide lines from previous steps
Brown guide lines: emphasised guides created and used in the current step; they lead to full small red circles which are used to establish both additional guide lines and the lines that form the shape of the yantra.
Full small red circles: junctions to be used in a given step
Green guide lines: connect full small red circles and project beyond them (to point to empty small red dots) in a given step ; they become full blue lines.
Empty small red circles: junctions that are projected via green guide lines from the full red dots
Full blue lines: represent lines that are visible in the yantra; you can see the yantra forming as these lines accumulate.
Dotted blue lines: represent lines that will be visible in the yantra but don’t have an end point when they are drawn; when their end points are found they become full blue lines.

Step 1

Draw a cross (typically in the middle of your page); The intersection point will be the center of the yantra.
Draw a circle at the center point; The yantra will be contained in this circle.
Draw two more circles of the same radius; One with the center at the point where the top of first circle crosses the the vertical line and the other where the center at the point where the bottom of the first circle crosses the vertical line.

Step 2

Step 3

Step 4

The first blue dotted line appears since it’s place is known at this point (and required for next steps) but its length is not yet known. The points that define its beginning and end will appear in a later step.

Step 5

These two lines project from a point established by the previous line and also have clear positioning (relative to other established junctions) but do yet have clear endings.