The standard modern edition and translation of the Mayamata was produced by the French Indologist Bruno Dagens, whose critical edition of the Sanskrit text alongside an English translation and extensive commentary, published in the 1990s, remains the primary reference for scholars and readers without direct access to surviving manuscripts. Dagens' work situates the Mayamata within the broader history of South Indian temple architecture, drawing connections between the treatise's prescriptions and surviving built structures from the region and period the text is associated with.
This comparison between prescriptive text and standing buildings has been a significant contribution of modern Mayamata scholarship generally, since it allows researchers to test how closely actual temple construction followed the treatise's formal proportional systems, revealing both substantial correspondence and areas where built practice departed from the text's idealized prescriptions, a gap scholars read as evidence that such treatises functioned as an authoritative reference and training tool rather than as rules mechanically applied without local adaptation.
Dagens' edition also traces how manuscript copies of the Mayamata circulated and were preserved within South Indian temple and scholarly communities, work that situates the text not as a purely historical curiosity but as part of a continuous, if sometimes interrupted, chain of transmission connecting medieval architectural theory to the manuscripts modern scholars eventually located and edited.