Alternate Dasha Systems

What this page adds to the calculator above

The calculator returns ten rows. Each names a dasha system, the lord whose period was running at birth, how long that period lasts, how much of it was left and the date it ended, and a verdict on whether your chart meets the condition the classical text attaches to that system. The notes above it state the counting rule in two paragraphs. This section goes further: what the source chapter actually says and how it ranks these systems, the full table of lords and years, the starting lord for every nakshatra, how each condition is tested in code, a real chart worked by hand, how often each condition is met across twenty thousand charts, and how far a few minutes of birth time can move the answer.

Where the alternate dashas come from

The source is one chapter: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, Chapter 46, "Dashas of Grahas". It opens with the student Maitreya asking for guidance about the different kinds of dashas. Parashara's answer, in slokas 2-5, sets the hierarchy that this whole page depends on. Dashas are of many kinds, he says, and among them Vimshottari "is the most appropriate for the general populace". The others are "followed in special cases". That is why the Vimshottari Dasha calculator is this app's main timeline and this page is a set of reference points beside it.

The same slokas name the special-case systems: Ashtottari, Shodshottari, Dwadashottari, Panchottari, Shatabdik, Chaturashiti-sama, Dwisaptati-sama, Shastihayani and Shat-trimshat-sama. Parashara describes all nine as "based on Nakshatras", meaning that each one, like Vimshottari, starts from the lunar mansion the Moon occupied at birth. Most of the names are simply numbers. Vimshottari is the dasha of 120 years, Shodshottari of 116, Dwadashottari of 112, Panchottari of 105, Shatabdik of 100. Chaturashiti-sama means eighty-four in equal parts, and Dwisaptati-sama seventy-two in equal parts.

Slokas 12-14 explain why Vimshottari is the general rule: "In Kali Yuga the natural life-span of a human being is generally taken, as 120 years." A cycle of 120 years covers that span once. The chapter offers no comparable reasoning for the other totals. It gives each of them a condition and a counting rule and moves on, and this page does the same: it does not supply a theory the text does not state.

Slokas 6-11 add two more things worth knowing. First, Parashara says some sages mention a Kala dasha and a Chakr dasha, "but they have recognized the Kala Chakr Dasha, as supreme". Second, he lists a long row of further systems, among them Char, Sthir, Yogini, Pind, Nausargik and Asht Varg, and closes with the remark "in our view all these Dashas are not appropriate". The first name on that list is Char: the Chara Dasha calculator here follows a later chapter of the same book, and it is a sign-based dasha, a different family from the nakshatra-based ones on this page.

Two other books in this app's library were searched for these systems: Saravali and Advanced Predictive Astrology. Neither has a passage on them, so nothing here is attributed to either. Everything classical on this page is BPHS Chapter 46, and the full list of texts is on the sources page.

Nine names in the text, all nine on this page

The table sets out all nine special-case systems as the chapter gives them. The total for each is the sum of its lords' years as stated in the sloka.

Seven of the nine share one shape. Count nakshatras from a named reference star to the birth star, divide by the number of lords, and the remainder picks the lord. Each nakshatra carries one whole dasha, and the next nakshatra hands over to the next lord, exactly as in Vimshottari. Those seven are built here by that rule.

Ashtottari and Shastihayani work differently. Ashtottari groups the stars into uneven runs: four nakshatras from Ardra belong to the Sun, the next three to the Moon, then four, three and so on through eight lords. Four runs of four and four runs of three make twenty-eight slots, not twenty-seven, and sloka 21-22 accordingly gives a rule for Abhijit, an extra nakshatra made from the last quarter of Uttara Ashadha and the first fifteenth of Shravana. The engine reads Abhijit from the Moon's longitude on exactly those limits, so a Moon between 276 deg 40 min and 280 deg 53 min falls in Abhijit, Saturn's third star. The same sloka gives one star a quarter of a malefic's dasha and a third of a benefic's; the four-star lords are exactly the malefics, so a star's share is the lord's years divided by its run, and a Moon in the second or third star of a run has the stars before it already spent. Shastihayani also names Abhijit, among Saturn's stars, but its table as printed lists only twenty-seven of the twenty-eight stars: Chitra is missing. The sloka also gives no rule for the balance at birth. Both gaps are filled here from a published reference outside BPHS, Sanjay Rath's Vimsottari and Udu Dasa's (2002, Table 51), and the result flags them as such: a Chitra Moon gets the Moon, 6 years, and the balance is taken as in Vimshottari, the lord's years times the part of the birth star still to cross, so every Shastihayani period is dated.

Shat-trimshat-sama, the thirty-six-year system counted from Shravana, is the seventh of that shape and is built by the same rule: the count is divided by eight, with lords Moon 1, Sun 2, Jupiter 3, Mars 4, Mercury 5, Saturn 6, Venus 7 and Rahu 8 years. Kala Chakra, which the text calls supreme, is not a tenth entry in that list at all: it is a separate construction of two twelve-box diagrams, Savya and Apasavya, described from sloka 52 onward, and it is built here. The Moon's pada picks a row of nine signs (slokas 60-81); each sign's lord gives the years (sloka 84: Sun 5, Moon 21, Mars 7, Mercury 9, Jupiter 10, Venus 16, Saturn 4), and a row totals 100, 85, 83 or 86 (sloka 89). The balance comes from sloka 93: the part of the pada the Moon has crossed, times the row's total, is spent sign by sign. The engine reproduces both of the chapter's own worked examples: a Krittika third-pada birth left with 3 years 7 months 24 days of Capricorn, and a Mrigashira fourth-pada birth with 2 years 3 months of Taurus. Three of the sixteen rows are misprinted or abbreviated in the text; each is read the one way the chapter's own Deha and Jiva signs and sloka 89 totals allow, and the code says which.

The original six systems: reference star, lords and years

A few things stand out when the six are laid side by side. No system uses all nine grahas. Shodshottari includes Ketu and leaves out Rahu. Dwadashottari includes both nodes and leaves out Venus, which is notable because Venus is the graha its own condition is about. Dwisaptati-sama includes Rahu and leaves out Ketu. Panchottari, Shatabdik and Chaturashiti-sama use the seven visible grahas only.

How the starting lord is found

The only astronomical input to the first three columns of the result is the Moon's nakshatra at birth, which you can see on its own in the Nakshatra calculator. The engine numbers the twenty-seven nakshatras from Ashwini as 0 to Revati as 26 and, for each system, does three things.

1. 1.It counts inclusively from the reference nakshatra to the birth nakshatra, so that the reference star itself is 1. If the birth star comes earlier in the zodiac than the reference star, the count wraps round through Revati and Ashwini.
2. 2.It divides the count by the number of lords in that system, seven or eight, and keeps the remainder.
3. 3.A remainder of 1 selects the first lord in the list, 2 the second and so on. A remainder of 0 selects the last lord. In code this is one line: the lord index is the count minus one, modulo the number of lords.

Dwadashottari alone runs the count the other way. Sloka 27-28 reads "Count from Janm Nakshatr to Revati", so the birth star is 1 and Revati is the end of the count. The engine carries a reversed flag for this one system and otherwise uses the same arithmetic.

The text states the remainders 1 onward and does not spell out what a remainder of zero means. Treating it as the last lord is the only reading under which every count maps to a lord, and it is the convention the engine applies to all seven count-and-remainder systems.

The seam at the reference star

Twenty-seven is not a multiple of seven or of eight. The consequence is that the lords do not form a closed ring round the zodiac. In an eight-lord system three full rounds use twenty-four nakshatras, the remaining three go to the first three lords, and then the count restarts at the reference star. In Shodshottari, for example, Punarvasu is count 27 and falls to Jupiter, the third lord, while the next star, Pushya, is count 1 and falls to the Sun again. Saturn through Venus are skipped at that one junction. So in the eight-lord systems three lords own four nakshatras each and five lords own three. In the seven-lord systems six lords own four each and the last lord owns three. This is a property of the rule as written, not an adjustment made here.

Starting lord for every birth nakshatra

The table below is the engine's output for all twenty-seven stars, so you can check your own row without running anything. Find your Moon's nakshatra, read across. If different apps give you different nakshatras, read why apps disagree on your nakshatra first, because every cell in your row depends on it.

The balance at birth

The lord tells you which period was running when you were born. It does not tell you how much of it was left, and the remainder is what puts a date on the end of that period. BPHS gives the rule in sloka 16 of the same chapter, for Vimshottari: multiply the lord's dasha period by the part of the Moon's stay in the birth nakshatra that has already expired, divide by the Moon's total stay in that nakshatra, and the result is the expired portion. "If this figure is deducted from the total period of the Dasha, we will get the balance of Dasha at the time of birth."

Slokas 21-22 then apply "the method, followed for Vimshottari Dasha" to Ashtottari, scaled by the share of a dasha that one nakshatra carries in that system, a quarter or a third. In the seven count-and-remainder systems one nakshatra carries one whole dasha, so the share is 1 and the sloka 16 rule applies without scaling. The text does not restate the balance rule separately for each of the seven; applying sloka 16 to them is the engine's reading, and the reasoning is the one just given.

In practice the engine does not measure the Moon's stay in hours. It reads the fraction from longitude: each nakshatra is 13 degrees 20 minutes wide, and the fraction crossed is the Moon's distance past the start of its nakshatra divided by that width. The balance is the lord's years multiplied by one minus that fraction. The same function supplies the fraction to the Vimshottari timeline, so the two dasha displays cannot disagree about how far into the nakshatra the Moon was.

• The balance is rounded to two decimals of a year. One hundredth of a year is under four days, and the code comment notes that this is already finer than the Moon's own longitude error in this engine.
• The end date of the first period is the birth instant plus the unrounded balance, with a year taken as 365.2425 days.
• If the Moon's longitude were not passed, or did not fall in the stated nakshatra, the balance fields would simply be absent. The calculator on this page always passes it.

How each condition is checked against your chart

A list that printed every system with a fixed sentence under each could not tell you which, if any, the text would have you look at. Each condition is built from things this app already computes, so the engine evaluates it and returns two fields: a verdict, and a sentence stating the facts the verdict was read from so that you can check it yourself.

• Shodshottari. Two sentences in the text, sloka 23 and sloka 24-26, each state a case for adopting it. The engine accepts either. The first needs day or night and the lunar fortnight: day birth with Krishna Paksha, or night birth with Shukla Paksha. Day or night is decided by whether the Sun was above the sunrise line at the birth place; the fortnight is read from the Moon's elongation from the Sun at the birth instant, the same quantity the Moon Phase calculator shows. The second needs the Ascendant's Hora: the Moon's Hora with Krishna Paksha, or the Sun's Hora with Shukla Paksha. The Hora is the half-sign division shown in the Hora D2 calculator.
• Dwadashottari. The Ascendant's Navamsa sign must be ruled by Venus, that is, Taurus or Libra. The Navamsa Ascendant is the one the Navamsa D9 calculator prints.
• Panchottari. The Ascendant must be Cancer and its twelfth-part must also be Cancer. The Dwadasamsa D12 calculator shows that division. In the sample chart worked below, an Ascendant at Leo 2.33 has Leo as its Dwadasamsa and one at Leo 4.58 has Virgo, so the first twelfth-part of a sign carries the sign itself; the condition is in effect a Cancer Ascendant in its first two and a half degrees.
• Shatabdik. The Ascendant must be Vargottama, which sloka 31-32 defines directly: the Lagna in the Rasi chart and the Navamsa Lagna are in the same sign.
• Chaturashiti-sama. The lord of the tenth sign from the Ascendant must sit in the tenth house. Houses here are whole signs counted from the Lagna.
• Dwisaptati-sama. The lord of the Ascendant sign must sit in the first house or the seventh.

Each verdict can take three values, not two: applies, does not apply, or not settled. The third exists for honesty. Every condition reads the Ascendant, so a chart without one gets no verdict fields at all rather than a row of false ones. Within Shodshottari, if day or night cannot be established and the Hora clause does not settle the matter on its own, the verdict is left empty rather than marked as failing.

A worked chart

The sample used across these calculator pages is a birth on 14 August 1994 at 06:42 in Ahmedabad. The engine places the Moon at 204.6401 degrees sidereal, in Libra, in Vishakha, second pada, with Leo rising at 2.33 degrees. It is the eighth tithi of Shukla Paksha and, by the sunrise test, a day birth. The full chart is on the birth chart calculator.

Counting the lords by hand

Vishakha is the sixteenth nakshatra from Ashwini.

• Shodshottari: from Pushya, the eighth star, to Vishakha is nine stars inclusive. Nine divided by eight leaves 1: the first lord, the Sun, 11 years.
• Dwadashottari: from Vishakha to Revati, the twenty-seventh, is twelve stars. Twelve divided by eight leaves 4: the fourth lord, Mercury, 13 years.
• Panchottari: Anuradha is the star just after Vishakha, so the count runs almost the whole circle: twenty-seven. Divided by seven it leaves 6: the sixth lord, the Moon, 17 years.
• Shatabdik: from Revati round to Vishakha is seventeen. Divided by seven it leaves 3: the third lord, Venus, 10 years.
• Chaturashiti-sama: from Swati, the star just before Vishakha, the count is two: the second lord, the Moon, 12 years.
• Dwisaptati-sama: from Mula round to Vishakha is twenty-five. Divided by eight it leaves 1: the Sun, 9 years.

All six match the Vishakha row of the table above. For comparison, the Vimshottari rule in sloka 12-14 counts from Krittika and divides by nine: Vishakha is the fourteenth from Krittika, remainder 5, the fifth lord, Jupiter, 16 years. Seven systems, five different grahas for the same birth.

The balance by hand

Vishakha begins at 200 degrees. The Moon had crossed 4.6401 of its 13.3333 degrees, a fraction of 0.3480, leaving 0.6520 still to cross. Every balance is that one number times the lord's years: 11 times 0.6520 is 7.17 for Shodshottari, and so on down the table. The proportion left is identical in every system, because it belongs to the Moon and not to the system.

Notice how Shodshottari qualifies. This is a day birth in the bright fortnight, which is the opposite of the pairing sloka 23 asks for, so the first sentence fails. It passes on the second: Leo is an odd sign, its first half is the Sun's Hora, the Ascendant at 2.33 degrees is in that half, and the fortnight is Shukla. Shat-trimshat-sama applies to this chart as well, on the Hora alone: a day birth with the Ascendant in the Sun's Hora (Sl. 42-43). Its lord is Saturn, 6 years, with 3.91 left at birth.

The same day at other times

Moving the birth time through that one day shows which parts of the result are steady and which are not.

Three patterns are visible. The lord holds for most of the day, because the Moon takes roughly a day to cross a nakshatra. The balance drains steadily: about 0.08 of a year for every ten minutes in Shodshottari, which is about a month. And the verdicts move fastest of all: ten minutes, from 06:42 to 06:52, was enough to carry the Navamsa Ascendant from Aries into Taurus and switch Dwadashottari on. By 22:42 the Moon has entered Anuradha and every lord in the row is different: Mars, Ketu, the Sun, Mercury, Mars and the Moon.

How often each condition is met

To see how selective these conditions really are, the calculator's own function was run on twenty thousand charts: random instants spread evenly from 1950 to 2010, across eight Indian cities. These are evenly spread moments, not a sample of real births, so read the figures as properties of the rules and not as population statistics.

The arithmetic behind most of these is easy to see. Two of the twelve Navamsa signs belong to Venus, one sixth, which is Dwadashottari's 16.6%. Dwisaptati-sama asks for one graha in two houses of twelve, again about a sixth. Chaturashiti-sama asks for one graha in one house of twelve, about a twelfth. Panchottari asks for one Ascendant sign in twelve and then one twelfth-part of it. Shodshottari is the outlier at three charts in four, and the reason is the reading choice flagged earlier: the day-or-night clause is met by about half of all charts, the Hora clause by about half, and accepting either covers about three quarters.

So about half of all charts meet exactly one condition, more than a third meet two or more, and about one in seven meets none. The text does not say what to do when two conditions are met at once, and neither does this page. It also does not say that a chart meeting none of them is lacking anything: for that chart the general rule, Vimshottari, simply stands alone.

How to read your result

• Lord. The graha whose period, in that system, was running at the moment of birth. It comes from the Moon's nakshatra alone.
• Years. The full length of that lord's period in that system. The Sun's period is 11 years in Shodshottari, 7 in Dwadashottari, 12 in Panchottari, 5 in Shatabdik, 12 in Chaturashiti-sama and 9 in Dwisaptati-sama, so the same graha means a different span in each row.
• Total years. The length of that system's whole cycle. It is printed for reference; in the count-and-remainder rows no later period in the cycle is dated.
• Balance. How many years of the first period remained at birth. A balance close to the full figure means the Moon had only just entered its nakshatra; a small balance means it was about to leave.
• First period ends. The birth instant plus the balance. In the count-and-remainder rows this is the only dated event.
• Applies to this chart. Whether the condition BPHS attaches to that system is met, with the facts stated beside it.

What a "yes" means is narrow and worth stating exactly. It means that by the wording of BPHS Chapter 46 your chart is one of the special cases for which that system is named. It does not mean the system outranks Vimshottari, that its lord is stronger, or that the period it names was good or bad. A "no" means the condition is not met; the lord and balance in that row are still computed correctly and are shown for completeness. For what a dasha lord's period is classically read to bring, the place to start is what a Mahadasha actually is, and the condition of the lord itself can be weighed on the Shad Bala page.

Limits and birth-time sensitivity

The result has three layers and they are not equally robust.

• The lord depends only on the Moon's nakshatra. In the sweep, moving the birth ten minutes later changed the starting lord in 135 of 20,000 charts, under 0.7%. It matters only when the Moon was close to a nakshatra boundary, and then it matters in all six rows at once.
• The balance moves continuously. The Moon crosses a nakshatra in about a day, so an hour of error in the birth time shifts every balance by roughly four percent of that lord's years: several months in the longer periods.
• The verdicts depend on the Ascendant and on its fine divisions, and those move quickly.

The Dwadashottari figure is the one to take seriously. A Navamsa is a ninth of a sign, and the Ascendant crosses one in a matter of minutes, so for one chart in four a ten-minute error flips that verdict. If your birth time is rounded to the nearest quarter or half hour, treat the Dwadashottari and Shatabdik verdicts as provisional. The article on working without a birth time explains what can and cannot be recovered.

• A birth time and a resolved birth place are required. Every condition reads the Ascendant, so the calculator does not run on a date alone.
• For the seven count-and-remainder systems only the first period is dated, so they cannot tell you which period you are in today unless the first one is still running. Ashtottari, Shastihayani and Kala Chakra list every period of their cycle with dates. No sub-periods are built for any system.
• The Moon's position comes from this app's own astronomical routines and a sidereal correction, described on the methodology page along with their accuracy. A different ayanamsa moves the Moon's sidereal longitude, and with it the nakshatra fraction and occasionally the nakshatra itself; the Ayanamsa calculator shows the value in use.
• Shastihayani's lord for a Chitra Moon and its balance at birth are not in its sloka. Both come from a published reference outside BPHS (Sanjay Rath, Vimsottari and Udu Dasa's, 2002, Table 51), and the result flags them as such.
• The effects of periods in these systems are not described. BPHS Chapter 46 gives their construction; this page reports construction only.

How this connects to the rest of the app

The primary timeline is Vimshottari. The Vimshottari page lays out every Mahadasha with dates and the sub-periods inside the current one, and the article on Antardasha and Pratyantardasha explains why those dates slide with the birth time, which is the same sensitivity the balance on this page has. The Timing feature builds on that timeline, not on the systems here.

Inside a saved chart, the Kundali view carries a fold titled Alternate Dasha Systems, described there as classical reference points, not the primary timeline. That fold shows the lord and its years for all ten systems, and whether your chart meets each one's condition. It does not show the balance at birth or the dated sequences; those are on this calculator.

The inputs to the conditions each have their own page: the Panchang for tithi and paksha, the Hora, Navamsa and Dwadasamsa calculators linked above for the Ascendant's divisions, and the tenth house article for the house Chaturashiti-sama turns on. Navamsa, the second chart explains the Vargottama idea behind Shatabdik. The Numerology Dasha is unrelated to all of these: it is a number-based timing scheme from a different tradition and shares only the word.

Questions

Two systems apply to my chart. Which one wins?

The text does not say. BPHS Chapter 46 gives each system its own condition and never addresses a chart that meets more than one. In the twenty-thousand-chart sweep about 35% of charts met two or more, largely because the Shodshottari condition as read here is met so often. This page reports each verdict separately and does not rank them.

None of the systems applies to me. Is something wrong?

No. About one chart in seven in the sweep met none of the original six conditions. Parashara's general rule is that Vimshottari suits the general populace, and the others are for special cases. A chart that is not one of those special cases is simply covered by the general rule.

Why does Shodshottari apply to so many charts?

Because the text states its case in two sentences and the engine accepts either. A day birth in the dark fortnight or a night birth in the bright fortnight covers about half of all charts. An Ascendant in the Moon's Hora in the dark fortnight, or in the Sun's Hora in the bright fortnight, covers about half as well. Together they cover about three quarters. If you prefer to require both sentences, check the facts printed beside the verdict: they state the day or night, the paksha and the Hora, so you can apply the stricter test yourself.

Is the balance at birth the same proportion in every system?

In the seven count-and-remainder systems, yes. The proportion left is the share of the birth nakshatra the Moon still had to cross, and that is a fact about the Moon, not about the system. In the sample chart it is 0.652 in all seven of those rows, and in Shastihayani too. Ashtottari differs, because a lord holds three or four stars and the stars before the birth star in its run are already spent; Kala Chakra differs, because it reads the pada, not the whole nakshatra.

Can I work out the later periods myself?

The order of lords and their years are in the table on this page, and the first period's end date is given, so the sequence can be continued on paper by adding each following lord's years in order. For those seven the engine does not do this; for Ashtottari, Shastihayani and Kala Chakra it does, and it builds no sub-periods for any of them. BPHS discusses sub-periods in later chapters; nothing from them is implemented for any of these systems.

Why do I need a birth time when the dasha comes from the Moon's nakshatra?

The lord needs only the nakshatra, but the balance needs the Moon's exact longitude, which moves about half a degree an hour, and every one of the conditions reads the Ascendant or a division of it. Without a time and a resolved place there is no Ascendant, and the calculator does not run.