Bhava Padas

What this page adds to the table above

The calculator above returns twelve rows, each with four facts: a name, an area label, a sign and a house number. The sections above explain the count for one house and the two corrections. This long-form adds three things: where the rule and the twelve names come from, what the whole table can and cannot look like once the count is run twelve times, and what the classical text does when it compares one Pada with another. Every figure below was produced by running this site's engine.

If you only want the first row, the Arudha Lagna calculator treats it on its own, with the readings Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra builds on that single Pada. If you do not yet know your rising sign, begin with the Lagna calculator, because every row is counted from it, and keep your birth chart open to see where each house lord sits.

The classical source: one sentence, applied twelve times

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS) gives the method in Chapter 29, and the chapter is titled Bhava Padas: it is named after this table, not after the Arudha Lagna. In Sloka 1-3 Parashara says he will describe the Padas, also called Arudhas, of the Bhavas and the Grahas, and presents them as handed down by earlier sages. He defines the Pad of the Lagna as the sign reached by counting as many signs from the Lagna's lord as that lord is away from the first house, and then extends it in one sentence: 'Similarly Padas for other Bhavas be known through their Lords.' That sentence is the whole classical basis for rows two to twelve.

The passage adds that the word Pad used alone means the Pad of the Lagna, which is why later verses that count from the Pad without naming a house are counting from row one. It then names all twelve. The table sets those names beside what this site returns and a few of the matters BPHS Chapter 11 assigns to each Bhava.

• Alternate names. The text gives a second name for five Padas: Bhratru for Vikram, Sukh for Matru, Putr for Mantra, Satru for Rog and Kalatr for Dar. This site returns the first of each pair.
• The eighth row. The source calls the eighth Bhava's Pada Maran. The engine returns Transformation Pada, the app's wording for the eighth house everywhere else. Only the label differs.
• The father. Ch. 11, Sloka 11 lists the father under the tenth Bhava, while Ch. 29 names the ninth Bhava's Pada Pitru and Ch. 32, Sloka 22-24 reads the father from the ninth sign counted from the Sun. The text is not uniform here; the engine's label for the ninth, 'Fortune & father', follows the Pada's name.

What the text does not define

Chapter 29 never states what a Pad signifies. It gives the arithmetic, the exceptions, then effects. The signed-in Kundali heads this table 'How each house's affairs appear to others', and the engine's comments describe a Pada as how a house's affairs appear, as distinct from where its lord and occupants actually sit. That is this app's working convention, drawn from how the chapter uses Padas for visible things such as gains, expenses, standing and the outward state of a marriage. It is an interpretation, not a quotation.

The count is a reflection

The rule says: count from the house to its lord, then count the same number again from the lord. Put differently, the lord sits exactly halfway between the house and the sign the count reaches. The raw Pada is the house's mirror image, and the lord is the mirror. Two things follow before any correction is applied.

• The raw count always lands an even number of signs away from the house. In the classical inclusive count that is the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th or 11th from it, and never the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th or 12th.
• Two positions of the lord give the same reflection. A lord in any sign and a lord in the sign opposite it are both halfway to the same place, so they return the same raw Pada.

Sloka 4-5 then removes two of those six places: a house cannot be its own Pad, and neither can the 7th from it. A count landing on the house itself is replaced by the 10th from that house, and one landing on its 7th by the 4th from that house. The passage ends with a third sentence: when a house's ruler is in the 4th from it, the sign it occupies is the Pad. That is a consequence, not an extra rule. A lord in the 4th reflects to the 7th, the 7th is replaced by the 4th, and the 4th is where the lord sits.

To see the whole behaviour at once, the engine's function was run for every rising sign, every house and every position of the house's lord, 1,728 runs in all. One table holds for all twelve houses alike.

So a Pada is always the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th or 11th from the house it belongs to. Read in reverse, the table tells you where a lord is, to within two choices, from its Pada alone. Four of the twelve positions call for a correction, so about a third of the rows in a typical result are corrected ones: across 10,898 real charts, cast one every 37 hours from 1970 to 2015 at the sample's coordinates, the average was 3.99 per chart.

How the engine builds the twelve rows

Positions are computed for the birth instant and converted to sidereal longitude with the Lahiri ayanamsa; the ayanamsa calculator shows the offset for any date, and the methodology page sets out the astronomy and its limits. The rising sign comes from the birth time and the coordinates of the birth place. From there on, only whole signs are used.

1. 1.Without an Ascendant there is nothing to count from: the calculator stops, says the result cannot be computed and names what is missing, a birth time or a place that resolves to coordinates. Nothing is estimated.
2. 2.For each house from 1 to 12, take the sign that many places from the rising sign, counting the rising sign as 1. Houses are whole signs, with no cusps.
3. 3.Look up that sign's lord in a fixed table: Mars for Aries and Scorpio, Venus for Taurus and Libra, Mercury for Gemini and Virgo, the Moon for Cancer, the Sun for Leo, Jupiter for Sagittarius and Pisces, Saturn for Capricorn and Aquarius. Rahu and Ketu rule nothing in it.
4. 4.Measure how far the lord's sign is from the house's sign, a number from 0 to 11, and move the same distance on from the lord's sign. That is the raw Pada.
5. 5.Test the raw Pada against this house's own sign and its 7th, not against the Lagna, and take the 10th or the 4th from this house where needed.
6. 6.Convert the final sign to a house number counted from the rising sign, and attach the Pada's name and the house's area label.

No degree enters the arithmetic, and strength, aspects and occupants are not consulted. The handler behind this page asks the engine for no particular language, so the names and area labels come back in English.

The Pada belongs to the sign, the name belongs to the house

Look at what the count reads: a sign, and the sign its lord is in. The rising sign does not enter until the last step, where it supplies the house numbers and decides which name goes with which sign. So at any moment there is one Pada for each of the twelve zodiac signs, fixed by where the seven lords stand, and it is the same for everyone born while those lords stay in their signs. The birth time only decides which of the twelve is called the Arudha Lagna, which the Dhan Pada, and so on.

Engine output for the morning of 14 August 1994 at Ahmedabad shows this for three birth times and three rising signs.

The third column is identical at all three times. Only the names slide, one row for each step of the rising sign, and the house numbers slide with them: Leo, which holds four Padas that morning, is the 2nd house with Cancer rising, the 1st with Leo rising and the 12th with Virgo rising. This is what the limit above means by all twelve shifting together.

Worked example: all twelve rows for the sample

The sample is the 06:42 birth, with an Ascendant of Leo at 2.33 degrees. The table follows the engine's steps for each house and matches the result shown on this page row for row.

Two rows were corrected. For the 7th house, Saturn sits in Aquarius, the house itself, so the raw count returns Aquarius and the 10th from it is taken: Scorpio, the 4th house. For the 12th house, the Moon in Libra is in the 4th from Cancer; the raw count reaches Capricorn, the 7th from Cancer, so the 4th is taken, which is Libra, the sign the Moon is in. That is the third sentence of Sloka 4-5 at work.

The five lords that rule two signs each drive two rows from one position. Mars in Gemini gives the Matru Pada (Capricorn) and the Pitru Pada (Leo); Mercury in Cancer the Dhan (Taurus) and Labh (Leo) Padas; Jupiter in Libra the Mantra (Leo) and Transformation (Taurus) Padas; Venus in Virgo the Vikram (Leo) and Karm (Capricorn) Padas; Saturn in Aquarius the Rog (Pisces) and Dar (Scorpio) Padas. The twelve end up in seven signs: four in Leo, two each in Taurus and Capricorn, and one each in Gemini, Libra, Scorpio and Pisces.

Which houses each Pada can reach

Because a Pada is confined to six places from its own house, it is confined to six houses from the Ascendant as well, and it shares those six with the Pada of the opposite house. The engine sweep gives the full map.

Six Padas can fall in the first house: Vikram, Matru, Mantra, Pitru, Karm and Labh. The other six cannot, the Arudha Lagna among them, which is the case the first question above deals with. The map is also a quick test of another tool: a Dhan Pada shown in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd house, or a Dar Pada in the 1st or 7th, was not produced by the count in Sloka 1-5.

How to read the table

Padas that share a sign

Sharing is the normal state of this table. In the sweep of 10,898 charts only 2 had all twelve Padas in different signs. Most often the twelve occupy eight signs (35.9 percent of charts), then nine or seven. The busiest sign held two Padas in 48.2 percent of charts, three in 45.2 percent and four in 6.1 percent, so the sample's four in Leo is crowded without being rare. BPHS states no result for several Padas in one sign, and this page adds none. Mechanically it means only that one sign, with its occupants and its lord, answers for several rows.

A Pada in the first house

At least one Pada falls in the first house in 67.9 percent of the swept charts; four there, as in the sample, occurred in 53 of the 10,898. The text has one verse on a Pada in the rising sign. Ch. 40, Sloka 11 links the Arudh of Dharm Bhava falling in the Janma Lagna itself with association with royal circles. That is the Pitru Pada in the first house, and the sample has it: the 9th lord Mars is in the 11th house, the 3rd from the 9th, so the Pada is the 5th from the 9th, which is the Lagna. The condition needs the 9th lord in the 5th or 11th house, and 16.9 percent of the swept charts met it, one in six. The phrase is the text's idiom for access to people of standing, and a condition that common is a small weight in a reading, not a promise. For the other five Padas in the first house the text is silent.

Grahas in a Pada's sign

The calculator returns each Pada's sign, not its occupants; the birth chart calculator shows those. In the sample the Arudha Lagna's sign, Gemini, holds Mars, the Vyaya Pada's sign, Libra, holds the Moon, Jupiter and Rahu, and the other five Pada signs are empty. BPHS names results for occupants only for the first row, as in Ch. 30, Sloka 39 on Mercury, Jupiter and Venus in the Lagn Pad, and for the Upa Pada, described below. For the other Padas it offers a comparison method instead.

What BPHS does with two Padas at once

Ch. 29, Sloka 30-37 is the one passage that puts rows two to twelve to work, by counting from the Lagn Pad to another Pada. If the Dar Pad falls in an angle or a trine from the Lagn Pad, or if both hold strong Grahas, the text speaks of wealth and fame; if it falls in the 6th, 8th or 12th from it, of want. For the couple, the two Padas mutually in Kendras or Konas mean amity, and mutually in the 6th, 8th or 12th, discord. A closing sentence adds the 3rd and 11th to the favourable positions, and Ch. 39, Sloka 23 repeats it as a Raj Yoga.

The passage then generalises twice. The relationship with a son, and gain or loss through any such matter, is to be judged the same way from the Lagn Pad and the Pada of the house concerned; and the Lagn Pad and Dhan Pad are to be compared likewise. The method, then, is to start from the sign in row one and count to the sign of the row you are interested in.

Positions that cannot occur

The sweep shows that some of these places are out of reach. The Dar Pada is never the 4th or 10th from the Arudha Lagna, so for that pair mutual Kendras can only mean the same sign or opposite signs. For any rising sign there are 144 ways to place the two lords: 48 put the Dar Pada in the 1st or 7th from the Arudha Lagna, 16 in the 5th or 9th, 16 in the 3rd or 11th, 48 in the 6th, 8th or 12th, and 16 in the 2nd. Real charts keep those proportions: in the sweep 32.7 percent had it in the 6th, 8th or 12th.

That last figure governs how the verse should be held. A condition that about one chart in three meets cannot be a verdict on a marriage or on anyone's means, and the passage supplies its own counterweights: strong Grahas in both Padas, or a strong Grah in the Lagn Pad, its 7th, or an angle, trine or Upachaya from it.

The other rows have blind spots of their own. Counted from the Arudha Lagna, the Dhan and Transformation Padas are never the 5th or 11th; Vikram and Pitru never the 6th or 12th; Matru and Karm never the 1st or 7th; Mantra and Labh never the 2nd or 8th; Rog and Vyaya never the 3rd or 9th. These follow from the count itself, so they hold for any tool that applies Sloka 1-5.

The sample, counted from the Arudha Lagna

Treat this as a locating exercise. The text spells out results for the Dar Pada, points to the Dhan Pada and to sons and other matters, and leaves the rest to the same method; this calculator scores none of it. Here the Dar and Dhan Padas fall in the class the verse reads unfavourably while four Padas sit in the 3rd, which it reads favourably. The reading points both ways at once, which is why strength, shown by the Shad Bala calculator, and timing, shown by the Vimshottari Dasha, have to be weighed before any conclusion is drawn.

The Upa Pada is one of these rows

Chapter 30 repeats that the Pad of the Lagna is of prime importance and then introduces a second point, the Upa Pad or Gaun Pad, which Sloka 1-6 ties to happiness from spouse and children. It is calculated for the Bhava that follows the Lagna. The translator's notes record more than two views on what that means, call it normally the twelfth Bhava, and give the reading this engine follows: the twelfth house when an odd sign rises, the second when an even sign rises, with the corrections of Ch. 29, Sloka 4-5 applied.

So no new arithmetic is involved. With an odd sign rising your Upa Pada is the Vyaya Pada row of this table; with an even sign rising it is the Dhan Pada row. The sample has Leo rising, an odd sign, so its Upa Pada is Libra in the 3rd house. The signed-in Kundali prints that line under the twelve rows; this public page leaves you to pick the row. From Sloka 7 onward Chapter 30 turns to the health and death of a spouse. This site does not compute, display or paraphrase that material as a reading of anyone.

Bhava Padas are not Graha Padas

Ch. 29, Sloka 6-7 defines a second family, the Arudh of a Grah: count from the Grah's position to its own sign, then the same number again from that sign. The anchor is a planet, not a house. The engine computes these for the seven grahas in the signed-in Kundali, taking the nearer own sign where a graha owns two, applying no correction because the sloka states none, and leaving out Rahu and Ketu. They are not part of this calculator, so a tool that lists Padas for planets is answering a different question.

Limits and birth-time sensitivity

A change of rising sign renames every row

The table uses whole signs, so it does not drift with a few minutes of birth time: it is either unchanged or changed throughout. For the sample day and place the engine puts the change from Cancer to Leo rising at 06:32 and from Leo to Virgo at 08:44. The recorded time, 06:42, is ten minutes past the first. Twenty minutes earlier the Arudha Lagna is Libra in the 4th house, not Gemini in the 11th, and the four Padas in Leo are the Matru, Rog, Karm and Vyaya Padas in the 2nd house, not the Vikram, Mantra, Pitru and Labh Padas in the 1st. If your Ascendant is within two or three degrees of either end of its sign, run the calculator ten minutes earlier and later. Birth time unknown explains what can be recovered when the time is uncertain.

A lord changing sign changes its rows

The other input is the sign of each lord. Six of the seven stay in a sign for weeks or longer, so the birth date nearly always settles them. The Moon changes sign about every two and a quarter days, so the Pada of whichever house falls in Cancer can change within a day. On the sample day the engine has the Moon leaving Libra for Scorpio at 15:49 IST. Before that minute the Pada of Cancer is Libra; after it the Moon is in the 5th from Cancer and the Pada is Pisces. Nothing else in the table moves. A lord near a sign boundary is also where the ayanamsa matters: the sample's Mercury is at 28.35 degrees of Cancer, and software whose ayanamsa is smaller than Lahiri by more than the remaining degree and a half would count it in Leo and change both rows Mercury drives.

What the calculator does not do

• It counts every sign through one lord: Scorpio through Mars, Aquarius through Saturn. Sloka 6-7's instruction to take the stronger where a sign has two owners is not applied, so a tool that counts those signs through Ketu or Rahu can differ on those two rows.
• It weighs nothing. Strength, dignity, aspects, Argala, occupants and the mutual positions described above are left to the reader.
• It describes appearance only as a convention. No Pada measures anyone's opinion of you.

Where the table connects

The first row is the Arudha Lagna calculator's result by construction, since both call the same routine. The signed-in Kundali shows all twelve rows in its Jaimini layer, beside the Upa Pada line, the Graha Padas and the Argala table; on the free plan that section is a blurred preview and on paid plans it is readable, while this public page shows the full table without an account. The AI Life Chat is given the Arudha Lagna's sign and house as chart context, not the other eleven rows.

Three neighbouring techniques lean on this table. Ch. 31, Sloka 11-17 says that Argala on the Arudh Pad, the natal Lagna and the 7th from both makes a person famous and fortunate; the Argala calculator reports Argala for the twelve houses from the Ascendant and runs no pass from a Pada. Ch. 29, Sloka 29 says the yogas stated from the Lagn Pad are to be judged from the Karakamsa as well, which the Char Karakas and Karakamsa calculators locate. And since a Pada never changes after birth, timing comes from the Chara Dasha, Vimshottari Dasha and Gochar calculators, brought together in the timing feature.

For what each house stands for in the classical texts, the learn pages take them one at a time: the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th house. Every chapter and sloka cited here is listed on the sources page.

Questions people ask about the Bhava Padas

Other software labels these A1 to A12. Are they the same thing?

The shorthand is the same idea: the letter A with the number of the house the Pada belongs to, so A1 is the Arudha Lagna, A2 the Dhan Pada, A7 the Dar Pada and A12 the Vyaya Pada. This site's code uses that notation internally. Whether another tool's signs match depends on its rules, not its labels: the corrections of BPHS Ch. 29, Sloka 4-5, the lord used for Scorpio and Aquarius, and the rising sign all have to agree.

Why do so many of my Padas fall in the same sign?

Because twelve reflections through only seven lords are bound to collide. In a sweep of 10,898 charts all twelve Padas were in different signs only twice, and eight or nine signs in use is typical. Neither BPHS nor this calculator reads anything into the overlap itself.

Is a Pada in my 6th, 8th or 12th house a bad sign?

Not on any rule cited here. The house number in the table is counted from your Ascendant. The unfavourable positions in BPHS Ch. 29, Sloka 30-37 are counted from the Arudha Lagna to another Pada, a different count, and about a third of all charts meet them for the Dar Pada. In the chapters this site draws on, the text gives no verdict for a Pada by its house from the Ascendant, apart from the one verse on the Pitru Pada in the rising sign.

Which row is my Upa Pada?

The Vyaya Pada if an odd sign rises (Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius) and the Dhan Pada if an even sign rises (Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces). That is the reading in the notes to BPHS Ch. 30, Sloka 1-6 and the one this engine follows. The notes record that authorities differ, so a tool that always uses the twelfth house will disagree for even rising signs.

Can a Pada fall in the house it belongs to?

No. BPHS Ch. 29, Sloka 4-5 rules out the house itself and its 7th, and the count can never reach the 2nd, 6th, 8th or 12th from the house. Every Pada is the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th or 11th from its own house. When the lord sits in the house itself the Pada is the 10th from it, as with the sample's Dar Pada.

Why does another tool give different Padas for only some rows?

If every row differs, the two tools disagree on the rising sign; check the Lagna first. If only some differ, look at which. Rows placed in the house itself or its 7th point to a tool that skips the corrections. The rows for Scorpio and Aquarius point to a different lord for those signs. Two rows that share a lord point to that lord sitting near a sign boundary, where the ayanamsa decides its sign.

Do the Padas change during my life?

No. They are fixed by the birth chart. What changes is which period is running and where the grahas are now, which the Vimshottari Dasha and Gochar calculators show.