Char Karakas

What this page adds to the calculator above

The calculator above returns seven rows: a role, a short life-area label, a graha, its birth-chart sign and its degree inside that sign. The notes beside it state the rule in two paragraphs. This long-form goes further. It shows where the rule is written, what the text says and does not say about each role, each step of the sort with real engine output you can redo by hand, how far the ranking moves when the birth time moves, and where this calculator deliberately stops short of the text. It also says plainly which of the two classical schemes the engine follows, because that choice changes which role the last graha receives.

One orientation point first. The seven karakas are a ranking of degrees, so they need an exact moment. The calculator therefore asks for a birth time and a resolved place, as the Lagna calculator does. If you only know your date, the article on what an unknown birth time changes lists what can still be computed.

Two kinds of karaka: fixed and movable

Karaka means significator: the graha that stands for a person or a matter in the chart. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS) Ch. 32 describes two different ways of assigning them, and it helps to see both before reading your result.

The first is constant. BPHS Ch. 32 Sl. 18-21 calls these the constant Karakatwas: a graha stands for the same relative in every chart. The stronger of the Sun and Venus indicates the father, the stronger of the Moon and Mars the mother, Mars the younger brother, Mercury the maternal relatives, Jupiter the paternal grandfather. Sl. 22-24 then says which house to count from each: the 9th from the Sun for the father, the 4th from the Moon for the mother, the 3rd from Mars for brothers, the 6th from Mercury for the maternal uncle, the 5th from Jupiter for sons, the 7th from Venus for the wife and the 8th from Saturn for death. Nothing about your own chart changes who the significator is; only its condition differs.

The second is movable, and it is what this calculator computes. BPHS Ch. 32 Sl. 13-17 names them Char Karakas, which the translation glosses as inconstant significators. Here the role is not attached to a graha at all. It is attached to a rank. Whichever graha has travelled furthest through its sign takes the first role in your chart, the next takes the second, and so on. In one chart Mercury is the Atma Karaka; in a chart cast a day later it is the Sun. The same Sl. 13-17 links the two systems with a fallback: if two grahas share a longitude and a role is left unfilled, the text says to consider the constant significator for that relative instead.

This app files the Char Karakas under Jaimini, the name the tradition gives to the family of techniques built on sign aspects, padas and movable significators. Every reference on this page, however, is to BPHS, because that is the text in this project's library that states the rule; no Jaimini Upadesa Sutras text is in the library, so nothing here is attributed to it. The sources page lists the texts the engines draw on.

What BPHS Ch. 32 actually says

The definition (Sl. 3-8)

The rule is one sentence in the text: among the grahas from the Sun onward, whichever has traversed the maximum number of degrees in its sign is the Atma Karak. If two grahas have the same degrees, the one with more minutes of arc is taken; if the minutes also match, the one with more seconds. The measure is the position inside the sign, from 0 to 30, not the position on the full zodiac. A graha at 28 degrees of Cancer outranks a graha at 5 degrees of Pisces, although Pisces comes later in the circle.

The king and the minister (Sl. 3-12)

BPHS gives the first rank a special standing. Sl. 3-8 says the Atma Karak has a prime say on the native, as a king is head of all affairs in his country. Sl. 9-12 continues the image: as a minister cannot go against the king, the other karakas cannot predominate over the Atma Karak. If the Atma Karak is adverse, the text says, the others cannot give their benefic effects; if it is favourable, the others cannot predominate with malefic ones. That is a statement about priority among significators. The text does not define adverse or favourable at this point, and this calculator does not attempt to.

The other roles (Sl. 13-17)

The graha next in degrees is the Amatya Karak, and following one another come the Bhratru, Matru, Pitru, Putr, Gnati and Stri Karak. That is eight names. The chapter gives the names and their order and nothing more about each: there is no paragraph on what the Bhratru Karaka means in a sign or a house. The names carry the meaning, each being the Sanskrit word for a person: atma the self, amatya a minister or counsellor, bhratru a brother, matru the mother, pitru the father, putra a child, gnati a kinsman, stri a wife. The life-area label on each row of your result is this app's short gloss on that name, not a quotation from the text.

Seven grahas or eight (Sl. 1-2)

The chapter opens by admitting a disagreement. Parashara says he will detail the karakas obtainable from the seven grahas, the Sun to Saturn. He then records two other views: some say Rahu becomes a karaka when two grahas match in longitude, and some say all eight grahas including Rahu are to be considered regardless. For Rahu, Sl. 3-8 gives a special measure: deduct his longitude in the sign from 30, because the node moves backward through the signs. Sl. 13-17 adds a further variation, that some consider the Matru Karak and the Putr Karak identical. With eight names and seven grahas, treating two names as one is how a seven-graha list can cover all eight roles.

Exactly how the engine computes it

1. 1.It builds the sidereal birth chart for the moment and place you entered, with the Lahiri ayanamsa. The ayanamsa calculator shows the correction used for any date, and the methodology page describes how positions are computed.
2. 2.For each graha it takes the sidereal longitude modulo 30. That remainder is the degree in sign, stored as a decimal rounded to two places, so 28 degrees 26 minutes appears as 28.43.
3. 3.It takes the seven grahas that have dignity tables in this codebase: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. Rahu and Ketu are not in the list.
4. 4.It sorts those seven from the highest degree in sign to the lowest.
5. 5.It assigns the roles by position: first Atma Karaka, second Amatya, third Bhratru, fourth Matru, fifth Pitru, sixth Putra, seventh Gnati.
6. 6.It returns each row with the graha's birth-chart sign and its degree in sign. Nothing else is attached: no house, no dignity, no verdict.

Three consequences of this design are worth stating outright, because they are the places where another chart program may differ.

• The decimal does the tie-break. The text's rule of degrees, then minutes, then seconds is the same as comparing decimal degrees, so no separate step is needed. The engine compares at two decimal places, and one hundredth of a degree is 36 seconds of arc. Two grahas closer than that inside their signs are treated as tied, and the sort then keeps the fixed order Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn. BPHS Sl. 13-17 handles the same case differently: both grahas become the same karaka and one role goes unfilled. The engine does not do that; it always fills seven roles.
• Rahu is left out. The engine follows the first view in Sl. 1-2, the seven grahas from the Sun to Saturn. The eight-graha view is recorded by the text and not implemented.
• The seventh role is labelled Gnati Karaka. The engine takes the first seven of the text's eight names in order and stops, so no row is ever labelled Stri Karaka. Under the variation in Sl. 13-17 that treats Matru and Putr as one role, the seven grahas would instead cover all eight names and the last graha would be the Stri Karak. If another source calls your lowest-degree graha the spouse significator, that is the reason: a different reading of the same sloka, not a different calculation of the degrees.

A worked example you can redo by hand

The sample on this page is a birth on 14 August 1994 at 06:42 in Ahmedabad. The engine returns Leo rising and these seven positions. You can reproduce the first column with the birth chart calculator and then do the ranking yourself with nothing more than a pencil.

Read the gaps, not only the order. Mercury leads the Sun by 1.09 degrees, the Sun leads the Moon by 2.62, and Jupiter leads Venus by only 0.63. A small gap is a rank that a small change in the birth time can reverse; a large one, such as the 8.50 degrees between Venus and Mars, is safe.

The sample also shows why the ranking is not a strength score. In this chart the engine places Mercury in the 12th house from the Leo Ascendant and flags it as combust, since the Sun sits barely a degree away in the same sign. Mercury is still the Atma Karaka, because the sort reads one number and nothing else. To judge how capable that Mercury is, use the Shad Bala calculator, which measures strength on its own terms; the pages on Mercury and the 12th house cover what the placement itself is classically taken to mean.

The same chart under the eight-graha view

The engine reports Rahu at 25.40 degrees of Libra in this chart. The text's rule for Rahu is to deduct that from 30, which gives 4.60. On the eight-graha view of Sl. 1-2, Rahu would therefore enter the list between Venus at 12.92 and Mars at 4.42: seventh of eight, with Mars eighth. The first six ranks would not move, and Mars would pass from Gnati Karak to Stri Karak. This subtraction is hand arithmetic on the engine's Rahu position; the calculator itself does not perform it.

Two more real charts

For 15 May 1990 at 10:30 in Mumbai the engine returns the Moon at 29.84 degrees of Sagittarius as Atma Karaka, then Mars (Aquarius 24.40), Venus (Pisces 18.77), Jupiter (Gemini 15.81), Mercury (Aries 14.33), Saturn (Capricorn 1.47) and the Sun (Taurus 0.40). Two things stand out. The Moon is 0.16 of a degree from the end of its sign, a point taken up below. And the Sun, the natural significator of the self in the constant scheme, is last here: the movable scheme does not privilege any graha.

For 19 October 1995 at 11:05 in Mumbai the order is Saturn (Aquarius 25.03), Jupiter (Scorpio 19.75), Venus (Libra 17.30), Mercury (Virgo 13.51), Mars (Scorpio 5.04), the Sun (Libra 1.57) and the Moon (Leo 0.10). Saturn is retrograde in that chart. Retrograde motion plays no part in the sort; the engine ranks the position at the birth moment, whichever way the graha is moving.

How to read each row of your result

Because BPHS Ch. 32 gives names and an order and no interpretations, the honest reading of this list is as an index: it tells you which graha to look at for which question. What that graha then says is found elsewhere in the chart. The points below note where BPHS itself uses each role.

• Atma Karaka. The role the text ranks above all the others (Ch. 32 Sl. 3-12) and the one later chapters use most. Its Navamsa sign is the Karakamsa (Ch. 33 Sl. 1), computed by the Karakamsa calculator. Ch. 39 Sl. 3-5 says Raj Yogas are to be known from the Karakamsa Lagna and the natal Lagna, pairing the Atma Karaka with the Putra Karaka on one side and the lords of the 1st and 5th on the other.
• Amatya Karaka. BPHS Ch. 40, on royal association, is where this role does its work. Sl. 1 reads the 10th lord joined with or aspected by the Amatya Karaka or its dispositor; Sl. 3 reads the Amatya Karaka together with the dispositor of the Atma Karaka; Sl. 4 and 6 read the Amatya Karaka in its own house, in exaltation, or in a kendra or kona. In the language of the text these describe a minister at a king's court, which is the literal meaning of amatya. The closing line of Ch. 33 Sl. 63-74 also counts the 6th Navamsa from the Amatya Karaka's Navamsa.
• Bhratru, Matru and Pitru Karaka. Named in Ch. 32 Sl. 13-17 and not taken up by name in the chapters this project has read. Classically read as the grahas to examine for siblings, mother and father, alongside the constant significators of Sl. 18-21 and the 3rd, 4th and 9th houses.
• Putra Karaka. Named again in Ch. 39 Sl. 3-7, where the Atma Karaka and the Char Putra Karaka in the Lagna, the 5th house, exaltation, own sign or own Navamsa, with a benefic's aspect, are given as one form of Maha Raj Yoga. The text's stated result is fame and happiness.
• Gnati Karaka. Named in the list only. The label Relatives & obstacles is the app's gloss; BPHS Ch. 32 says nothing further about it.

The sign printed on each row is the birth-chart sign of the graha, which tells you where to find it. The degree is the number that earned the rank. A row carries no good-or-bad judgement, and a low rank is not a weakness: rank seven is simply the graha that has most recently entered its sign.

What BPHS builds on the Atma Karaka

Several later rules treat the Atma Karaka as a second reference point beside the Lagna lord. They are reported here as what the text says, in its own courtly vocabulary; the calculator evaluates none of them.

• Ch. 39 Sl. 8: the Lagna lord and the Atma Karaka in the 1st, 5th or 7th house, joined with or aspected by a benefic, form a Raj Yoga.
• Ch. 39 Sl. 9-10: benefics in the 2nd, 4th and 5th counted from the Lagna lord or from the Atma Karaka's sign, and likewise malefics in the 3rd and 6th from either, are given as marks of rank.
• Ch. 39 Sl. 22: the Atma Karaka in a benefic's sign or Navamsa is read for wealth.
• Ch. 40 Sl. 5, 6, 8 and 10: the Atma Karaka in the 1st, 5th or 9th; in a kendra or kona; in exaltation or its own house aspecting the 9th lord; or in the 5th, 7th, 9th or 10th with a benefic, are each read for patronage and standing.
• Ch. 42 Sl. 14-15, in the chapter on penury: the 8th and 12th counted from the Atma Karaka, aspected by its Navamsa lord or its dispositor, are read for loss of wealth and for spending.
• Ch. 46 Sl. 178: a Karak Dasha begins with the period of the Atma Karaka and runs through the remaining karakas in order, each lasting as many years as the signs counted from the Lagna to that karaka. The note above it also names an Atma Karak Kendradi variant. This page does not compute either.

Two cautions on using these. First, the phrasing is a millennium and more old: king, minister and army chief are the text's images of standing, and the yogas calculator does not attempt the Karakamsa-based Raj Yogas, because the chapter carries dozens of competing rules whose combined reading the text does not specify. Second, each rule needs facts this list does not contain: houses, aspects, dignity and the Navamsa. The list tells you which graha the rule is about; the rest of the chart tells you whether the condition is met.

Birth-time sensitivity, measured

The notes above the fold say a wrong birth time can swap two roles. Here is how much, on the sample day. The table holds the date and place fixed and changes only the time.

Four things happen in that one day, and each is a general lesson.

• The Ascendant changes six times and the list ignores it. The ranking uses no house. The Ascendant is required only because the calculator refuses to rank degrees for a moment it has had to guess.
• The Moon does most of the moving. In the engine's output it goes from 20.70 degrees at midnight to 23.05 at 04:00, a little over half a degree an hour. Every other graha moves less than a degree and a half in the whole day; Saturn moves 0.06.
• The Moon climbs past its neighbours. A scan of the engine at ten-minute steps shows the Moon overtaking the Sun at about 11:30 and Mercury at about 14:05. For roughly an hour and three quarters after that, the Moon is the Atma Karaka.
• Then it drops to last. At about 15:50 the Moon leaves Libra for Scorpio. Its degree in sign resets from nearly 30 to nearly 0, and it falls from first rank to seventh in a single step. At 16:00 it is at 0.11 degrees of Scorpio.

The last line of the table shows the slower kind of change: by 23:59 Venus (13.65) has edged past Jupiter (13.64), and the Matru and Pitru roles have changed hands. Across the neighbouring days the same thing happens to the first rank. At 06:42 on 13 August the order is Mercury 26.33, Sun 26.30, a gap of three hundredths of a degree. At 06:42 on 15 August Mercury has crossed into Leo at 0.36 degrees and is last, and the Sun at 28.22 of Cancer is the Atma Karaka.

The sign-edge effect

The rule rewards a graha for being late in its sign, so the most favoured position and the least favoured one are neighbours. A graha at 29.9 degrees is very likely the Atma Karaka; the same graha a few hours or days later, at 0.1 of the next sign, is very likely last. The 1990 Mumbai chart above has its Atma Karaka Moon at 29.84 degrees of Sagittarius. At the Moon's pace that is well under an hour from the boundary, so a birth recorded even a little early would move the Moon from first to seventh and hand the first rank to Mars.

The ayanamsa matters for the same reason and only for this reason. A different ayanamsa slides every graha by the same amount, so the gaps between grahas in the same stretch of a sign do not change. But a graha near a sign edge can be pushed across it, and then its degree in sign jumps by nearly 30. Software using a different ayanamsa can therefore return the same list as this one for most charts and a sharply different one for a chart like the 1990 example.

Limits of this calculator

• It ranks and labels. It does not judge. No row says whether a karaka is well or badly placed, and the engine has no notion of an adverse or favourable Atma Karaka, although BPHS Ch. 32 Sl. 9-12 makes that distinction.
• It implements one of the views BPHS records. Seven grahas, seven roles, no Rahu, no Stri Karaka row, and no merging of Matru and Putra.
• It never leaves a role empty. The text's case of two grahas at one longitude sharing a karaka is resolved here by a fixed order instead.
• It compares at two decimal places, about 36 seconds of arc. The text asks for comparison down to the second.
• It does not evaluate the Raj Yoga, royal-association or penury rules of Ch. 39, 40 and 42 that name the karakas, and it does not build a Karak Dasha.
• It reports the birth-chart sign only. Navamsa positions belong to the Karakamsa and Navamsa calculators.
• It is not a prediction. A role says which graha the tradition consults for a subject, and nothing about what will happen in that part of a life.

How this connects to the rest of the app

The same function that fills this page feeds several other places, so the list you see here is the list they use.

• The Karakamsa calculator takes the first row, looks up that graha in the Navamsa (D9) and reports the sign. For the sample chart the engine returns Pisces. The article on the Navamsa as the second chart explains why that step needs the birth time to the minute.
• The 12th from Karakamsa calculator counts on from there, and the article on the Ishta Devata question sets out what BPHS Ch. 33 does and does not say about it.
• The Career & Money feature lists the Amatya Karaka as one of the grahas that own your career axis, beside the 10th lord, any graha in the 10th and the Dashamsa (D10) Ascendant lord, and names the Atma Karaka in its summary. Its ranking of those contributors is a relative weighting, not a score.
• The Life Blueprint cites the Atma Karaka in its section on direction, and the Kundali report receives the same seven-row list with the rest of the chart and names the Atma Karaka from it.
• The other Jaimini calculators read the same chart from different anchors: Arudha Lagna, Bhava Padas, Argala and the sign-based Chara Dasha. None of them depends on the karaka ranking, so a disputed Atma Karaka does not disturb them.

A sensible order of work is this. Confirm the chart with the birth chart calculator. Read this list and note any narrow gaps. Open the Karakamsa calculator for the first rank. Then, for any role you care about, look at that graha's house, sign and strength in the ordinary way. The full set of tools is on the calculators index.

Questions people ask about the Char Karakas

Why is there no Dara Karaka or spouse significator in my list?

Because the engine assigns the first seven of the eight names in BPHS Ch. 32 Sl. 13-17, and the eighth, Stri Karak, is the spouse role. Sources that show a spouse karaka for seven grahas are following the variation in the same sloka that treats the Matru and Putr Karak as one, which frees the last graha for the eighth name. Under that reading the graha this page labels Gnati Karaka would be the spouse significator. The degrees are the same either way.

Can the same graha hold two roles?

Not in this calculator. Seven grahas are sorted into seven positions, so each holds exactly one. BPHS does allow two grahas to share one role when their longitudes are identical, leaving another role empty; the engine resolves that case by a fixed order instead.

Does a retrograde graha rank differently?

No. The sort uses the degree in sign at the birth moment and ignores the direction of motion. The only reversed measure in the text is for Rahu, whose longitude is deducted from 30, and Rahu is not in this engine's list.

My Atma Karaka is debilitated or combust. Is that a bad sign?

The list cannot tell you, because it does not look at dignity or combustion. BPHS Ch. 32 Sl. 9-12 does say an adverse Atma Karaka limits what the other karakas can give, but it does not define adverse there. Check the graha's measured strength with the Shad Bala calculator and read it as one factor among many, not as a verdict.

Do I need my exact birth time?

You need a time and a place for the calculator to run at all. How exact it must be depends on your chart. If every gap in your list is a degree or more and the Moon is far from its neighbours and from the end of its sign, an error of several minutes changes nothing. If two grahas are a few hundredths of a degree apart, no ordinary birth record is precise enough to separate them.

Why does the Moon change role so often?

It moves a little over half a degree an hour, far faster than anything else in the list. On the sample day it passes two grahas and changes sign within about four and a half hours, holding the third, second, first and seventh ranks in turn.

Is the Atma Karaka the same as my Lagna lord or my Sun sign?

No. The Lagna lord is the ruler of the rising sign, the Sun sign is where the Sun sits, and the Atma Karaka is whichever of the seven grahas has the highest degree in its sign. They can coincide by chance. BPHS Ch. 39 Sl. 8-10 reads the Lagna lord and the Atma Karaka side by side as two separate reference points.

Will my karakas change over my life?

No. They are fixed by the birth moment. What changes is your knowledge of that moment: a corrected birth time can reorder the list, as the tables above show.

Does the calculator tell me my career from the Amatya Karaka?

No. It names the graha and stops. The Career & Money feature uses that graha as one contributor among several and shows its reasoning for each; this page only supplies the ranking.