Dashamsa D10 Chart

What this page adds to the calculator above

The calculator above returns the D10 sign of your Ascendant and nine grahas, twelve houses counted from the D10 Lagna, and the points that keep their Rasi sign. The notes beside it give the arithmetic briefly. This longer section covers the rest: where the Dashamsa is defined, the full table of all 120 divisions, one real chart worked by hand, how to read each value the calculator can return, what the classical texts use the chart for, how two other parts of this site use it, and how much birth-time error it tolerates. Every number below came from running the same engine function the calculator calls.

Where the Dashamsa is defined

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra names sixteen divisions of a sign in Ch. 6 Sl. 2-4. The Dashamsa is the seventh in that list, immediately after the Saptamsa (D7) and the Navamsa (D9) and before the Dwadasamsa (D12). The rule itself is Ch. 6 Sl. 13-14: there are ten Dashamsas in a sign, each of 3 degrees, reckoned from the same sign for an odd sign and from the ninth sign for an even sign. That is the whole definition, and the calculator applies it without additions.

Odd and even refer to a sign's number counted from Aries as one. Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius are odd; Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces are even. The ninth sign is counted inclusively, with the sign itself as the first. So the ten parts of Aries run from Aries to Capricorn, while the ten parts of Taurus begin at Capricorn, the ninth sign from Taurus, and run to Libra.

The same sloka adds that the ten parts are presided over by the ten rulers of the directions. The translation in our corpus lists them for an odd sign as Indra, Agni, Yama, Rakshasa, Varuna, Vayu, Kuber, Isan, Brahma and Ananth, and says the order is reversed for an even sign. The chapter attaches no reading to any of the ten names, so this page does not either, and the calculator does not display them. They are mentioned so that you recognise them if another tool prints a name beside each D10 placement.

All 120 Dashamsas in one table

Twelve signs of ten parts each make 120 divisions. The table was generated from the engine's own starting-sign function, so it is exactly what the calculator uses. Find the row for the Rasi sign of a point, then the column for the part its degree falls in. The parts are easy to find: the first covers 0 to 3 degrees, the second 3 to 6, and so on up to the tenth, 27 to 30.

Four things are visible in the table. First, every row covers ten consecutive signs, so two signs are always out of reach: a graha in Aries can never have a D10 sign of Aquarius or Pisces. Second, a sign appears in its own row exactly once, in the first column for odd signs and the fifth for even signs. Those twelve cells are the only places where a point keeps its Rasi sign.

Third, the sequence is not one unbroken count around the zodiac, and this is where the D10 differs from the D7 and D9. Read from the end of an odd row into the next even row and the sign repeats: Aries ends on Capricorn and Taurus begins on Capricorn. Read from the end of an even row into the next odd row and it jumps: Taurus ends on Libra, Gemini begins on Gemini. We checked all 120 cells against a simple continuous count from Aries and only 30 agree. Software that fills a D10 by counting tenths straight round the zodiac is using a different rule from the one BPHS states, and will disagree with this calculator in most cells.

Fourth, because of that repeat, a point crossing from an odd sign into the next even sign changes its Rasi sign without changing its D10 sign. The Moon in the worked chart below does exactly that later in the day.

How the engine computes it, step by step

The calculator first builds the ordinary sidereal chart from your date, time and place, the same one shown by the birth chart calculator. Each point arrives with a sign and a degree within that sign. The Dashamsa step needs nothing else. It runs through a shared routine, computeVarga, that also produces the D7 and D12 on this site; only the number of parts and the starting-sign function differ.

1. 1.Which part. The degree within the sign is divided by 3 and the fraction is dropped. A result of 0 is the first part and 9 the tenth. The result is capped at 9 so that a value rounding to exactly 30 degrees cannot produce an eleventh part.
2. 2.Starting sign. If the Rasi sign is odd, the start is the sign itself. If it is even, the start is the sign eight places further on, which is the ninth sign counted inclusively.
3. 3.D10 sign. The engine steps forward from the starting sign by the part index, wrapping from Pisces to Aries.
4. 4.Same-sign flag. If the D10 sign equals the Rasi sign, the point is added to the list of points that keep their sign.
5. 5.Houses. The D10 sign of the Ascendant becomes house 1 and the remaining eleven signs follow in zodiac order. Each graha's D10 house is the whole-sign count from that sign.

Two details matter when you compare outputs. The engine places a point in a D10 sign and stops there; it does not assign a degree inside the divisional sign. And the houses are whole-sign houses, the same convention as the Rasi chart on this site, so a D10 house is only a count of signs from the D10 Lagna.

A worked chart, line by line

The stored example on this page is a birth on 14 August 1994 at 06:42 in Ahmedabad. We ran it through the engine again for this section and added two columns the calculator does not show: the degree of each point within its Rasi sign and the number of the part it falls in. With those you can check each row against the table above by hand.

Start with the Moon, in an odd sign. It is in Libra at 24.64 degrees. Dividing by 3 gives 8.21; drop the fraction and the index is 8, the ninth part. Libra is the seventh sign, which is odd, so the count starts at Libra. Eight steps on from Libra is Gemini. The D10 Lagna is Leo, and Gemini is the eleventh sign from Leo, so the Moon is in D10 house 11.

Now an even sign. The Sun is in Cancer at 27.26 degrees, which is the tenth part, index 9. Cancer is the fourth sign, even, so the count begins at the ninth sign from Cancer, which is Pisces. Nine steps on from Pisces is Sagittarius, the fifth sign from Leo. Mercury, 1.17 degrees further on in the same part, lands in the same place.

Venus is the even-sign case that returns to itself. It is in Virgo at 12.92 degrees: the fifth part, index 4. Virgo is the sixth sign, even, so the count starts at Taurus. Four steps on from Taurus are Gemini, Cancer, Leo and Virgo. Venus keeps its sign, but only just. The fifth part ends at 15 degrees and begins at 12, and Venus is 0.92 of a degree past the lower edge.

Mars and Saturn share Cancer in D10 by unrelated routes. Mars is in the second part of odd Gemini, one step on from Gemini. Saturn is in the sixth part of odd Aquarius, five steps on from Aquarius.

How to read each thing the calculator returns

The D10 sign of a point

This is the core output: one of twelve signs for the Ascendant and each of the nine grahas. The classical question to ask of a varga sign is how well the graha is placed in it. BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 42-53 counts a division as good when it falls in the graha's exaltation sign, its Mooltrikon sign or its own sign, and says the divisions of a combust, defeated or weak graha are not to be counted as auspicious. This page does not make that judgement. The Vimshopaka Bala calculator does, and a later section shows the D10 row it produces for the sample chart.

The D10 house

Each graha also gets a house number from 1 to 12, counted in whole signs from the D10 Lagna. That number depends entirely on the D10 Lagna, which is the most time-sensitive value on the page. A graha's D10 sign does not depend on the Lagna at all and is far steadier. If your birth time is approximate, trust the signs before the houses.

Points that keep their Rasi sign

The calculator lists every point whose D10 sign equals its Rasi sign. The engine names this flag vargottama for every divisional chart, though the classical term belongs to the Navamsa. Here it is a structural fact: the point is in the first 3 degrees of an odd sign or between 12 and 15 degrees of an even sign. It is not a measure of strength. Venus in the sample keeps Virgo in both charts, and Virgo is the sign of its debilitation in both. Nor does it carry over between divisions: the sample Ascendant repeats Leo in D10 and falls in Aries in D9.

The twelve houses

The house list is the twelve signs in zodiac order from the D10 Lagna. For the sample that is Leo through Cancer, with Taurus as the tenth. Several grahas can share a house and several houses can be empty. In the sample, house 5 holds the Sun, Mercury and Ketu, house 11 the Moon and Rahu, house 12 Mars and Saturn, while houses 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10 hold no graha. An empty D10 tenth house is ordinary. Nine grahas cannot fill twelve houses, and the calculator attaches no reading to an empty one.

When the calculator declines to answer

This calculator is registered as needing an Ascendant. With no birth time it does not fall back to a noon chart. It returns an unavailable result that names the birth time as the missing piece. If a time is given but the place cannot be resolved to coordinates, it names the birth place instead. No D10 is drawn in either case. If you do not know your time, our guide to charts without a birth time explains what can still be computed.

What the classical texts use the D10 for

BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 1-8 assigns one subject to each of the sixteen divisions: the physique from the Lagna, wealth from the Hora, sons and grandsons from the Saptamsa, the spouse from the Navamsa, parents from the Dwadasamsa. For the Dashamsa the phrase in our translation is power, with position added in brackets by the translator. That phrase is everything BPHS says in this chapter about what the D10 is for. It gives no method for reading the chart house by house, and the word career, which modern usage attaches to the D10, is an interpretation of that phrase, not a quotation.

The detailed classical rules about work and standing are rules about the Rasi chart. BPHS Ch. 11 Sl. 11 lists what is read from the tenth house, Karm Bhava: authority, place, profession or livelihood, honour, father, living in foreign lands and debts. Ch. 21 then judges those matters from the tenth lord. Sl. 2 says a strong tenth lord in exaltation or in its own sign or Navamsa gives fame and good deeds; Sl. 3 says a tenth lord without strength brings obstructions in work; Sl. 4 ties gains through patronage and business to the lord being with a benefic or in a good house. Our page on the tenth house, Karma Bhava covers that primary layer.

It is worth noticing which divisional chart Ch. 21 reaches for when it wants a second opinion. Sl. 16 reads Saturn in the tenth with a debilitated graha together with a malefic in the tenth house of the Navamsa chart. The chapter on the tenth house never cites the Dashamsa. In the BPHS text we hold, then, the D10 has a named subject in Ch. 7 and a place in the strength schemes described below, and the working rules for profession remain with the Rasi chart and the Navamsa.

A modern case-study book in our corpus, Advanced Predictive Astrology, does give the D10 working rules. In a list of difficult periods read from divisional charts, it says the sub-period of a planet that is debilitated or badly conjoined in the Dashamsa is an obstacle to professional progress. In a separate list on timing foreign travel, it names the dasha of the Dashamsa's twelfth lord or of a planet in its twelfth house. Both are one author's working rules and are reported here as such. Neither this calculator nor the Vimshottari dasha calculator applies them.

The Dashamsa as a measure of strength

The second classical use of the D10 is independent of its subject. BPHS weighs a graha's placement across several divisions at once and scores the result out of 20. Ch. 7 Sl. 17-19 describes a six-division and a seven-division scheme, and the Dashamsa is in neither. Sl. 20 then says to add the Dashamsa, the Shodashamsa and the Shashtiamsa to the seven to get the Dasha Varga, the scheme of ten. In that scheme the Rasi counts for 3, the Shashtiamsa for 5, and each of the other eight divisions, the Dashamsa among them, for 1.5. Sl. 21-25 widen the set to all sixteen divisions, where the Dashamsa is one of nine that count for half a point each.

This site's Vimshopaka Bala uses the sixteen-division scheme, so the D10 carries 0.5 points of 20, the same as the D7 and D12 and one seventh of the Rasi's 3.5. For each of the seven grahas from the Sun to Saturn the engine finds the dignity of the graha in its D10 sign and awards a share of that half point: all of it for exaltation, three quarters for an own sign, five eighths for a friendly sign, half for a neutral sign and nothing for an enemy sign or debilitation. Rahu and Ketu are left out because the engine keeps no dignity table for them. The older six-fold system does not use the D10 at all: the positional component defined in BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 2-4 sums dignity across seven divisions and the Dashamsa is not among them, which is why it has no line in the Shad Bala calculator.

The table puts the D10 in proportion. Four of the seven grahas earn nothing from their D10 sign, and Venus, one of the four, still has the highest total because other divisions carry more weight. The friendly and enemy labels come from the compound relationship, which mixes the permanent friendships with temporary ones read from the birth chart, so the same graha in the same D10 sign can be labelled differently in another chart. BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 13-16 adds a finer grading, full, medium and nil effects at the beginning, middle and end of a division. The engine keeps no degree inside the D10 sign and does not apply it.

Where else this site uses your D10

The calculator on this page reports placements and nothing more. Two other engines on the site take the same computeDashamsa output and use it as one input among several. Both need a birth time, for the same reason this page does. The first is the career and money calculator. It names the grahas that hold a career role in your chart and weights each role: the lord of the Rasi tenth house 3, a graha sitting in the tenth 2.5, the lord of the D10 Ascendant 2, the Amatya Karaka 2, and the strongest graha by Shad Bala 1.5. A graha holding more than one role adds them, and the total is scaled by that graha's measured strength. The D10 enters through one door only, the sign rising in it.

For the sample chart the D10 Ascendant is Leo, so the Sun takes the D10 role. The Sun is also this chart's Amatya Karaka, the second-highest graha by degree in the Char Karaka scheme, so it holds two roles and comes out as the top contributor with a pull of 3.075. Venus, lord of the Rasi tenth house, follows at 1.676, pulled down by its debilitation. The same block reports the D10's own tenth sign and its lord, here Taurus and Venus, and repeats the list of points that keep their sign. Because the sample's D10 Lagna equals its Rasi Lagna, the tenth sign is the same in both charts; in most charts the two differ.

The second use is in the career timing windows of the life-prediction engine. That engine picks future Vimshottari periods from the Rasi chart alone. For each one it then looks up the house the period's lord occupies in the D10. Houses 1, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 10 are labelled corroborated, houses 6, 8 and 12 contradicted, and the rest neutral. The label is reported beside the window and never removes it; the code comment is explicit that one divisional placement is not strong enough to veto a reading from the Rasi chart. In the sample, run from today's date, the first window is the Sun's sub-period within Mercury's Mahadasha, April 2030 to February 2031, and the Sun's D10 house 5 marks it corroborated.

How sensitive the D10 is to birth time

The note beside the calculator says the page cannot give a single figure for the precision needed. We can give the figures for the sample. We recomputed the chart every ten seconds across the whole birth date. The D10 Lagna took 120 positions over the 24 hours, one for each tenth of each rising sign. The shortest lasted 8 minutes 50 seconds, in the evening with Pisces rising; the longest 13 minutes 40 seconds, before dawn with Gemini rising. The spans differ because signs rise at different speeds at a given latitude, so these figures belong to Ahmedabad on that date and will be somewhat different elsewhere.

The sample birth at 06:42 sits near the end of the Leo span, which runs from 06:31:40 to 06:45:00. Had the birth happened three minutes later than recorded, the D10 Lagna would be Virgo and every graha would move back one house: the Sun, Mercury and Ketu from the fifth to the fourth, Mars and Saturn from the twelfth to the eleventh. Eleven minutes earlier, the Rasi Lagna itself becomes Cancer and the D10 Lagna Sagittarius. In the career engine described above, either change replaces the Sun as D10 Ascendant lord, with Mercury or Jupiter. A birth time rounded to the nearest five minutes is not precise enough to be sure of the D10 Lagna.

The grahas are much steadier. Across the same date the Sun, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and Rahu each kept one D10 sign from midnight to midnight. The Moon did not. It began the day in the seventh part of Libra with a D10 sign of Aries, moved to Taurus at 00:31, Gemini at 05:37 and Cancer at 10:43, a new D10 sign roughly every five hours. At 15:49 it entered Scorpio and its D10 sign stayed Cancer, the repeat between an odd sign and the next even sign noted earlier; it then moved to Leo at 20:55. The Moon's D10 sign therefore needs a birth time good to within an hour or two, while its Rasi sign often needs only the date. The Lagna calculator shows your Ascendant's degree, which is the first thing to check: the closer it is to a multiple of 3, the less the D10 Lagna can be trusted.

Limits worth keeping in mind

• Boundary cases. Positions come from this site's built-in formulas, described on the methodology page. There are nine internal boundaries in every sign, one every 3 degrees, and a point within a few minutes of arc of one may land in the neighbouring part in other software. A small difference in ayanamsa has the same effect.
• One starting rule. The engine implements BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 13-14 as translated in our corpus and nothing else. Tools that count the tenths continuously, or that count the even signs differently, will produce another chart from the same degrees. This page makes no claim about which traditions use which variant.
• No degrees inside the D10. A point is placed in a D10 sign only. Anything that needs a degree within the divisional sign is not computed.
• No aspects or yogas. The calculator shows which grahas share a D10 sign but does not compute aspects in the D10 or detect any combination there.
• No interpretation. There is no reading attached to a D10 Lagna, to a graha in a D10 house or to a D10 house lord on this page. BPHS gives the division a subject and a weight, not a house-by-house manual, and this page does not supply one from elsewhere.
• Nodes. Rahu is the mean node and Ketu is always exactly opposite, so the two always occupy opposite D10 signs. A tool using the true node can differ when Rahu is near a boundary.

How the D10 connects to the rest of the site

The same Dashamsa appears in the full Kundali feature whenever the chart has an Ascendant, drawn as a wheel beside the D7, D9 and D12. The free birth chart tool gives the Rasi positions the D10 is derived from, and the two are worth reading side by side, since every D10 placement is a function of one Rasi sign and one degree. The two divisions that join the D10 in the scheme of ten have their own pages: the Shodashamsa (D16) and the Shashtiamsa (D60).

For the classical layer the D10 is meant to support, read the tenth house first, then the graha pages most often consulted with it: the Sun, Saturn, and placements such as the Sun in the tenth house or Saturn in the tenth house. Navamsa, the second chart explains why the D9 carries six times the weight of the D10 in the sixteen-varga scheme, and what a Mahadasha is covers the periods the career windows are built from. For how confident any output can be given your birth details, see the accuracy feature, and for the texts themselves, the sources page.

Questions people ask about the Dashamsa

Why does my D10 differ from what another app shows?

There are two common causes. The first is a small difference in degree: each D10 Lagna lasted between about 9 and 14 minutes of clock time in the sample sweep, so a few minutes in the recorded time or a few minutes of arc in the calculation is enough to cross a boundary. The second is the rule. This site follows BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 13-14, counting from the sign itself for odd signs and from the ninth for even signs. A tool that counts tenths continuously round the zodiac agrees with that in only 30 of the 120 divisions. Compare degrees first; if they match and the signs do not, the rule differs.

Is the D10 more important than the tenth house of my birth chart?

Not in the sources we hold. BPHS gives the Dashamsa one phrase in Ch. 7 and gives the tenth house a full chapter of rules in Ch. 21, all stated for the Rasi chart and, in one sloka, the Navamsa. In the sixteen-varga strength scheme the Rasi carries 3.5 points of 20 and the Dashamsa 0.5. The D10 is a supporting view. Start with the tenth house.

Does BPHS actually say the D10 is the career chart?

It says power, with position in brackets, is to be considered from the Dashamsa. Career is the usual modern reading of that phrase and this site's code uses the word as shorthand. The classical list of tenth-house matters in BPHS Ch. 11 is wider than a job: authority, place, livelihood, honour, father, living abroad and debts. The text does not say which of these, beyond power and position, the Dashamsa covers.

What does it mean if a planet is debilitated in D10?

Mechanically, the tenth of the sign it occupies maps to its debilitation sign. In this site's Vimshopaka Bala it then earns none of the half point the D10 carries. One modern book in our corpus links the sub-period of such a planet to obstacles in professional progress; BPHS does not state that rule and this calculator does not apply it. In the sample, Mars and Venus are both debilitated in D10 and Venus still has the highest sixteen-varga total.

My D10 tenth house is empty. Is that a problem?

No. Nine grahas cannot occupy twelve houses, and in the sample seven of the twelve D10 houses hold no graha, the tenth among them. The calculator attaches no reading to an empty house. Where this site does use the D10 tenth, in the career calculator, it reports the sign on that house and the sign's lord, both of which always exist.

A planet keeps its sign in D10. Does that make it strong?

Not on that fact alone. The flag only says the point is in the first tenth of an odd sign or the fifth tenth of an even sign. Strength in the classical sense depends on the dignity of the graha in that sign. Venus in the sample keeps Virgo in both charts and is debilitated in both. The career calculator does print a note about consistent professional expression when points repeat their sign; that sentence is this site's wording, not a rule quoted from BPHS.

Are the ten direction rulers, Indra, Agni and the rest, shown anywhere?

No. BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 13-14 names them and says the order reverses for an even sign, but attaches no reading to the names in that chapter. The engine stores only the D10 sign. If another tool gives a meaning for each name, it comes from a source outside our corpus.

Can I use this calculator without a birth time?

No. It is registered as needing an Ascendant and returns an unavailable result naming the birth time as missing. The slower grahas would keep their D10 signs across a whole day, as the sample sweep shows, but the Moon changed D10 sign four times that day and there would be no houses at all, so the page does not offer a partial chart.

How is the D10 different from the D7 on this site?

In two numbers and one property. The D7 cuts a sign into seven parts and starts even signs from the seventh sign; the D10 cuts it into ten and starts even signs from the ninth. Both run through the same routine and both carry half a point in Vimshopaka Bala. The property is continuity: the D7 sequence runs unbroken round the zodiac from one sign to the next, and the D10 sequence repeats and jumps at sign boundaries. BPHS gives them different subjects, children for the D7 and power and position for the D10.