Prashna Kundali

This page describes a tool you cannot run from here. Prashna casts a chart for the minute a question is asked, and because it uses the coordinates saved with an account and keeps a history of what was asked, it lives behind sign-in. The Prashna feature page already covers the classical background: the Daivajna Vallabha and its fifteen chapters, the ten Avasthas, the rule set behind each of the five question types, and how the place and the minute move the answer. This long read does not repeat that. It goes one level closer to the text and one level closer to the numbers: verse by verse, what each implemented chapter says and what the code takes from it; the supporting rules in BPHS and Saravali; a single moment read through all five question types; a pair of questions sixty seconds apart; a whole day of verdicts; and a year of verdicts sorted by rising sign.

Every chart, score, signal count and percentage quoted here came from running the engine that serves the signed-in page. The sample place is Bengaluru (12.9716 N, 77.5946 E) and the sample day is 15 October 2026, in Indian Standard Time. No real question was asked; the engine never reads the wording of a question anyway.

What you see here, and what the signed-in page adds

Most calculators on this site run on the page: you enter a date, a time and a place, and the server answers. This one does not. Its entry in the calculator registry carries no public endpoint and is marked as needing an account, so the page shows a short description, then a panel headed "This one lives inside the app", then this long read. No form is shown, because a form here could only fail. To ask a question you need an account with saved birth details - onboarding collects them - and then the Prashna page in the app.

On that page you type a question of up to 300 characters and choose one of five types: General yes/no, Money, gains & opportunity, Travel, Lost & found, or Relationship timing. When you press Ask, the server takes its own clock as the moment, reads the latitude and longitude saved with your birth record, and casts the chart. The type you chose decides which chapter of the Daivajna Vallabha is applied. The question text is not parsed; it is stored so you can read it back.

The daily allowance, claimed before the chart is cast

The plan table in the server allows one Prashna a day on the Free plan, five on Basic, and no limit on the higher plans. The counter is claimed before the reading is produced, in one conditional database write: the first ask of a new UTC day resets the counter to one, and every later ask only succeeds while the count is under the limit. This replaced an older read-then-save sequence in which several requests sent together could all read zero used and all be answered. If the engine throws before a reading is saved, the claim is handed back, so a failed ask does not use up the day. When the allowance is spent, the server answers with a message naming your plan and its daily number, and the page shows it.

What is stored, and what is thrown away

The history list returns your latest twenty, newest first, and reopening one shows it exactly as saved - nothing is recalculated, so a later engine correction does not rewrite an old answer. Deleting your account removes every stored question with the rest of your data, as the DPDP page describes; the Privacy page lists the use of your birth coordinates as a stand-in for where you are.

Verse by verse: what the code takes from each chapter

The feature page lists which chapters are read. Below, each implemented chapter is set out sloka by sloka against the code, including the verses that sit beside the implemented ones and are not used. Quotations are short and from the translation in this app's source library; the numbering is that translation's own, which in Chapter 2 runs two numbers per verse.

Chapter 3, Gains and Losses

The engine scores both halves of the two verses it uses. Its own comment explains why: an earlier version printed the "does not" halves as reasons but added nothing for them, so the score could only rise and Testing could never appear. Now a malefic in a gain house costs the same point a benefic there earns, and a movable rising sign costs the point a fixed one earns. The consequence is large, and it is the single biggest change in how this question type behaves; the year-long counts further down show it.

Chapter 4, Travel

Two choices in that table are the engine's, not the text's, and both are stated in the code. A dual sign is not split into halves, because the verse does not settle which half acts like which, and guessing would decide a third of all charts. And the verdict counts rules rather than letting the last one decide. Counting has a visible side-effect: one signal for and three against still reads Mixed signals, exactly as one for and one against does. The verdict word does not weigh the counts; the reason lines do.

Chapter 9, Lost articles - the recovery verses

Chapter 15 and the general score

Chapter 15, Sl. 2 states the rule the general score is built on: the Sun, Saturn and Mars spoil the house they occupy except the 3rd and 11th, the Sun and Mars do not spoil the 10th, and benefics make every house flourish except the 6th. Sl. 3-5 and 6-9 then go house by house, and Sl. 9 closes the pattern: malefics outside the upachaya houses give results opposite to benefics there.

Sl. 10 adds three qualifications that the score does not use. A malefic "happily posited" in the ascendant is praiseworthy; an afflicted benefic is not good there; and a retrograde planet is not good in an angle. The last would bear on every chart, because the engine marks Rahu and Ketu retrograde by convention and they always occupy two opposite houses, so whenever the nodes fall in the 1st and 7th or the 4th and 10th, the verse would apply. The engine scores the nodes by house only.

Chapter 2: the combinations that are not scored

Chapter 2 holds a second, independent set of general rules. Sl. 2 says a house flourishes when its own lord occupies or aspects it, and when benefics stand 2nd, 4th, 7th, 10th or 12th from it. Sl. 20-21 favour a Shirshodaya or benefic sign rising, and benefics in angles and trines with malefics confined to the 3rd, 6th and 11th. Sl. 23-24 name Gemini, Virgo, Libra and Aquarius as human signs and read a human sign rising as good; Sl. 26 reads benefic aspects on the ascendant and the Moon as good. None of these is scored. They are listed so that a reader comparing an app verdict with a human practitioner's judgment can see how much the practitioner has to work with that the app leaves aside.

Benefic, malefic and upachaya in BPHS and Saravali

Every Prashna rule above rests on two lists the Daivajna Vallabha takes for granted: which planets are benefic, and which houses are upachaya. The engine uses fixed lists - Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and the Moon as benefics; the Sun, Mars, Saturn, Rahu and Ketu as malefics; the 3rd, 6th, 10th and 11th as upachaya. The natal texts in this library support those lists, with conditions the engine does not apply.

• BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 11 names the Sun, Saturn, Mars, the decreasing Moon, Rahu and Ketu as malefics and the rest as benefics, adding that Mercury becomes malefic when joined with a malefic.
• BPHS Ch. 34 Sl. 8-10, on yoga-causing planets, grades the same idea: Jupiter and Venus are benefics, the Moon is "mediocre", and Mercury is neutral, taking the colour of its company.
• BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 33-36 lists Sahaj, Ari, Karm and Labh - the 3rd, 6th, 10th and 11th houses - as the Upachaya houses. Saravali Ch. 3 Sl. 33 gives the same four and calls the other eight Anupachaya.

The practical gap is the Moon. Both BPHS passages make the Moon's good nature depend on its phase, and the Daivajna Vallabha itself keeps asking for a "full Moon" in the lost-article verses and warns against a weak Moon in the ascendant (Ch. 2, Sl. 24). The engine counts the Moon as a full benefic in every phase and in every sign, including its debilitation. On the sample day the Moon was in Scorpio, its sign of fall, and in the Cancer-rising span the Moon was at once the debilitated lord of the ascendant - scored -2 as Dina - and a benefic in the 5th, scored +1 in the general reading and +1 as a gain-producing placement. Both lines are printed; neither cancels the other in the text, and neither should be read alone.

One moment, five question types

At 09:00 IST on 15 October 2026, the chart cast at Bengaluru coordinates had Scorpio rising at 6.79° in Anuradha, with the Moon also in Scorpio, in Jyeshtha. These are the placements every rule set reads from.

The same chart, put through each of the five rule sets, gives five different kinds of answer.

General yes/no: +1

Four benefics outside the 6th - Jupiter in the 9th, Venus and Mercury in the 12th, the Moon in the 1st - add 4. The Sun in the 11th and Ketu in the 10th are malefics in upachaya houses: +2. Mars in the 9th, Saturn in the 5th and Rahu in the 4th are malefics elsewhere: -3. The lord of Scorpio is Mars, debilitated in Cancer, so the first line printed names the Dina state and the lord costs 2. Four plus two, minus three, minus two: +1, inside the -1 to +1 band that reads Mixed signals. Chapter 15 would have qualified two of those lines - Rahu, retrograde by convention, sits in an angle (Sl. 10), and the Moon in the ascendant is in its fall, not the full Moon the text prefers - but the score takes them at face value.

Money, gains & opportunity: -1

No benefic stands in the 3rd, 5th, 7th or 11th. Two malefics do - the Sun in the 11th and Saturn in the 5th - and each costs a point under the second half of Sl. 1. Scorpio is a fixed sign, worth one point under Sl. 5. The total is -1: Testing. Notice what the reasons say against what the verdict implies. The positive line is about status or a post; the two negative lines are about a desired result not arriving through the gain houses. A reader asking about a salary negotiation and one asking about a promotion would weigh those three lines differently, and the verdict word cannot.

Travel: one for, three against

Scorpio, fixed, counts against (Sl. 1). Mercury and Venus in the 12th each count against (Sl. 4). The Sun in the 11th counts for (Sl. 4). Venus is the lord of the 7th from Scorpio and is retrograde, so the Sl. 10 note about a person away from home returning is printed and not counted. One for and three against is Mixed signals - the same word a one-to-one chart would get. Here the lines lean clearly towards a journey not going ahead or being cut short.

Lost & found: two for

The Moon in the ascendant is a benefic in the 1st (Sl. 14, 16). Jupiter in the 9th aspects the 1st by its fifth-house aspect (Sl. 11, 16). The one rule against needs both a malefic sign rising and a malefic aspect on it; Scorpio is a malefic's sign, but no malefic aspects the 1st - Rahu in the 4th aspects the 10th, Saturn in the 5th aspects the 7th, 2nd and 11th, Mars in the 9th aspects the 12th, 3rd and 4th, the Sun in the 11th aspects the 5th, Ketu in the 10th aspects the 4th. Two for, none against: Favourable.

Relationship timing: nothing fired

The Moon is in the 1st, which is not one of the five houses Sl. 11 names, so that verse is not tested. Venus in the 12th aspects only the 6th, so Sl. 12 is not tested either. With no signal either way, the engine returns its fourth verdict, which the page prints as "No clear indication" with the note that the chart gives no indication either way. This is a statement about the chart, not about the relationship.

Sixty seconds apart: 10:42 and 10:43

The feature page shows a general question changing word at an ascendant boundary. Here is what one boundary does to all five types at once. At 10:42 IST Scorpio was at 29.95°; at 10:43 Sagittarius had risen, at 0.18°. No planet moved sign in that minute. Every planet moved back one house.

Three of five verdicts changed. In the general reading the lord changed from Mars, debilitated, to Jupiter, exalted in Cancer - from -2 to +2 - and Rahu moved from the 4th into the 3rd, an upachaya house. For gains, Venus and Mercury moved from the 12th into the 11th, two benefics in a gain house, while Sagittarius, a dual sign, contributes nothing. For travel the fixed sign disappeared and the same two planets now count for departure under Sl. 4. Lost & found kept its word but on different grounds: the Moon left the ascendant, Jupiter's aspects from the 8th no longer reach the 1st, and a benefic in the 11th took over.

Nothing in the sky changed between those two minutes except the degree rising in the east. That is the whole sensitivity of Prashna in one table. It also explains why the app takes the server's clock rather than letting you type a time: a time chosen after the fact could be chosen for its answer. To see which sign is rising at a moment you pick, the Lagna calculator gives the ascendant for any date, time and place.

A whole day at Bengaluru, span by span

Stepping the engine one minute at a time through 15 October 2026 and recording every change of verdict in any of the five types produces the table below. Every change that day happened at an ascendant boundary. Within a span nothing moved: the Moon, the fastest planet, stayed in Scorpio all day, and no other planet changed sign.

Several patterns in that day are properties of the rules rather than of the date. Travel follows the modality of the rising sign almost exactly: Cancer, Libra, Capricorn and Aries, the movable signs, never read Testing; Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius and Taurus, the fixed signs, never read Favourable; and the dual signs - Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces - read either No clear indication or whatever the planets in the 11th and 12th decide. Gains is Testing under every movable sign that day, because the movable sign itself costs a point and each time at least one malefic stood in one of the four gain houses.

Relationship timing reads Favourable in six spans, which is far more than its year-long average. The reason is one aspect. Jupiter in Cancer casts its fifth-house aspect onto Scorpio, where the Moon was all day, and no malefic aspected Scorpio. So whenever the rising sign placed Scorpio in the 3rd, 5th, 6th, 7th or 11th house - Virgo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus and Capricorn rising - Sl. 11 fired forward. On a day when the Moon has moved two signs on, the same rising signs give nothing. The answer depends on the day as well as the minute, and both depend on the sky rather than on the person asking.

One span shows how far apart two chapters can pull. In the Libra span the general reading is +6, the highest of the day, while gains reads -3, the lowest: Venus rules Libra and is in its own sign, which lifts the general score, but with Libra rising Rahu sits in the 5th and Ketu in the 11th, two malefics in gain houses on top of the movable-sign point. One sky, two chapters, opposite answers. The planetary hour, which Chapter 15 (Sl. 33) also mentions and the engine does not use, can be looked up on the Hora calculator for the same day.

Rising sign by rising sign: gains and travel through 2026

Because so much hangs on the rising sign, it is useful to see each question type sorted by it. The next table comes from casting the chart for every twentieth minute of calendar 2026 at Bengaluru coordinates - 26,280 moments - and grouping them by the sign rising.

The travel column is close to a restatement of Sl. 1. A fixed sign rising can never read Favourable, because the sign itself counts against and anything in its favour only turns the answer to Mixed signals. A movable sign almost never reads Testing; the 0.8% under Cancer are moments when one of the Sl. 2 planets was retrograde in the ascendant. A dual sign usually reads No clear indication and turns only when a planet stands in the 11th or 12th.

The gains column depends heavily on the year. The fixed-sign rows lean favourable because the sign adds a point; the movable rows lean testing because it subtracts one. But the size of the lean is set by where the slow planets were in 2026. Saturn spent the whole year in Pisces, Rahu in Aquarius and Ketu in Leo; with Libra rising those three land in the 6th, 5th and 11th, two of them in gain houses, which together with the movable sign is why Libra produced no favourable gains reading at all. In another year, with Saturn and the nodes elsewhere, the same row would look different. Treat the column as a picture of 2026, not as a property of Libra.

How often each verdict appears under the current rules

The same 26,280 moments give the overall rate for each question type. These are rates of the rule set applied to the 2026 sky, not rates of anything coming true; the app keeps no record of outcomes.

Three readings of that table matter in use. Gains is now the question type most likely to read Testing, because both halves of its two verses are scored and in 2026 the malefics often sat in gain houses. Travel splits roughly into quarters, and about a fifth of the time the honest answer is that a dual sign gave no indication. Relationship timing has never once read Mixed signals in the year, because its two verses rarely fire together; when anything fires, it is usually a malefic aspect on the house of the Moon. Earlier frequency figures published for this tool were produced before the gains and travel rules were corrected and before No clear indication existed as a separate verdict, which is why they differ.

Reading Mixed signals and No clear indication

Mixed signals means two different things depending on the type. For general yes/no and gains it is a score that landed in the middle band, and it may rest on many lines or very few. For travel, lost & found and relationship timing it means at least one rule fired each way, with no weighting - one against three is still Mixed. In every case the reasons below the word are the fuller answer. If a dated question is what you actually have - when to sign, when to set out - a chart of the moment is the wrong instrument; the Muhurat calculator and Muhurat feature look ahead for a window instead, and Decisions answers should-I questions from your own birth chart.

Why is there no form on this calculator page?

Because the tool needs two things a public page does not have: coordinates saved with an account, and a place to keep your question history. The calculator registry marks Prashna as account-only with no public endpoint, so the page shows a description instead of a form that would always fail. Create an account through onboarding and the Prashna page in the app does the casting.

My travel reading listed three lines against the journey and one for it, yet said Mixed signals. Is that a mistake?

No; it is how the verdict is defined. For travel, lost & found and relationship timing the engine counts rules for and against, and any chart with at least one of each reads Mixed signals, whatever the ratio. The 09:00 sample above is exactly that case. The counts are not shown, so read the reason lines and see which way most of them point.

Can a money question come back as Testing?

Yes, under the current rules, and in 2026 it was the most common answer for that type: 45.4% of sampled moments. A malefic in the 3rd, 5th, 7th or 11th costs a point and a movable sign rising costs a point, matching the "do not yield" and "does not happen" halves of Chapter 3, Sl. 1 and 5. An earlier version of the engine scored only the positive halves, so readings saved before that correction may say otherwise; saved readings are never recalculated.

What does "No clear indication" mean?

That none of the rules the chosen type reads applied to the chart at all. It is a separate verdict from Mixed signals, which needs rules pointing both ways. It is the usual result for relationship timing (70% of 2026 moments) and common for travel when a dual sign is rising.

Does the engine use the phase of the Moon?

No. The Moon is always a benefic in these rules, in every phase and in every sign, even when it is debilitated. BPHS (Ch. 3, Sl. 11) treats a decreasing Moon as a malefic, and several lost-article verses ask specifically for a full Moon, so a reading that leans on the Moon as a benefic deserves a check against the Moon phase calculator for that date.

Is my question kept after I get an answer?

Yes. The question text, the type, the verdict, the reason lines, the ascendant and Moon signs and nakshatras, and the time are stored with your account; the planet positions and the score are not. Account deletion removes all of it, as the DPDP page explains.