Bharani Nakshatra: Yama's star in Aries, its padas, the Venus dasha and what the texts say

Bharani is the second of the twenty-seven nakshatras. It covers the middle of Aries, from 13 degrees 20 minutes to 26 degrees 40 minutes, and like Ashwini before it, it lies wholly inside that one sign. If your Moon was there at birth, Bharani is your Janma Nakshatra: it fixes the Venus Mahadasha your life began in, the Elephant yoni and Manushya gana you carry into a matching table, and the sub-lord under which your Moon sits. The nakshatra calculator tells you whether your Moon is in Bharani and in which pada.

What follows is what the classical books in this app's corpus say about Bharani, cited to chapter, sloka or page, set beside what this app's engine actually computes for it. The books are Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS), Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara and Advanced Predictive Astrology; all are on the sources page. Bharani is a nakshatra about which the texts say less than about some others, and this page does not fill the silence. For the basic idea of Moon sign and nakshatra, see Moon sign and nakshatra; for the sign around it, Aries, Mesha Rashi.

Where Bharani sits in the zodiac

BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 4-6 counts the 27 nakshatras from Ashvini, and the translator's list that follows puts Bharani second. With each nakshatra 13 degrees 20 minutes wide (Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara, Ch. II, pp. 22-23), Bharani starts where Ashwini ends and ends 3 degrees 20 minutes before the close of Aries. Its four padas of 3 degrees 20 minutes each therefore all lie in Aries, a Mars sign.

Two classical dignity points fall inside Bharani. BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 49-50 gives Saturn's exaltation in Libra at 20 degrees and says each graha's deepest fall is at the same degree of the seventh sign, which puts Saturn's deepest debilitation at Aries 20 degrees: exactly the boundary between Bharani's second and third padas. And Sl. 51-54 limits Mars's Mooltrikona to the first 12 degrees of Aries, so all of Bharani lies in the portion where Aries is simply Mars's own sign. Sl. 59-60 grades the difference: Mooltrikona carries three-quarters of a graha's good effect, its own sign one half.

The Navamsa column can be checked two independent ways. The engine counts from the sign itself for a movable sign like Aries, so Bharani's padas, the 5th to 8th navamsas of Aries, fall in the 5th to 8th signs, Leo to Scorpio. BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 87-88 gives a different-looking rule for the same thing: take the number of nakshatras already passed (one, Ashwini), divide by 3, multiply the remainder by 4 and add the pada; the result is the Navamsa counted from Mesh. For Bharani pada 1 that is 1 x 4 + 1 = 5, Leo, and the other padas follow. Both agree. None of the four padas returns to Aries, so no graha in Bharani is Vargottama; the Navamsa calculator shows where yours fall.

Yama, the triangle and the crow

BPHS gives the deities of the nakshatras inside its chapter on divisional charts. Ch. 6 Sl. 24-26 says the lords of the 27 parts of the Saptavimshamsa are the presiding deities of the 27 nakshatras, and the second name in that list is Yama. That list is what the Saptavimshamsa (D27) calculator uses for each part, counted forward in odd signs and backward in even ones.

Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara (Ch. IV, p. 92) agrees on the deity and supplies the rest of the classical picture. It describes Bharani as three stars in a triangular shape, presided over by Yama. It gives the nakshatra's sex as female, its tatthwa as Prithvi (earth), its region as the North-east, its body part as the soles of the feet, and its emblem as the crow. The entry also assigns a caste, which this page, like the app's engine, does not carry over.

Here the book is internally consistent: its direction table (p. 90) also puts Bharani in the North-eastern regions, and its body-part table (p. 91) also lists the soles. Notice how the body-part assignments run. Krittika is the head and the list descends through the body to Revati at the ankles; Ashwini, the upper feet, and Bharani, the soles, close the list as the 26th and 27th entries even though they are the first two nakshatras. The book does not explain the ordering; it simply begins its table at Krittika.

Bharani in Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara's classifications

Chapter IV of Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara sorts the nakshatras into groups before it describes them one by one. Bharani's memberships are below. They are classical labels, not computations; this app's engine uses none of them.

Two of these are about the kind of action a nakshatra suits. "Ferocious" is one of the book's natures, alongside fixed, movable, light, soft and hot; it introduces the list by saying that during the period of a planet placed in a particular star, effects will be felt according to these characteristics (p. 91). "Looking downwards" is a separate grouping the book gives without explaining its use. Bharani is the only nakshatra in Aries that is both.

The book's yoga list (pp. 28-29) adds one more link. Each of the 27 yogas of the almanac is said to begin at a nakshatra, and the 22nd yoga, Sadhya, begins at Bharani. That is about where a yoga's arc starts on the zodiac by the book's "yoga point" method; it does not transfer the yoga's traits to people born in Bharani. Bharani is not one of the stars that names a lunar month in the book's month table (p. 24).

Two descriptions of a Bharani birth that do not agree

Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara gives each nakshatra a prose description and a translated Sanskrit sloka. For Bharani the two pull in opposite directions, which is worth seeing because it shows how much a single-nakshatra reading depends on which line you quote.

• The prose (pp. 92-93): the person born in this constellation will be successful at work, truthful, free from diseases, able, and free from grief.
• The sloka translation (p. 93): the person becomes notorious and is condemned by people, spends time in various kinds of pleasures, is particularly fond of water-sports, and is fickle-minded.

The book does not reconcile them. It does attach a general condition to the whole chapter: the effects "will fully come to pass only if the moon is powerful" (p. 91). It does not define "powerful" there, and this page does not guess.

This app shows one line for each Janma Nakshatra, taken from the sloka rather than the prose. The engine's NAKSHATRA_TRAITS table in kundaliEngine.js renders Bharani as: you tend to be "pleasure-seeking and fickle-minded, drawn to change and new experiences". The comment above the table explains what was changed on purpose for all 27 entries: the caste label dropped, appearance and spouse predictions dropped, and harsh moral verdicts softened to tendencies. For Bharani, "notorious" and "condemned by people" are the verdicts that were softened. The prose's more favourable reading is not shown anywhere in the app, which is a choice worth knowing about if you compare this page with your chart.

Saravali, which mentions Ashwini, Krittika and Pushya in its Raja Yoga chapter, does not mention Bharani anywhere in the corpus copy. Neither does Bhrigu Sutras. BPHS names it only in its lists and dasha rules. That is the honest extent of the classical material on Bharani in this corpus.

Venus, the lord of Bharani, and the 20-year Mahadasha

BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 12-15 assigns the Vimshottari lords in a repeating cycle of nine that begins at Krittika with the Sun. Running backwards, Bharani is the last nakshatra of the previous cycle and belongs to Venus, the lord with the longest period of all: 20 years out of the 120. The engine's nakshatraSubdivision() returns the same. Venus also rules the matching positions in the next two cycles, Purva Phalguni and Purva Ashadha. For Venus as a graha, see Venus in Vedic astrology.

A Bharani Moon therefore starts life in a Venus Mahadasha, with a balance that depends on how far through Bharani the Moon had travelled. BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 16: multiply the dasha's years by the portion of the nakshatra already crossed, divide by the whole, and subtract from the total.

Because Venus's period is so long, the spread is wide: a Moon at the start of Bharani begins with almost 20 years of Venus, while a Moon near Aries 26 degrees begins with only a few months of it and moves into the Sun's period in childhood. Your own dates are in the Vimshottari Dasha calculator, and the period is described on the Venus Mahadasha page. As BPHS Ch. 48 Sl. 1-8 stresses, what a Venus period brings depends on which houses Venus rules and occupies in your chart, which the nakshatra alone cannot tell you. For how a Mahadasha is subdivided, see what a Mahadasha is.

Venus and Mars: the star lord and the sign lord

A Bharani Moon has two lords: Venus for the nakshatra and Mars for the sign. How those two regard each other is a question the sources answer differently. BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 55 builds natural friendship from each graha's Mooltrikona sign: the lords of the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th, 9th and 12th signs from it, plus the lord of its exaltation sign, are friends, the rest enemies, and a graha that qualifies both ways is neutral. Worked from Libra, Venus's Mooltrikona, Mars rules the 2nd (Scorpio) but also the 7th (Aries), so Mars is neutral to Venus. Worked from Aries, Venus rules the 2nd (Taurus) and the 7th (Libra), so Venus is neutral to Mars.

This app's NATURAL_RELATIONS table in kundaliEngine.js agrees: Venus's friends are Mercury and Saturn, its enemies the Sun and Moon, and Mars is neither; Mars's only listed enemy is Mercury. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara's relationship table (Ch. III, p. 85), built by a method it attributes to Sathyacharya, gives a different answer for one side: it lists Sukra (Venus) among the enemies of Kuja (Mars). The engine follows BPHS here. The disagreement is reported rather than resolved, and it affects only readings that weigh friendship between the two lords; the dasha dates are unchanged either way.

The nine sub-lords inside Bharani

The engine divides Bharani into nine arcs, one per Vimshottari lord, each in proportion to that lord's years. BPHS Ch. 51 Sl. 2 gives the first sub-period of any dasha to the dasha's own lord, so Bharani's first and widest arc is Venus's. These are the boundaries the sub-lord calculator reports.

Saturn's deepest-fall degree, Aries 20, sits inside the Rahu sub, a few minutes before it hands over to Jupiter. The sub-lord arcs are narrow enough that a birth-time error of an hour can move the Moon across one, which is why the app treats them cautiously; see the sub-lord and birth time.

Bharani in the Kala Chakra and the other nakshatra dashas

BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 6-11 says the sages recognised the Kala Chakra Dasha as supreme, and Bharani has a special place in it. Sl. 56-58 places the nakshatras in two charts, Savya and Apsavya, and Bharani falls in the Savya chart. Sl. 65 then names Bharani as the model for a group of five: "In the four Padas of the 5 Nakshatras, Bharani, Pushya, Chitra, Purvashadha and Uttarabhadrapad, Deha and Jiva are the same, as for Bharani." Sl. 66-69 give, for each Bharani pada, a Deha sign, a Jiva sign and the order of nine sign lords whose dashas follow.

Sl. 84 gives the Kala Chakra years for each graha: Sun 5, Moon 21, Mars 7, Mercury 9, Jupiter 10, Venus 16, Saturn 4. Adding those years along each row of the table above produces a neat internal check on the translation. Pada 1's nine lords (Mars, Venus, Mercury, Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter) total 100 years; pada 2's total 85; pada 3's total 83; pada 4's total 86. Sl. 89 independently lists the full years attached to each Navamsa in this system as 100 for Mesh, 85 for Vrishabh, 83 for Mithun and 86 for Kark, "the same for Rasis situated the 5th and 9th to them". Bharani's padas fall in the Navamsas Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio, which are the 5th signs from Mesh, Vrishabh, Mithun and Kark. So the row totals and the Sl. 89 figures agree pada for pada: 100, 85, 83, 86.

The text uses those totals as a span-of-life figure (Sl. 85-86). This page reports the arithmetic because it shows the Bharani rows were transmitted consistently, not to make any statement about anyone's lifespan; this app makes none. For the balance at birth, Sl. 90-91 work the same way as Vimshottari but on the pada rather than the whole nakshatra: the time already elapsed in the birth pada, multiplied by the years of the running dasha and divided by 15 (Sl. 90-91), or by a quarter of the Moon's whole stay in the nakshatra (Sl. 92), gives the expired portion, and the remainder is the balance. The engine builds the Kala Chakra in full from these rows, with that balance at birth, the dated sequence, and Deha and Jiva, alongside Ashtottari and Shastihayani, the other two systems that group nakshatras unevenly.

Ashtottari (Sl. 17-20) puts Bharani in Rahu's group of four nakshatras, a 12-year dasha in that system, and Shastihayani (Sl. 40-41) lists Bharani under Guru, a 10-year dasha there; the app computes both, Shastihayani with a balance and dated periods by the published rule "as in Vimshottari", which comes from outside BPHS (Sanjay Rath), since the sloka itself gives no balance rule. The six remainder systems the engine also builds are shown in the alternate dashas calculator; for a Bharani Moon they start as follows.

Bharani in Ashtakoot matching

Yoni, Gana, Nadi and Tara are the four kootas read from the Moon's nakshatra. The values below were produced by running the engine's ashtakoot() function with a Bharani Moon; the Kundli matching calculator applies them to two people.

The engine's comment on these tables is candid: an audit asked for changes to Gana, Yoni, Nadi and Bhakoot, and they were left as they are because no book in this corpus prints the Ashtakoot rules, so there was nothing to cite a change to. They are the conventional tables. One external check is possible for Nadi. Advanced Predictive Astrology (Vol. II, p. 225) prints a three-column table of "humour producing asterisms", and its Pitta column (Bharani, Mrigasira, Pushyami, P. Phalguni, Chitra, Anuradha, Purvasadha, Dhanishta, Uttara Bhadrapada) is exactly the engine's Madhya Nadi group. The book uses that grouping for health tendencies; it is reported as the book's view, not as medical advice.

Tara deserves a closer look because it is the one koota that is about counting stars rather than looking up a table. The engine counts from one person's nakshatra to the other's, inclusively, then the other way, and treats a count as unfavourable when its remainder after dividing by 9 is 3, 5 or 7. For a Bharani Moon the nine partner stars that score the full 3 points are Ashwini, Bharani itself, Krittika, Magha, Purva Phalguni, Uttara Phalguni, Mula, Purva Ashadha and Uttara Ashadha; every other star scores 1.5. Because the forward and backward counts between two different stars always add to 29, both cannot be unfavourable at once, which is why this engine never gives Tara a 0.

Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara adds a related counting rule of its own (Ch. IV, p. 89): the 22nd nakshatra from one's birth nakshatra is the vainasika nakshatra, to be avoided for auspicious events. Counting Bharani as the first, the 22nd is Dhanishta. This app does not use the vainasika rule anywhere; it is noted so that a reader who meets it elsewhere knows where it comes from.

When Bharani holds a graha other than the Moon

The engine reports a nakshatra and sub-lord for every graha, not only the Moon. Three placements in Bharani meet something specific in BPHS's dignity rules.

• Saturn. Saturn in Aries is debilitated (BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 49-50), and its deepest fall at Aries 20 degrees lies inside Bharani, on the boundary of padas 2 and 3. Sl. 59-60 rates the good effects of a graha in debilitation as nil. A Saturn in Bharani is therefore always debilitated in this app's dignity reading, and most deeply so near the middle of the nakshatra.
• The Sun. All of Aries is the Sun's exaltation sign, so a Sun in Bharani is exalted, though past the deepest point at 10 degrees, which lies in Ashwini. The sidereal Sun enters Aries around 14 April, so it crosses Bharani in late April and early May.
• Mars. Mars in Bharani is in its own sign but outside the Mooltrikona, which ends at Aries 12 degrees. Sl. 59-60 gives own sign one half of a graha's good effect, against three-quarters for Mooltrikona.

Each of these is a statement about dignity in Aries rather than about Bharani as such; the nakshatra adds the lord and sub-lord the sub-lord calculator prints beside each graha. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara also says the body-part table (soles, for Bharani) is useful with the 6th lord in judging where an illness shows; that is reported as the book's claim, not medical advice, and the app does not use it.

Bharani in muhurat

The muhurat finder scores windows partly by the nakshatra the Moon is passing through. Bharani is on none of the engine's six favoured lists (Marriage, Business launch, Property purchase, Travel, New job, Investment), so a window with the Moon in Bharani loses 6 points on that factor and can only score well if tithi, paksha, the Moon's house from your chart, the weekday and your personal day carry it. The engine's lists cite no text, and no book in this corpus gives per-activity lists; the closest classical statement is Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara's labelling of Bharani as ferocious, a nature the same book groups apart from the light, soft and fixed stars. The day's nakshatra is shown in the Panchang.

Checking Bharani in your own chart

A Moon nakshatra needs only the date and a time; the birth place is needed for the Ascendant and houses, not for the Moon's star. The Moon covers Bharani in about a day and a pada in about six hours. This app's Moon longitude is good to roughly 0.1-0.3 degrees (the methodology page gives the figures), so a Moon within a few tenths of a degree of Aries 13 degrees 20 minutes or 26 degrees 40 minutes may honestly be in either neighbour. A different ayanamsa moves all of these boundaries together, the commonest reason for disagreement between apps; see why apps disagree on your nakshatra. The Moon sign calculator shows the sign and nakshatra together.

Bharani between Ashwini and Krittika

Bharani is the middle of the three nakshatras that fill Aries. Before it is Ashwini, the Ketu-ruled Sristi star that opens the zodiac; after it comes Krittika, ruled by the Sun, which crosses from Aries into Taurus and is where BPHS begins its Vimshottari count. In Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara's triple grouping the three run Sristi, Sthithi, Laya, with Bharani as the Sthithi member. In the Kala Chakra, Ashwini and Bharani head the two Savya groups, and Krittika is reckoned with Ashwini. The sign lord for all of Bharani is Mars; see Mars in Vedic astrology.

Which planet rules Bharani nakshatra?

Venus, in the Vimshottari scheme of BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 12-15, with the longest Mahadasha of the nine: 20 years. Its sign lord is Mars, because all of Bharani lies in Aries.

Who is the deity of Bharani?

Yama. BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 24-26 lists Yama as the second of the 27 nakshatra deities, and Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara (Ch. IV, p. 92) names Yama as the presiding deity of Bharani.

What is the symbol of Bharani?

Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara describes three stars in a triangular shape and gives the crow as Bharani's emblem. The engine's Yoni animal for Bharani is the Elephant.

Is any pada of Bharani Vargottama?

No. Its padas fall in the Navamsa signs Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio, none of which is Aries. BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 87-88 gives the same four signs by its own counting rule.

Why do two descriptions of Bharani people contradict each other?

Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara's prose calls the Bharani-born successful, truthful, able and free from grief, while its translated sloka calls them notorious, pleasure-loving and fickle. The book does not reconcile the two. This app's one-line trait follows the sloka in a softened form.

What is the gana, yoni and nadi of Bharani?

In this app's matching engine: Manushya gana, Elephant yoni and Madhya nadi. The engine notes these are conventional tables; no book in the corpus prints them.

Is Bharani good for a muhurat?

It is on none of this app's six favoured activity lists, so it costs a window 6 points on the nakshatra factor. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara classes Bharani as ferocious and downward-looking.

How long is the Venus dasha at birth for a Bharani Moon?

Up to 20 years. The balance is 20 years times the share of Bharani the Moon had still to cross: a Moon 5 degrees into Bharani leaves 12.5 years.