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In short
A Cancer Moon and a Pisces Moon score 12 to 26 out of 36 in this app, median 23, across all 81 nakshatra-quarter pairings, in either order. The two water signs share Varna and Vashya and Jupiter counts the Moon a friend, giving Graha Maitri 4, but Pisces is the 9th sign from Cancer, so Bhakoot is 0 and the sign kootas give 7 of 15.
Cancer and Pisces close the circle of water signs: Pisces is the last sign of the zodiac and Cancer the first water sign, nine signs on. Jupiter, lord of Pisces, is exalted in Cancer. In Guna Milan the pair does well at sign level on every count but one, and that one - the trine distance - is a rule this engine changed in October 2026. Tara, unusually, is almost always full. Here is the arithmetic.
Sign pages: Cancer, Karka rashi and Pisces, Meena rashi. The nakshatra matching hub covers the eight kootas, and the Kundli matching calculator scores two real charts.
Kark and Meen in BPHS
BPHS Ch. 4 describes two watery, Sattvic signs that are both strong at night and both, by Sl. 5-5.5, phlegmatic. Kark (Sl. 10-11) is many-footed, bulky, pale-red, forest-dwelling, rising with its back, ruled by Candr. Meen (Sl. 22-24) is footless, "a pair of fish, one tailed with the head of the other", a water-resorter that rises with both head and back, rules the north, "denotes resoluteness", and is ruled by Guru. Kark is movable and Meen dual. Kark is assigned a Varna in the text; Meen is not, and the engine gives it the class of its fellow water signs, the same as Kark's.
Ch. 3 Sl. 49-50 makes Kark the exaltation sign of Guru, the lord of Meen. That is a classical bond between the two signs, but Ashtakoot as the engine implements it reads only natural friendship between lords, not dignity, so the exaltation plays no part in the scores below.
A Cancer Moon is in Punarvasu (one quarter), Pushya or Ashlesha. A Pisces Moon is in Purva Bhadrapada (one quarter), Uttara Bhadrapada or Revati.
The kootas the two signs fix: 7 of 15
| Koota | Out of | Cancer with Pisces | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Varna | 1 | 1 | Same class; the same in either order |
| Vashya | 2 | 2 | Same Vashya group |
| Graha Maitri | 5 | 4 | Jupiter lists the Moon as a friend; the Moon is neutral to Jupiter |
| Bhakoot | 7 | 0 | Pisces is 9th from Cancer; Cancer 5th from Pisces |
Graha Maitri (the koota) is 4. In the BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 55 relationships stored in the engine, Jupiter counts the Moon a friend, while the Moon's friends are only the Sun and Mercury, leaving Jupiter neutral. Friend-neutral scores 4 in all four of the engine's references.
Varna (the koota) and Vashya (the koota) are full. With both signs in one class, the engine's order-dependent Varna comparison passes either way, so this pair gives one total regardless of who is entered first. Varna is the name of a koota here and nothing more.
Bhakoot: the trine that now scores 0
Bhakoot (the koota) counts Pisces as the 9th sign from Cancer and Cancer as the 5th from Pisces. Until October 2026 this engine scored 5/9 as 7. It now scores 0, because two references ([A], [B] in its header) agree that 5/9 belongs among the zero distances with 2/12 and 6/8. The header is explicit that no book in this app's library contains the rule and that other descriptions differ. Other software may therefore show this pair 7 points higher. The zero is usually called Bhakoot dosha.
The kootas the nakshatras decide
- Tara is 3 in 73 of 81 pairings and 1.5 in the other 8 - nearly always full.
- Nadi is 0 in 33 and 8 in 48. Each Cancer star has a Nadi partner in Pisces: Punarvasu with Purva Bhadrapada (Aadi), Pushya with Uttara Bhadrapada (Madhya), Ashlesha with Revati (Antya). Since Pushya, Ashlesha, Uttara Bhadrapada and Revati each hold four quarters, two of those partnerships cover many pairings.
- Gana is 6 in 20, 3 in 45, 0 in 16. Revati is Deva, so it matches Punarvasu and Pushya fully and clashes with Rakshasa Ashlesha. The two Bhadrapadas are Manushya, giving 3 against every Cancer star.
- Yoni is 2 in every pairing: Cat and Sheep against Lion, Cow and Elephant, with no shared animal and no enemy pair.
Revati is the decisive Pisces star. Against Pushya it gives full Gana and a different Nadi - the best combination in the pair. Against Ashlesha it gives neither: Deva against Rakshasa, and both Antya. Uttara Bhadrapada is steadier, giving 3 for Gana against every Cancer star, but it shares Pushya's Madhya nadi. So a Pushya Moon does best with Revati and worst with Uttara Bhadrapada, and an Ashlesha Moon the reverse.
That mirror pattern explains the shape of the distribution: two large groups of pairings, one losing Nadi and one keeping it, with Gana adding 0, 3 or 6 on top. Tara, being almost always 3, barely moves anything, and Yoni, fixed at 2, moves nothing at all. Two kootas, in effect, decide the whole spread.
The range of totals
Across all 81 pairings the total runs from 12 to 26 out of 36, median 23, identical in either order. The 7 sign points and a near-constant 3 from Tara give most pairings a base of about 12, and the rest depends on whether Nadi and Gana are kept.
In the same engine, Cancer with Scorpio, the other water trine, runs 10.5 to 26, median 20. Both lose Bhakoot to the 5/9 rule; Pisces edges ahead because it has no Rakshasa star at all, so Gana falls to 0 only when Cancer's own Rakshasa star, Ashlesha, meets Deva Revati. Scorpio, with two Rakshasa stars of its own, produces Deva-Rakshasa clashes against both Punarvasu and Pushya, which is where most of its lower totals come from. Cancer with Cancer, at distance 1, runs 28 to 34 - most of that gap is the single Bhakoot rule.
For a real couple, the stars decide where in the range they fall; that needs both birth times. The nakshatra calculator finds them, and Moon sign and nakshatra explains why.
Worked example: Cancer 1 degree with Pisces 1 degree
A Moon at 1 degree of Cancer is in Punarvasu; a Moon at 1 degree of Pisces is in Purva Bhadrapada. Each sits in the single quarter its sign takes from a star that lies mostly in the previous sign:
| Koota | Score | Out of | What decided it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Varna | 1 | 1 | Sign: same class |
| Vashya | 2 | 2 | Sign: same group |
| Tara | 3 | 3 | Nakshatra: counts 19 and 10, both favourable |
| Yoni | 2 | 4 | Nakshatra: Cat and Lion |
| Graha Maitri | 4 | 5 | Sign: Moon neutral, Jupiter friendly |
| Gana | 3 | 6 | Nakshatra: Deva with Manushya |
| Bhakoot | 0 | 7 | Sign: 9/5 |
| Nadi | 0 | 8 | Nakshatra: Aadi with Aadi |
| Total | 15 | 36 |
At 15 the example sits eight points under the median, and the reason is a single koota: Punarvasu and Purva Bhadrapada share the Aadi nadi. This is the rarest of the three shared-Nadi combinations, since each star contributes only one quarter, but it is the one a 1-degree example lands on. Move the Pisces Moon a few degrees into Uttara Bhadrapada and Nadi becomes 8 (Aadi against Madhya) with Gana unchanged.
What the classical texts say
BPHS supplies the sign class shared by the two water signs (Ch. 4) and Jupiter's friendship towards the Moon (Ch. 3 Sl. 55). It does not contain the Ashtakoot points or the Bhakoot rule, and nor do Saravali, the Bhrigu Sutras, Daivajna Vallabha or Advanced Predictive Astrology. None of these books comments on a Cancer Moon matched with a Pisces Moon.
What a score does not tell you
A 12 or a 26 describes how two Moon positions meet a convention whose handling of this very distance changed this year. It does not describe a couple, and this app does not say whether anyone should marry. Nadi dosha discusses the shared-Nadi result; Mars placement is a separate check, explained in Mangal dosha: what it is and is not. The love compatibility calculator gives a lighter comparison. Related pairs: Cancer and Scorpio, Cancer and Aquarius and Gemini and Pisces.
- What Guna Milan score do a Cancer Moon and a Pisces Moon get?
- 12 to 26 out of 36 in this app, median 23, in either order of entry.
- Why is Bhakoot 0 for two water signs in trine?
- Pisces is the 9th sign from Cancer. Since October 2026 the engine scores 5/9 as 0, following two web references; before that it gave 7.
- Does Jupiter's exaltation in Cancer raise the score?
- No. Graha Maitri reads only natural friendship between the lords. Jupiter counts the Moon a friend and the Moon counts Jupiter neutral, which gives 4.
- Which star pairing does best?
- A Pushya Moon with a Revati Moon: both Deva, so Gana is full, and in different Nadis, so Nadi is full too.
- How do we find our actual score?
- Enter both births in the match tool; the order of entry does not matter for this pair.
Kundli Matching (Guna Milan)
The classical Ashtakoot score out of 36, computed from two birth dates.
This one has its own page
This one runs on its own page, built for it, where the full result is laid out properly. No account is needed there either.