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In short
A karana is the fifth limb of the panchang: half of a tithi, named from a set of eleven, as Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara sets out. BPHS and Saravali name the Bhadra (Vishti) karana among birth circumstances, but this app does not compute karanas. In the Ashtakavarga chapter of BPHS the same word means the inauspicious dot.
What the term means
Karana is one of the five limbs by which a panchang describes a day, beside the vara, tithi, nakshatra and yoga. A karana is half of a tithi, so every tithi has two, and the halves are named from a set of eleven.
Where the term comes from
Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara (Ch. II, pp. 31-32) calls the karana "the fifth 'limb' of the almanac" and glosses the word as "performing" or "doing". It gives eleven karanas, "each belonging to one half of a thithi", with a table for both pakshas. Four are fixed (Sthira): Kimsthughna, Shakuni, Chatushpada and Nagava, which fall around the new Moon. The other seven are movable (Chara), and Bhadra is "also known as Visti". The book says Bhadra and the fixed karanas are "supposed to be unfavourable". BPHS Ch. 85 Sl. 1-4 lists a birth "in Bhadra Karan" among circumstances it calls inauspicious, and Saravali Ch. 35 Sl. 87 names "Vishti (Bhadra) Karana" in a royal yoga built on the Moon in Krittika. A second, unrelated sense appears in BPHS Ch. 66 Sl. 69: in the Ashtakavarga the dot is called Karan, and "Karan is inauspicious, while Sthan is auspicious".
How this app uses it
This app does not compute the karana. The engine's birth panchang gives the tithi, paksha and vara and leaves out the karana and the yoga on purpose, noting that the codebase "has no astronomy for either yet" rather than showing a value it did not compute. The Panchang calculator does not return the day's karana, and muhurat scoring does not consider Bhadra karana. In the Ashtakavarga calculator the word appears only in its other sense, for the dot.
Two words, one spelling
When a page here mentions "karana", check the context. Next to tithi, Bhadra or Vishti it is the panchang limb; next to bindus or Ashtakavarga it is the dot that marks an unsupportive house.
Pages that use this term
- Panchang calculator - names the karana as a limb it does not return.
- Muhurat calculator - lists Bhadra karana among the factors it does not score.
- Ashtakavarga calculator - the dot sense of the word, from BPHS Ch. 66.
- Krittika nakshatra - discusses the Saravali yoga that names Vishti karana.