Ashtakavarga

Enter your birth details to see your Ashtakavarga: the bindus (benefic points) each graha gives to every sign, the Sarvashtakavarga total for each house, which houses are strong or weak, how well each graha is placed, and how today's transits score. Every bindu can be traced to the graha that gave it.

What Ashtakavarga is

Ashtakavarga ("eight-fold division") is a scoring system described in Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra. For each of the seven grahas from the Sun to Saturn, eight contributors are considered: the seven grahas and the Lagna. Each contributor gives one bindu to certain signs, counted from its own position in the birth chart. Adding them up gives the graha's Bhinnashtakavarga: a score from 0 to 8 for every sign.

The seven Bhinnashtakavargas always have the same totals: Sun 48, Moon 49, Mars 39, Mercury 54, Jupiter 56, Venus 52 and Saturn 39. Added together they make the Sarvashtakavarga, which always totals 337. The page checks this total for you.

Reading the scores

With 337 bindus over 12 signs, the average is about 28. A house with 28 or more in the Sarvashtakavarga is usually read as strong, 25 to 27 as average, and fewer than 25 as weak. In a graha's own Bhinnashtakavarga, 4 is the middle: 5 or more bindus in the sign it occupies supports it, and 3 or fewer weakens it.

The same numbers are used for transits. When a graha moves through a sign where it has 4 or more bindus in its own Bhinnashtakavarga, the transit is traditionally read as favourable. The transits page shows this for every graha.

Prastarakavarga

The Prastarakavarga is the working table behind each score. It shows, contributor by contributor, which signs received a bindu, so you can check any number by hand against the classical table.

Limits

The scores are the raw bindus. Classical texts go on to apply reductions (trikona and ekadhipatya shodhana) and to compute further values from them, which this page does not do. Rahu and Ketu are not part of the classical scheme. The positions come from the same engine as the Kundli; see the method page.