Avakhada Chakra: What Each Line of Your Kundli Means

Near the front of most printed janam kundlis, before the charts, there is a box of short labels: varna, vashya, yoni, gan, nadi, tatva, naam akshar and a few more. In Hindi printouts it is headed avakhada chakra (अवकहड़ा चक्र), also spelt avakahada. People who have just been handed a kundli ask what the words mean, “kundli me gan kya hota hai” or “yoni ka matlab”, and the more useful answer is where each one comes from. Almost all of them come from a single point in the chart, and once that is clear the box is a lookup rather than a mystery.

Avakhada Chakra Kya Hota Hai

It is a summary of the birth Moon, classified in the ways the matching tradition classifies it. The Moon at birth stands in one of 27 nakshatras, and each nakshatra has four padas, or charans, so there are 108 possible positions. A pada sits wholly inside one rashi, because a pada is 3°20′ and none crosses a sign line. So the pada fixes the nakshatra and the rashi together, and from those two the box’s lines follow by table:

The lines that do not come from the Moon are the ones that need the birth time or the Sun as well: the lagna, the tithi, yoga and karana of the birth day, and paya, which in the convention the site’s paya page follows is the Moon counted from the lagna. Some printouts also carry lines called yunja and hansak; the site’s tables do not hold them, so this page leaves them out rather than guess.

Worked Example: Rohini, Second Pada

Take a Moon in Rohini (रोहिणी), second pada. This is an example position, not anyone’s chart. Each line of the box reads off as follows:

• Rashi: Taurus (Vrishabha, वृषभ), because the pada lies inside it; rashi swami Venus.
• Nakshatra swami: Moon.
• Naam akshar: Va, the syllable of the second pada. The four padas of Rohini give O, Va, Vee, Vu in order, which is why two children born under the same nakshatra can be given names beginning differently.
• Gan: Manushya (मनुष्य). Yoni: Serpent (सर्प), male. Nadi: Antya (अन्त्य).
• Tatva: Earth (पृथ्वी), the element of Taurus. Varna: Vaishya (वैश्य), which the matching tables assign by that element. Vashya: Chatushpada (चतुष्पद).

All four padas of Rohini lie in Taurus, so a Moon anywhere in the nakshatra gets the same box except for the naam akshar. That is not true of every nakshatra, which is the subject of a section below.

The Twelve Rashis: Swami, Tatva, Varna, Vashya

Tatva and varna move together because both follow the element: every water rashi carries the same varna, every fire rashi another, and so on. Vashya is the one line here that ignores the element, sorting the rashis instead into human (manav), four-footed (chatushpada), water-dwelling (jalachar), wild (vanachar) and insect (keet) groups, and it is the only line that splits a rashi in half.

The 27 Nakshatras: Swami, Gan, Yoni, Nadi, Naam Akshar

The site’s nakshatra table pairs each nadi with a dosha name: Adi with Vata, Madhya with Pitta, Antya with Kapha. In the avakhada box they are matching labels, and the box gives no medical reading of anyone. The yoni column gives the animal with its sex because the Yoni koota uses both.

Where the Nakshatra Alone Is Not Enough

A sign is 30° and a nakshatra 13°20′, so most sign lines fall inside a nakshatra. Nine of the 27 straddle two rashis: Krittika, Mrigashira, Punarvasu, Uttara Phalguni, Chitra, Vishakha, Uttara Ashadha, Dhanishta, Purva Bhadrapada. For a Moon in any of them the nakshatra fixes gan, yoni and nadi, but not the rashi, so it does not fix the rashi swami, tatva or varna either. Krittika shows it: its first pada is in Aries, with Mars as swami, fire as tatva and Kshatriya as varna, while its other three padas are in Taurus, with Venus, earth and Vaishya. Its vashya happens to be Chatushpada on both sides. A kundli that prints a nakshatra without the pada leaves these lines undecided for those nine nakshatras.

Vashya adds one more wrinkle. Sagittarius and Capricorn change vashya group at 15°, and two padas run across that point: Purva Ashadha pada 1 and Shravana pada 2. For a Moon in either, the pada does not settle the vashya, and only the Moon’s degree does. The table above therefore gives those two rashis as two halves. Software that prints a single vashya for those padas has made a choice the pada cannot make for it.

Same Box, Many People

Because the box depends on the Moon’s pada, everyone born with the Moon in the same pada has the same avakhada lines, and the Moon spends only about a quarter of a day in each pada. Across all 108 padas, the six classification lines (varna, vashya, yoni, gan, nadi, tatva) take only 39 different forms, counting the two split vashya padas as their own form. The box is a set of labels shared by a great many people; on its own it describes no one.

What the labels are for is matching. Each of the eight kootas of Ashtakoot Guna Milan reads one of these lines, or the nakshatra or rashi they come from, for both people: Varna from varna, Vashya from vashya, Tara from the two nakshatras, Yoni from yoni, Graha Maitri from the two rashi swamis, Gana from gan, Bhakoot from the two rashis and Nadi from nadi. So in practice the box is the input to kundli matching. The guna milan pages take each koota and each value in turn, and the kundli matching tool computes all eight from two birth details.

What the Words Mean, and What They Do Not

• Varna is a four-way grading of the Moon’s rashi by element, used by one koota worth 1 guna of 36. It is a property of a sign. It says nothing about the caste or community of the person whose chart it is, and it should not be read that way.
• Gan sorts the nakshatras into Deva, Manushya and Rakshasa for the Gana koota. A Rakshasa gan on a printout is a matching category, not a statement about anyone’s character.
• Yoni assigns each nakshatra an animal and a sex, so that the Yoni koota can compare two of them.
• Nadi divides the nakshatras into three runs for the Nadi koota, the heaviest of the eight at 8 guna.
• Vashya is the five-group sorting of rashis described above, for the Vashya koota.
• Tatva is the rashi’s element; naam akshar is the syllable the naming custom draws from the pada.

Websites and booklets often attach temperaments to these labels. This page does not, because each label is shared by everyone born while the Moon was in any of the padas that carry it.

Finding Your Own Box

Everything above needs one input, the Moon’s nakshatra and pada at birth. The nakshatra finder computes both from a birth date, time and place, and with them the two tables on this page give every line of the box. Near a pada boundary the birth time matters: the Moon crosses a pada in roughly six hours on average, so a birth time that is off by an hour can move it into the next pada, and a chart made with a different ayanamsa can do the same. If two printouts of your kundli disagree on these lines, a Moon near a pada boundary is the first thing to check. For the symbols elsewhere on the printout, see kundli symbols and abbreviations, and for the order in which a chart is read, how to read your kundli. In Hindi: अवकहड़ा चक्र: कुंडली की हर पंक्ति का अर्थ.