Bhava Chalit Chart vs Lagna Chart: Madhya, Sandhi and Which Grahas Shift

A kundli printout can carry two wheels that look almost the same: the lagna chart and, beside it, a bhava chalit chart in which one or two grahas have slid into a neighbouring house. Nothing about the sky differs between them. They are two ways of drawing the house boundaries over the same positions, and in the equal-bhava version of the chalit chart the whole difference comes down to one number, the degree of the lagna within its sign. This page works out what that number does.

Bhava Chalit Chart Meaning (भाव चलित कुंडली)

Chalit means moved or shifted, and the chalit chart is the house chart with its boundaries moved off the sign lines. In the lagna chart, the one every table on this site’s houses pages uses, the whole sign holding the lagna is the 1st house, the next sign the 2nd, and so on, thirty degrees to a house with the edges on the sign boundaries. The chalit chart keeps the twelve signs where they are and redraws the twelve houses around the lagna’s exact degree instead. More than one scheme for doing that is in use. The one computed here is the equal-bhava scheme, in which every house is still thirty degrees wide and only its position shifts.

Bhava Madhya and Bhava Sandhi in the Equal Scheme

The madhya is the middle of a bhava, and in this scheme the lagna’s degree is the madhya of the 1st. Each later madhya lies thirty degrees further on, so all twelve sit at the same degree of successive signs. A bhava then stretches 15° back and 15° forward from its madhya, and the point where one bhava hands over to the next is the sandhi, the junction. Since every madhya shares the lagna’s degree, every sandhi shares one degree too: 15° past the lagna degree when the lagna is in the first half of its sign, 15° short of it when the lagna is in the second half.

A graha sitting exactly on a sandhi has to be put somewhere. The convention used on this page is that a bhava runs from its opening sandhi up to, but not including, the next one, so a graha on the junction counts in the bhava that begins there. Another convention could just as well put it in the bhava that ends there; the choice matters only for a graha at the exact junction.

Bhava Madhya Calculation for an Example Lagna

Take a lagna at 22°10′ Taurus, a made-up figure chosen for illustration. Its degree, 22°10′, is past the middle of the sign, so each sandhi falls at 22°10′ − 15° = 7°10′ of a sign. Each bhava begins at 7°10′ of the sign that heads the same-numbered house in the lagna chart, has its madhya at 22°10′ of that sign, and ends at 7°10′ of the next:

Every madhya lands in the sign of the same-numbered house of the lagna chart. That is true for any lagna degree, not only this one, and it is why the sign heading each house does not change when the chart is redrawn: in this scheme the 4th bhava is still centred on the sign of the 4th house. What the redrawing changes is the slice of each sign that gets handed to a neighbour.

The Rule for Which House a Graha Is In

Let d be the lagna’s degree within its sign and x a graha’s degree within its own sign, and say the graha’s sign is k signs on from the lagna sign, which makes it the house k+1 in the lagna chart. Compare x with d:

• x − d from −15° up to just under +15°: the equal bhava is k+1, the same house as in the lagna chart.
• x more than 15° below d: the bhava is k, one house back (back from the 1st is the 12th).
• x at 15° or more above d: the bhava is k+2, one house forward (forward from the 12th is the 1st).

The rule was checked on this page against direct arithmetic on longitudes for every lagna degree and graha degree on a quarter-degree grid in all twelve signs, with no disagreement. It is all a bhava chalit calculator does in the equal scheme; the inputs are the degrees, and the Kundli report prints the degree of the lagna and of every graha, while the free kundli prints the lagna degree alone.

Lagna Below 15°, Grahas Can Only Move Forward; Above 15°, Only Back

The rule has a consequence that holds for a whole chart at once. A degree within a sign runs from 0° to just under 30°. If the lagna degree is under 15°, x can never be more than 15° below it, so no graha can move back; the only possible move is forward, for grahas late in their signs. If the lagna degree is over 15°, x can never reach 15° above it, so no graha can move forward; the only move is back, for grahas early in their signs. At exactly 15° the sandhis sit on the sign boundaries, the equal bhavas coincide with the signs, and the two charts are identical. The share of each sign that ends up in a different bhava from its own house is |d − 15| ÷ 30:

Each share was also measured on this page by stepping through a sign a thousandth of a degree at a time, and it matches the formula. The figures describe arcs of the zodiac, not how many people see a graha move: at a lagna of 0° or near 29° close to half of every sign changes house, while near the middle of the sign almost nothing does.

A Worked Example Chart (Not Anyone’s)

Keep the made-up lagna at 22°10′ Taurus and place five grahas at degrees chosen for the arithmetic:

The lagna is past 15°, so any change has to be a step back, and three of the five take one. The Sun at 4°20′ Leo is in the 4th house of the lagna chart but falls before the 7°10′ sandhi, so the chalit chart counts it in the 3rd. The Moon at 3°40′ Taurus shares the lagna’s sign, yet it is far enough behind the lagna degree to drop into the 12th bhava. Mars at 6°30′ Scorpio falls 0°40′ short of the sandhi and goes from the 7th to the 6th. Jupiter at 8°15′ Cancer is only 1°05′ past the sandhi and stays in the 3rd; Saturn, at 21°05′ Aquarius, is nowhere near one and stays in the 10th.

Two things stand out. The 3rd bhava here runs from 7°10′ Cancer to 7°10′ Leo, across parts of two signs, so the Sun and Jupiter share it while sitting in different signs. And Mars and Jupiter show how fine the margins can be: a small error in the recorded birth time moves the lagna degree, every sandhi moves with it by the same amount, and a graha within a degree or so of a sandhi can change bhava when it does.

What Changes Between the Two Charts, and What Stays

The sign of every graha is the same in both charts. Mars in the example is in Scorpio in the lagna chart and in Scorpio in the chalit chart, so anything read from the sign, including which graha owns it, is untouched. If a bhava’s lord is taken as the lord of the sign its madhya falls in, house lordship is untouched as well in this scheme, because each madhya sits in the sign of the same-numbered house. What moves is the house a graha is counted in, and so any reading that runs through house placement can come out differently. In the houses table the 6th House is classed as a dusthana and the 7th House is not, so a Mars that moves from the 7th to the 6th, as in the example, changes which side of that line it falls on; the dusthana houses page sets out that group. The 3rd is an upachaya house there and the 4th is not, so the example Sun’s move from the 4th to the 3rd crosses into the group the upachaya houses page covers. The page does not say what either move means.

The Sripati Method, the Other Scheme Software Prints

The other scheme found on Indian chalit printouts is the Sripati method. It starts from two points, the lagna and the meridian degree, and divides each of the four quadrants marked out by those points and their opposites into three, which gives bhavas of unequal width. The method is named here so that a reader comparing printouts knows why two chalit charts for the same birth can disagree; it is not computed on this page, and none of the figures above apply to it.

Which chart to read house placements from is a question on which practitioners differ. Some read placements from the lagna chart, some from the chalit chart, some compare the two, and those who use a chalit chart do not all use the same scheme. This page takes no side. The rashi and lagna page explains the starting point both charts share, and the bhavat bhavam page works through the whole-sign house counting the rest of the site uses.

Where This Page Stops

It does not say that either chart is the correct one, and it gives no meaning for any graha in any bhava under either scheme. It prints no figures for the Sripati method or any other unequal division of the houses. The example chart belongs to nobody; its degrees were picked so the rule could be seen working in both directions of the margin. And no reading of a life, a relationship or a body is drawn from the fact that a graha changes house. In Hindi: भाव चलित कुंडली और लग्न कुंडली: भाव मध्य, संधि, बदलाव.