D16 Shodashamsa Chart: The Sixteen Parts of a Sign

Twelve does not go evenly into sixteen, so a sign cut into sixteen pieces has to visit some signs twice. The Shodashamsha handles that leftover in a tidy way: its starting rule is set up so that the whole chart, read from 0° Aries to the end of Pisces, is a single count of 192 parts with no break anywhere. This page builds the D16 table from the Parashari rule, tests that claim part by part, and lists the arcs where a sign gives back its own name.

The D16 Chart in Astrology (षोडशांश कुंडली)

Shodasha means sixteen, and the Shodashamsha (Shodasamsa, or षोडशांश in Hindi) is the chart of sixteenth parts. Every 30° sign is split into 16 arcs of 1°52′30″. In the Parashari list of sixteen divisional charts it comes 9th, and that list assigns it to “vehicles and comforts”. Some modern Parashari manuals read the D16 beside the 4th house, and the site’s houses table does list “Vehicles” among the 4th house keys, after “Mother's influence”, “Home and property” and “Inner contentment”. That is a correspondence between two lists, not a reading, and the page does not turn it into one. The divisional charts hub sets the D16 beside the other fifteen.

Movable From Aries, Fixed From Leo, Dual From Sagittarius

The start of the count depends only on the sign’s mobility. The movable signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn) begin their first part at Aries; the fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius) begin at Leo; the dual signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) begin at Sagittarius. From there each part steps one sign forward. Because the starting sign is the same for all four signs of a group, the 12 by 16 table has only three different rows, and the grid below gives all of it, one column per group.

Counted from the sign itself, the house of the first part cycles as you go round the zodiac: the 1st for Aries, the 4th for Taurus, the 7th for Gemini, the 10th for Cancer, and then the same four again for the next three signs and the three after that. Only those four houses, the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th, ever hold a sign’s first D16 part.

One Count, Sixteen Times Round the Zodiac

Here is the test. Number all 192 parts of the zodiac from 0° Aries, starting at zero, and ask whether the D16 sign of every part k is the sign k places on from Aries, wrapping after Pisces. The navamsa passes this test, and so does the D16: all 192 parts agree, so the chart is one unbroken chain. Twelve parts make one round of the signs, and 192 parts make sixteen rounds, each 22°30′ of the zodiac long. Four rounds fill exactly 90°, three signs, which is why signs three apart have identical rows.

This is what the starting signs are for. Aries uses up sixteen signs, one full round plus four, and its last part is Cancer. Taurus therefore picks up at Leo, the next sign in the count, and after its own sixteen it stops at Scorpio, so Gemini opens at Sagittarius. In the site’s varga rules the D45 uses the same three starting signs, but with 45 parts to a sign the hand-over does not line up: the first D45 part of Taurus is the 9th sign from the last part of Aries, not the next one. Among the sixteen charts, the ones that pass the chain test, apart from the trivial D1, are the D7, D9, D16, D20 and D27; the D20 Vimshamsa page shows the same hand-over working out with a different remainder.

No Jump at Any Sign Boundary

A consequence worth stating on its own: crossing from the last degrees of one sign into the next, the D16 sign moves just one sign forward, at all twelve boundaries, exactly as it does between two neighbouring parts inside a sign. The D10 is different; there the count breaks at the end of each even sign and resumes several signs away. In the D16 a graha moving forward through the zodiac changes its D16 sign every 1°52′30″, one step at a time, and a sign boundary is just another step.

Own-Sign Parts: 18 in the Whole Table

A sign gets its own name back once or twice. It gets it twice when its count starts on the 1st or the 10th house from itself, because its own name then falls inside the first four parts, and those four come round again 12 parts later. That holds for Aries, Cancer, Leo, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Pisces. The other six signs, whose count starts on their 4th or 7th, meet their own name once. The total is 18 own-sign parts over the twelve signs.

A graha in one of those arcs holds the same sign in the birth chart and the D16. The term for that agreement is vargottama, and in the navamsa every sign has one such arc; the vargottama page sets those out.

Every Sign in Every Row

A run of sixteen signs covers the whole zodiac with four to spare, so no sign is out of reach: every row of the table contains all twelve. The spare four are the first four signs of the row, which come back as parts 13 to 16; that is the last column of the table above. Over the full table, each of the twelve signs turns up exactly sixteen times, an even spread with no sign favoured, which follows from the single chain: sixteen rounds give every sign sixteen turns.

D16 Chart Calculator by Hand: a Worked Degree

Take a graha at 23°10′ Scorpio. By the table: Scorpio is a fixed sign, the degree divided by 1°52′30″ is 12.36, so it sits in part 13 (22°30′–24°22′30″), and the fixed column gives Leo. By the chain: its longitude from 0° Aries is 233.17°, which holds 124 whole parts; taking out 10 rounds of twelve leaves 4, and 4 signs on from Aries is Leo. Both routes agree, and the chain route works for any degree without the table. Done for the lagna and each graha, it gives the D16 chart, with the lagna’s D16 sign as the first house. The navamsa guide covers the same steps for the D9. The free kundli prints the lagna’s degree; the Kundli report prints every graha’s.

Outside the Scope of This Page

Nothing here interprets a D16 placement. The page does not say what a graha or lagna in any D16 sign brings, says nothing about vehicles, homes or comforts in anyone’s life, and gives no timing. It reports the Parashari construction as varga.js encodes it and the counting facts that follow; other schemes for the sixteenth division are not covered. The 4th house guide is a separate page on what the tradition attaches to that house.