D60 Shashtiamsa Chart: Meaning, Half-Degree Rule, Birth Time

Take the degree of a graha inside its sign, double it, and drop the fraction. Count that many signs forward from the graha’s own sign, going round again past Pisces as often as needed, and you have its D60 sign. That one line is the whole of the shashtiamsha in the Parashari scheme, and the rest of this page shows why it works, how to use it, and why the hard part of a D60 is the birth time rather than the arithmetic.

D60 Chart Meaning (षष्ट्यंश)

Shashti is sixty and amsha a share, so the shashtiamsha (षष्ट्यंश in Hindi) is the chart of sixtieth parts. Each 30° sign is divided into 60 parts of 0°30′, half a degree each. It is the 16th and last of the sixteen charts in the Parashari list, and the finest: no other divisional chart there cuts a sign smaller. That list gives it the entry “all matters, read together”, the same entry it gives the D45, rather than a single area of life such as the spouse for the navamsa (D9). The shodashvarga guide sets the sixteen side by side.

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra goes further than numbering the parts: it gives each of the sixty shashtiamsha divisions a name of its own. Those names are not printed here. The site’s own data does not hold that list, and a list of sixty names written from memory could not be checked against anything the page computes.

Why the Rule Is So Short

The first D60 part of every sign is that sign itself, and each later part is the next sign on. Nothing depends on whether the sign is odd or even, movable or fixed. Among the sixteen, only the D12 (dwadashamsha) follows the same rule, apart from the trivial D1. The difference is scale: the D12’s twelve parts go round the zodiac once, while the D60’s sixty go round five times. Because part number p (counting from zero) lands p signs on, and there are two parts to a degree, the number of signs to count is the doubled degree with the fraction dropped. Every twelfth part the count comes back to the starting sign, so it is the remainder after dividing by twelve that decides the sign.

The Lookup: Twelve Counts, Five Arcs Each

A full D60 table would be twelve rows of sixty. It is not needed, because every sign follows the same count. Find the degree in the right-hand column; the left-hand column says which sign it gives, counted from the graha’s own sign (the 1st is the sign itself, the 2nd the sign after it, and so on).

The table repeats every 6°: the arcs in any row are 6° apart, because twelve half-degree parts make six degrees.

Two Worked Examples

• A graha at 17°42′ of Taurus: the degree is 17.70, doubled 35.40, so 35 signs to count, which leaves 11 after taking out two circuits of twelve. 11 signs on from Taurus is Aries, the 12th from Taurus, in the part numbered 36.
• A graha at 6°10′ of Leo: the degree is 6.17, doubled 12.33, so 12 signs to count, exactly one circuit of twelve with nothing over. Counting nothing forward stays on Leo, so the D60 sign is Leo itself.

Five Own-Sign Arcs in Every Sign

The first row of the lookup is where a graha’s D60 sign is its rashi sign. There are five such parts in every sign, numbered 1, 13, 25, 37 and 49, and they sit at the same degrees in all twelve signs: 0°00′–0°30′, 6°00′–6°30′, 12°00′–12°30′, 18°00′–18°30′ and 24°00′–24°30′. Compare the navamsa, where each sign has one such arc of 3°20′, set out on the vargottama page; in the D60 the five arcs together cover 2°30′ of each sign, but in pieces of half a degree.

About Two Minutes a Part, on Average

The arithmetic is easy; the input is not. The lagna, the degree on the eastern horizon, crosses all 360° of the zodiac once a day, which is 720 D60 parts. If the lagna moved through every degree at the same pace, it would spend 2 minutes in each part. The table puts that average beside the same figure for coarser charts.

Real rising times are uneven from sign to sign and change with the latitude of the birthplace, so an actual D60 part can be shorter or longer than that average. Even on the average, a birth time written to the nearest quarter of an hour spans 7.5 D60 parts, and so leaves the D60 lagna open across several signs. A D60 lagna asks for a birth time far more exact than one rounded to the quarter hour. The D60 positions of the grahas are much less sensitive to the birth time than the D60 lagna, because every graha moves through the zodiac far more slowly than the rising degree. For how the lagna differs from the Moon’s sign, see rashi and lagna.

Past-Life Readings

Some later commentators read the D60 in terms of karma carried over from earlier lives. The page reports that this reading exists and does not make it: nothing in the half-degree arithmetic above says anything about a past life, and no D60 sign here is given a meaning.

What This Page Does Not Do

It gives no analysis of anyone’s D60, no strength or score for a D60 sign, no time of day for the lagna to enter any sign or part, and no method for correcting a birth time. It reports the Parashari construction and the arithmetic it implies. The Kundli report gives each graha’s degree to the minute of arc; doubling it and counting through the lookup above gives the D60 sign, and the D60 lagna is only as reliable as the birth time behind it.