Digbala: Directional Strength of the Planets by House

Digbala Meaning (दिग्बल)

Digbala, often written dig bala, is the name for directional strength, the strength the site’s tables tie to a house rather than to a sign. The house table describes it as “assigned by direction”. Each of the seven visible grahas has one such house, and the planet table gives Rahu and Ketu none, in its own words “the nodes have no directional strength”.

Only four houses take part, the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th, and they are the four kendras, the angles of the chart. Six grahas share their house with one partner; Saturn alone holds the 7th. The planet table and the house table state the same pairings from opposite sides, and this page checks the two against each other every time it is built.

The chart-point words are the site’s own: the house table places the 10th at the zenith and calls it the southern point, the 4th at the nadir and the northern point, and the 7th exactly opposite the lagna. It gives no compass word for the 1st or the 7th, so none is added here. Only the Sun’s and the Moon’s entries carry a time of day.

The Sun at Noon, the Moon at Midnight

The two luminaries are the entries where digbala is tied to the clock. The planet table puts the Sun’s strongest point “at the zenith, at local noon” and the Moon’s “at the nadir, around local midnight”, the two points the house table gives to the 10th and the 4th. The rising sign is not fixed through a day; it turns as the hours pass, at a speed that depends on where a person is born, which the ascendant calculator works out for any city. So for a birth on a given day, the Sun’s house changes with the birth hour, and the planet table links the Sun’s digbala house to the middle of the day. The table states no hour for the other five.

The Digbala Sign for Each Lagna

With whole-sign houses, a house is a sign once the lagna is known. The grid below gives, for each rising sign, the sign in which each graha would sit in its digbala house. Because the grahas pair up, four columns cover all seven: Mercury and Jupiter need the lagna sign itself, the Moon and Venus the 4th sign from it, Saturn the 7th, and the Sun and Mars the 10th. Each house number in the table above links to that house’s page and the matters the house table lists for it, such as the 7th house.

One cross-reading is worth having. Each graha has a single exaltation sign in the planet table, so for exactly one lagna that sign falls in the graha’s digbala house: the Sun for a Cancer lagna, the Moon for an Aquarius lagna, Mars for an Aries lagna, Mercury for a Virgo lagna, Jupiter for a Cancer lagna, Venus for a Sagittarius lagna and Saturn for an Aries lagna. Two lagnas appear twice: Aries, for Mars in the 10th and Saturn in the 7th, and Cancer, for the Sun in the 10th and Jupiter in the 1st. Exaltation itself, and the dates each graha spends in its exaltation sign, are on the exalted planets page.

Saturn and Jupiter in Their Digbala Signs, to December 2028

For a fixed lagna, a graha is in its digbala house only while it occupies one particular sign. Saturn and Jupiter hold a sign for months at a time, so for them that condition runs in long, datable stretches. Saturn needs the 7th sign from the lagna, Jupiter the lagna sign itself. Read off the ingress tables from 26 October 2026 to 31 December 2028, only four lagnas get any days at all.

Saturn moves between Pisces and Aries in this window, so its digbala lagna swaps between Virgo and Libra: Virgo while Saturn is in Pisces, Libra while it is in Aries. Between them the two lagnas account for every day of the window. The 20 October 2027 move back into Pisces is a retrograde one, as are Jupiter’s returns to Cancer on 25 January 2027 and to Leo on 28 February 2028, which is why some lagnas get two or three separate stretches. Jupiter’s longest total is the Leo lagna’s, about 386 days; a Libra lagna has Jupiter in the 1st only for the last few days of 2028.

For two lagnas both slow grahas meet the condition at once. A Virgo lagna has Saturn in the 7th and Jupiter in the 1st from 26 November 2027 to 23 February 2028, about 89 days. A Libra lagna has the same pairing from 26 December 2028, still running at the end of 2028. The other eight lagnas, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces, have neither graha in its digbala house at any point in the window. These are statements about the sky on those days, for a chart whose lagna is the one named.

One Component Among Several, Not a Score

Classical jyotish counts digbala as one kind of strength among several and weighs it with the others; the planet table’s Mercury entry names another, chesta bala, the strength of motion. This page covers only which house carries directional strength for which graha. It assigns no number to that strength, adds nothing up and does not call a chart strong or weak. The planet table does list each graha’s digbala house among its best houses, and the Moon’s, Mercury’s and Saturn’s entries name it there in words; what those lists go on to say about results is not repeated here.

The four digbala houses are the same angles the kendra yogas turn on; the kendra-trikona raja yoga page works out their lords by lagna, and the list of kundli yogas and how common they are compares the named combinations. The sign-based companion to this page is the planet friendship table. The angles themselves have their own pages: the 1st, 4th and 10th. In Hindi: दिग्बल: भाव के अनुसार ग्रहों का दिशा बल.