Divisional Charts (Shodashavarga): D1 to D60 Explained

What a Divisional Chart Is (वर्ग कुंडली)

A divisional chart, or varga, takes the birth chart and asks a finer question of every degree in it. Each 30° sign is cut into a fixed number of equal parts, and each part is handed a sign by a counting rule. A graha at a given degree then sits in one sign in the birth chart and in another sign, or the same one, in each varga. The chart named D-n is the one that cuts every sign into n parts, so the D-9 is the navamsa and the D-60 cuts each sign into sixty pieces of half a degree. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra lists sixteen of these charts, the shodashavarga, and gives each a counting rule and a field of life it is consulted for. The table below is that list, with the signs worked out by the site’s own varga arithmetic rather than copied.

The Sixteen Charts at a Glance

The third column shows where each chart starts counting for Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. Those four are enough to see every rule at work, because between them they cover an odd and an even sign and a movable, a fixed and a dual one. The last column is an average: the lagna turns through all twelve signs in about a day, which works out to four minutes of clock for each degree, so on average the lagna spends 120 ÷ n minutes in one part of the D-n. The real pace is faster or slower by sign and by latitude.

Four Ways of Counting

Read down that column and the sixteen rules fall into a few families. The simplest start from the sign itself and walk forward one sign per part: the D-1 trivially, the D-12 and the D-60, which is why their cells in it read Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer. The D-3 and D-4 also start from the sign itself but stride, by four signs and by three, so a sign’s drekkanas are the three signs of its element and its chaturthamshas are the four angles counted from it. A second family splits by odd and even sign: the D-7 and D-10 start an even sign from its 7th and 9th respectively, and the D-40 starts odd signs from Aries and even ones from Libra. A third splits by mobility, movable, fixed and dual: the D-9, D-16, D-20 and D-45. The D-27 alone counts by element, starting fire signs from Aries, earth signs from Cancer, air from Libra and water from Capricorn.

Two charts stand apart. The Parashari hora (D-2) gives every half-sign to Leo or Cancer and nothing else, and the D-24 starts every odd sign from Leo and every even one from Cancer, so in both charts the twelve rows collapse into two. The trimshamsha (D-30) has no equal parts at all. An odd sign is cut into bands of 5° (Mars), 5° (Saturn), 8° (Jupiter), 7° (Mercury) and 5° (Venus), each band taking a sign of that graha, and an even sign runs the same bands in reverse. Only the five tara grahas own a band, so the D-30 uses just ten signs and never reaches Cancer and Leo, the signs of the Moon and the Sun.

Where a Sign Meets Itself

A graha whose varga sign is the same as its birth-chart sign is called vargottama in that varga; the word is used most often of the navamsa, where each sign has exactly one such part, set out on the vargottama page. Every equal-part chart except the hora gives each of the twelve signs back to itself at least once. The hora manages it only for Cancer and Leo, because those are the only two signs it uses, and the trimshamsha only for the ten signs it uses. The finer the chart, the more often it happens: the D-60 walks through the zodiac five times inside every sign and so returns each sign to itself in five separate half-degrees.

One Degree Through All Sixteen

Take a graha at 17°24′ of Taurus. That degree lies in Rohini pada 3, whose navamsa is Gemini on the Rohini pada 3 page, and the D-9 row below reaches the same sign by the other route. Here is where the one degree lands in each chart:

Sixteen charts, and the degree comes back to Taurus in only two of them, the birth chart and the D-16. A varga is drawn up as a separate chart with its own lagna and houses, not as a correction to the birth chart, and the table shows why it has to be: the signs scatter. It is also why the finer charts depend so heavily on an accurate birth time: move the lagna by a degree and its D-9 sign may stay put, while its D-60 sign changes twice.

Shadvarga, Saptavarga, Dashavarga, Shodashavarga

The Parashari texts also name sets of these charts, each set containing the one before it, for assessing a graha across several vargas at once (the vimshopaka scheme weighs a graha’s dignity over a set). The page lists the sets and does not compute a score from them.

• Shadvarga (six charts): D-1, D-2, D-3, D-9, D-12, D-30
• Saptavarga (seven charts): D-1, D-2, D-3, D-7, D-9, D-12, D-30
• Dashavarga (ten charts): D-1, D-2, D-3, D-7, D-9, D-10, D-12, D-16, D-30, D-60
• Shodashavarga (sixteen charts): D-1, D-2, D-3, D-4, D-7, D-9, D-10, D-12, D-16, D-20, D-24, D-27, D-30, D-40, D-45, D-60

What This Page Does Not Do

The “Parashari use” column is the list’s own: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra assigns the D-10 to position and the D-12 to the parents, and practitioners consult the charts on that basis. It is not a statement that a varga placement decides anything in a life, and nothing here reads one. The counting is Parashari only; other schemes exist for the hora and the drekkana in particular, and they give different signs. Each chart with its own page on the site, linked in the first table, sets out its full sign table and the arithmetic peculiar to it. For real degrees, the free kundli gives the lagna’s and the Kundli report gives every graha’s, and the navamsa guide covers the one varga most charts are read with. The rashi and lagna explainer covers the birth-chart terms these pages assume. In Hindi: षोडश वर्ग कुंडली: D1 से D60 तक सोलह वर्ग.