Karana in Panchang: The 11 Karanas, Their Tithi Halves and 730 Sunrises Counted

The karana is the panchang limb that is easiest to misread. Only eleven karana names exist, yet a lunar month holds sixty karanas, and a daily panchang names one per day although the karana usually changes twice between one sunrise and the next. This page lays out where every karana falls in the month, then counts what the site’s own panchang shows over 730 sunrises at New Delhi, 1 Jan 2026 to 31 Dec 2027.

Karana Meaning: Half a Tithi (करण)

A tithi is 12° of the Moon’s lead over the Sun, the angle that starts at zero at the new Moon and comes back to zero a lunar month later. A karana (करण, also romanised as “karan”) is half of that: 6°. Twelve degrees thirty times round the circle make the 30 tithis, and 6° makes 60 karanas, two in every tithi. Over the two years in the site’s table a karana lasted 11.8 hours on average, sunrise to sunrise; the real length of any one varies with the Moon’s speed, which is why no fixed length works as a rule of thumb.

Because the karana is an angle between the Sun and the Moon, it changes at the same instant everywhere. What differs by place is the sunrise against which a panchang reads it. The counts below are for New Delhi; a city with a much earlier or later sunrise can print a different karana on a day when a change falls between the two sunrises.

The 11 Karanas: Seven Movable, Four Fixed

Sixty slots and eleven names: the arithmetic works because seven of the names repeat. The site’s karana table calls them chara (movable) and sthira (fixed). The seven movable karanas, Bava, Balava, Kaulava, Taitila, Gara, Vanija and Vishti, run in that order eight times through the month. The four fixed karanas, Kimstughna, Shakuni, Chatushpada and Naga, appear once each, and all four sit around the new Moon: Kimstughna opens the month and the other three close it.

The last column counts every time the karana came round between the first sunrise of the table and the last, whether or not a sunrise fell inside it. Each fixed karana came round 25 times, once a lunar month, and each movable one 197 or 198 times.

Which Karana Falls in Which Half of Each Tithi

Number the karanas of a month from 0 to 59. Karana number k covers the Moon’s lead from 6k° to 6k + 6°, so it belongs to tithi number k ÷ 2, rounded down: the first half if k is even, the second if it is odd. Doing that for all 60 gives the full map. It is a fixed pattern; every lunar month repeats it.

Three things follow from the map. First, Kimstughna takes the first half of Shukla Pratipada, so the movable cycle begins with Bava in its second half, and after eight rounds the cycle ends with Vishti in the first half of Krishna Chaturdashi; Shakuni takes the second half of that tithi and Chatushpada and Naga share Amavasya. Second, seven is odd, so a movable karana alternates between first and second halves from one round to the next: Bava, for instance, is in the second half of Shukla Pratipada, the first half of Shukla Panchami and the second half of Shukla Ashtami, and so on. Third, the same karana can fall in different tithis in the two pakshas, because a paksha is 30 karanas and 30 is not a multiple of seven.

Finding the Karana From the Tithi

The map can be carried in the head. Count the tithi from Shukla Pratipada as 1 to Amavasya as 30; call that n. Its two karanas are numbers 2n − 2 and 2n − 1. For a number from 1 to 56, divide one less than it by seven and take the remainder: 0 is Bava, 1 is Balava, and so on to 6 for Vishti. Numbers 0, 57, 58 and 59 are the fixed four. Krishna Ekadashi, for example, is tithi 26, so its karanas are numbers 50 and 51; 49 is a whole number of sevens, so the first half is Bava and the second Balava, as the table shows.

The same rule works backwards, and that is its practical use. A panchang that prints the tithi and karana at sunrise has also said, without spelling it out, whether sunrise came in the first or the second half of the tithi: if the karana is the first of the tithi’s pair, more than half the tithi was still to run when the day began.

Vishti: Four First Halves, Four Second Halves

Vishti, the seventh movable karana, is the one muhurta practice singles out, and it is the karana known as Bhadra. It falls every seven slots, eight times a month: in the first half of Shukla Ashtami, Purnima, Krishna Saptami and Krishna Chaturdashi, and in the second half of Shukla Chaturthi, Shukla Ekadashi, Krishna Tritiya and Krishna Dashami. That even split is the alternation above at work. For each Bhadra’s start and end in IST from late 2026 through 2027, see the Bhadra kaal dates page, which this page does not repeat.

The muhurta manuals set Vishti aside when a time is chosen for beginning an undertaking. The site’s muhurat finder applies one karana rule only: it marks a day down when Vishti holds the sunrise. This page reports that convention and does not grade the other ten karanas, assign them deities or natures, or say what any karana brings.

Two Karana Changes a Day Is Normal

Between two sunrises the karana advanced by two in 616 of the 729 intervals in the table, by three in 68 and by one in 45. It never stayed the same, so no karana held two sunrises. An advance of two means the karana printed for the day ended, a whole karana began and ended in the course of the day, and the next began before the following sunrise. That middle karana appears in no sunrise column at all.

Counted over the whole table, 1,482 karanas came round and 730 of them held a sunrise; the other 752, a little over half, held none. So a panchang that names the karana at sunrise names fewer than half of the karanas that actually occur. Of the sunrises, 376 fell in the first half of the day’s tithi and 354 in the second. For the hour of a particular event, read the karana in force at that hour rather than the one printed against the date; the panchang tool shows the day’s five limbs at sunrise.

Why the Fixed Four Are Rare in a Panchang

Each fixed karana occurs once a month and each movable one eight times, so before any sunrise is counted the fixed four make up 4 of 60 slots. Then each of them, like any karana, holds a sunrise only about half the time. In the table each fixed karana held between 10 and 13 sunrises out of 25 occurrences, and the four together held 46 of the 730, against 90 to 102 for each movable karana. A reader can go months without seeing a given fixed karana in print: Naga holds the sunrise on 9 Nov 2026 and not again until 8 Mar 2027, 119 days later, although it comes round every month in between, at the same place in the month.

The new Moon of November 2026 shows it plainly. The site’s panchang gives Vanija on 7 Nov 2026 (Krishna Trayodashi), Shakuni on 8 Nov 2026 (Krishna Chaturdashi), Naga on 9 Nov 2026 (Amavasya) and Bava on 10 Nov 2026 (Shukla Pratipada). Read against the map, the sunrises skip Vishti in the first half of Krishna Chaturdashi, Chatushpada in the first half of Amavasya, and Kimstughna in the first half of Shukla Pratipada: two of the four fixed karanas will come and go that month without being printed. The Amavasya tithi page lists every sunrise that tithi held.

Kundli Me Karan Kya Hota Hai: The Birth Karana

A birth chart’s panchang gives the karana in force at the moment of birth, worked out the same way. Take the Moon’s longitude, subtract the Sun’s (adding 360° if the result is negative), divide by 6 and drop the fraction. That number, 0 to 59, is the karana’s place in the map above. Both longitudes can be sidereal or both tropical; the difference between them is the same, so the ayanamsa does not affect the karana. The longitudes below are examples, not anyone’s chart.

• Example 1. Sun at 10°15′ Libra (190.25°), Moon at 24°40′ Capricorn (294.67°). The Moon leads by 104.42°; divided by 6 that is 17.40, so karana number 17: Kaulava (कौलव), in the second half of Shukla Navami.
• Example 2. Sun at 5°00′ Aries (5.00°), Moon at 2°30′ Aries (2.50°). The Moon leads by 357.50°; divided by 6 that is 59.58, so karana number 59: Naga (नाग), in the second half of Amavasya.

The second example has the Moon just behind the Sun, a few degrees short of the new Moon, which is why it lands on a fixed karana. A birth within a few minutes of a karana change is worth checking against an ephemeris, since the Moon’s lead grows by about 0.5° an hour on average.

What This Page Does Not Do

It does not read a birth karana or say what one means for a person, and it does not time any event. It names no deity or temperament for any karana, gives no clock time for a karana change, and grades no karana beyond reporting the muhurta manuals’ treatment of Vishti. The other limbs are laid out the same way on the panchang hub, with day lists for every tithi and yoga; the guide to reading today’s panchang covers all five limbs together. In Hindi: करण कितने होते हैं: पंचांग के 11 करण और उनकी गिनती.