KP Sub Lord Table: All 249 Subs With Sign, Star and Sub Lord

What a Sub Lord Is in KP Astrology (केपी सब लॉर्ड)

Krishnamurti Paddhati, usually shortened to KP, is the system K. S. Krishnamurti built on top of the nakshatra scheme. Classical practice names two lords for any degree of the zodiac: the lord of the sign it falls in and the lord of its nakshatra, called the star lord. KP adds a third. It cuts every nakshatra into nine unequal pieces called subs, and the graha a piece is named after is the sub lord of every degree inside it. So in KP each degree carries three names, sign lord, star lord and sub lord, and the table further down lists all three for the whole zodiac.

KP practice sets these lords against degrees worked out its own way. It uses its own ayanamsa, the KP or Krishnamurti ayanamsa, which is close to but not the same as the Lahiri-type value this site’s calculators use, and it takes house cusps from the Placidus system rather than counting whole signs from the lagna. The cusp sub lord, the sub lord of the degree on a house cusp, is the point KP practitioners examine when they look at the matters of that house, together with the star lord and the houses those grahas occupy and own. This page does neither of those steps: it computes no cusp and reads no sub lord. It sets out the division itself, which is plain arithmetic once the Vimshottari years are known.

How a Nakshatra Is Divided Into Nine Subs

A nakshatra spans 13°20′ of the zodiac, which is 800 arcminutes. The Vimshottari dasha shares out 120 years among nine grahas, and KP shares out the nakshatra in exactly the same proportion. Each sub’s arc is 800′ multiplied by its lord’s years and divided by 120. That makes the natural unit 800′ ÷ 120 = 6′40″, one unit per dasha year, and every sub is a whole number of those units. This is why the table can give every boundary to the exact second: there is no rounding anywhere in it.

The order of the subs is the Vimshottari order, Ketu, Venus, the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, but the count does not start from Ketu in every nakshatra. It starts from the nakshatra’s own star lord and runs on round the cycle. Ashwini, whose star lord is Ketu, opens with a Ketu sub; Bharani, a Venus nakshatra, opens with Venus and ends with Ketu. The first sub of every nakshatra therefore has the same graha as star lord and sub lord.

Sub Sizes Depend Only on the Sub Lord

Because the arc is set by the lord’s years and nothing else, a sub of a given lord is the same size in every nakshatra, whatever the star lord and whatever the sign. The nine sizes are:

The longest sub is Venus’s at 2°13′20″, from its 20 years, and the shortest is the Sun’s at 40′, from 6. Ketu and Mars are the only two lords with the same size, 46′40″ each, since both carry 7 years. Every lord appears once in each of the 27 nakshatras, so its subs added together cover 27 × its years × 6′40″, which comes to three degrees per year: 60° of the zodiac falls in Venus subs and 18° in the Sun’s.

Why 27 × 9 = 243 Subs Become 249 Rows

The 27 nakshatras of nine subs each give 243 subs. The published KP table has 249 rows because it keeps every row inside one sign, so that each row has a single sign lord. A sub that a sign boundary passes through is printed twice, once for the part before the boundary and once for the part after, with the same star lord and sub lord but a different sign lord.

Of the twelve sign boundaries, three coincide with the start of a nakshatra: the beginnings of Aries, Leo and Sagittarius. The other nine fall inside a nakshatra, which is why Krittika, Mrigashira, Punarvasu, Uttara Phalguni, Chitra, Vishakha, Uttara Ashadha, Dhanishta and Purva Bhadrapada each lie partly in two signs. In units, a sign is 270 and a nakshatra 120, and the two line up again every 1080 units, which is four signs or nine nakshatras. So the zodiac holds the same pattern three times over, and inside each repeat a sign boundary lands three ways:

• In the Sun nakshatras, Krittika, Uttara Phalguni and Uttara Ashadha, the boundary comes 3°20′ in. The Sun, Moon and Mars subs take up 23 units, so the boundary falls inside the Rahu sub, leaving 46′40″ of it in the first sign and 1°13′20″ in the next.
• In the Mars nakshatras, Mrigashira, Chitra and Dhanishta, the boundary comes 6°40′ in. The Mars, Rahu, Jupiter and Saturn subs add to 60 units, exactly half the nakshatra, so the boundary falls on the edge between two subs and nothing is split.
• In the Jupiter nakshatras, Punarvasu, Vishakha and Purva Bhadrapada, the boundary comes 10°00′ in. The first six subs, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Ketu, Venus and the Sun, total 85 units, so the boundary cuts the Moon sub exactly in half, 33′20″ on each side.

That is six cut subs, three of Rahu and three of the Moon, and six extra rows: 243 + 6 = 249. The halves of the cut Moon subs, at 33′20″, are the shortest rows in the table, shorter than any whole sub; the longest rows are the uncut Venus subs at 2°13′20″.

Looking Up a Degree: A Worked Example

Take Scorpio 20°00′00″, a degree chosen for the arithmetic, not anyone’s chart. This page is not a calculator, but the lookup is short enough to do by hand or with the table.

• Sign and sign lord: Scorpio, whose lord is Mars.
• Nakshatra and star lord: Jyeshtha begins at Scorpio 16°40′00″, so the degree is 3°20′ into it, and its star lord is Mercury.
• Subs counted from Mercury: Mercury (1°53′20″) and Ketu (46′40″) use up 2°40′, which is short of 3°20′; the next sub, Venus’s 2°13′20″, runs on to 4°53′20″ and contains it.
• In sign degrees that Venus sub runs from Scorpio 19°20′00″ to 21°33′20″, which is row 160 of the table.

So the three lords of Scorpio 20°00′00″ are Mars for the sign, Mercury for the star and Venus for the sub. A degree has to be on the KP ayanamsa before this lookup means what KP practice means by it. The narrowest rows are only 33′20″ wide, so a degree taken on a different ayanamsa, or a cusp from an uncertain birth time, can sit in the neighbouring row.

KP also divides each sub into nine sub-subs by the same proportion, starting again from the sub’s own lord; the smallest of them, the Sun’s share of a Sun sub, is 40′ × 6 ÷ 120 = 2′.

The 249 Numbers in KP Horary

The row numbers have a use of their own in KP. In the horary method of KP practice, the person asking a question is asked to name a number from 1 to 249, and the practitioner takes the start of that row as the ascendant degree for the question, then builds the chart from it. Row 1 is therefore Aries 0°00′00″, and row 249 begins at Pisces 27°53′20″. This page describes the numbering only; it does not cast or read a horary chart.

The Full KP Sub Lord Table, Aries 0° to Pisces 30°

Degrees are within the sign. A row runs from its first degree up to, but not including, its last, which is where the next row begins. Rows marked “(part)” are the halves of a sub that a sign boundary cuts. If you know your Moon’s nakshatra but not its degree, the nakshatra finder narrows the search to one block of nine or ten rows. There is no spreadsheet download; the table is ordinary text and can be selected and pasted into one.

What This Page Does Not Cover

It gives no meaning for any sub lord, cusp or row, and it does not say that one sub lord is better or worse than another. KP practice judges a cusp sub lord through the houses its star lord occupies and owns, which needs Placidus cusps cast for an exact time and place on the KP ayanamsa, and none of that is in a table of arcs. The page computes no cusp, states no ayanamsa value, sets out no ruling planets and answers no horary question. For a second way of dividing time by the birth nakshatra, the Yogini dasha page works through its yoginis and their years.