Mokshada Ekadashi & Geeta Jayanti 2026: Date and Parana

One Day, Two Names (मोक्षदा एकादशी और गीता जयंती)

The Shukla Ekadashi of Margashirsha carries two observances at once. As an Ekadashi it is the vrat called Mokshada, one of the named Ekadashis of the year, each with its own katha. As Geeta Jayanti — spelled Gita Jayanti in ISKCON’s publications and Geetha Jayanthi in much of south India — it is the day on which the tradition marks the speaking of the Bhagavad Gita on the field of Kurukshetra. In 2026 both fall on Sunday, 20 December 2026.

Because this Ekadashi belongs to the bright fortnight, the month name is not in dispute. North Indian purnimanta calendars and the amanta calendars of the west and south disagree about what to call the dark fortnight, but they agree on the bright one, so a calendar from Varanasi and one from Pune will both print this as Margashirsha Shukla Ekadashi. The tithi is the anchor; the weekday is incidental, and a Sunday in 2026.

Why the 20th: Three Sunrises Side by Side

The Ekadashi tithi begins at 22:09 on 19 December 2026 and ends at 20:15 on 20 December 2026. That is a late start: sunset at New Delhi on the 19th is 17:27, so the tithi opens well into the night, more than four hours after sunset. The festival row carries no day-part rule, which in this site’s generated table means the default one — the tithi current at sunrise decides the day.

Read the three mornings in order. At sunrise on 19 December 2026 (07:08) the daily panchang has Shukla Dashami; the Ekadashi has not yet started. At sunrise on 20 December 2026 (07:08) it has Shukla Ekadashi, and the tithi then runs through the whole of that day’s daylight and past sunset at 17:28, closing only at 20:15. At sunrise on 21 December 2026 (07:09) it has Shukla Dwadashi. Exactly one sunrise falls inside the Ekadashi, so the sunrise rule has only one candidate, and the vrat lands on 20 December without a tie to break.

That matters for the Vaishnava reckoning as well. The rule the Hari Bhakti Vilasa sets out, and which Gaudiya and ISKCON calendars follow, rejects an Ekadashi that is still touched by Dashami in arunodaya, the stretch before dawn. On the morning of 20 December the Ekadashi has been running since 22:09 the previous night, so at New Delhi Dashami is long gone by the pre-dawn hours. This page does not reproduce ISKCON’s own calendar, which is computed separately for each city; it only shows that the Dashami condition, which can move a Vaishnava Ekadashi a day later than the Smarta one, is not met on this table.

Tithi instants are absolute and hold across India; sunrise and sunset are computed for New Delhi and shift by up to about an hour from east to west. Because the tithi begins the night before and ends the evening after, the 20th holds the only Ekadashi sunrise anywhere in the country, but take local sunrise times from a local panchang or from the panchang tool for your city.

The Parana on Dwadashi (पारण)

An Ekadashi fast is closed with parana, and the custom across the Smarta and Vaishnava manuals is to take it on Dwadashi, after sunrise, before the Dwadashi tithi runs out. In 2026 the daily table has Shukla Dwadashi at sunrise on Monday 21 December 2026 (07:09 at New Delhi), so the morning of the 21st is the one the custom points to.

What this page will not give is a parana window in minutes. The tables behind it record when the Ekadashi ends but not when the following Dwadashi ends, and they do not compute Hari Vasara, the opening quarter of Dwadashi during which the panchangs that print a parana time advise against breaking the fast. A clock window here would have to be invented, so there is none. If your household keeps a precise parana, take it from a printed panchang for your own town or from the family purohit.

The shape of the fast itself varies by household and sampradaya. The common Ekadashi custom sets grains and pulses aside for the day; some keep it nirjala, without water, some take fruit and milk, and many vrat manuals ask for a single meal on Dashami, eaten before sunset. With the tithi opening at 22:09, that Dashami meal on the 19th falls comfortably before the Ekadashi starts. Night-long jagran with kirtan or Gita recitation is kept in many temples, and the custom treats all of this as discipline undertaken, not as a transaction.

An Ekadashi Inside the Kharmas (खरमास)

The table’s Dhanu Kharmas runs from 16 December 2026 to 14 January 2027, the stretch with the Sun in Sagittarius. Mokshada Ekadashi falls four days into it. Vivah Panchami, the wedding day of Rama and Sita in the Ayodhya and Janakpur tradition, comes on Monday 14 December 2026, two days before the window opens, so the two Margashirsha observances sit on either side of the line.

The custom that keeps Kharmas defers samskaras and new undertakings — vivah, griha pravesh, mundan, upanayan, the start of a business — until the Sun moves on into Capricorn. It does not suspend vrats, festivals, daily puja, japa or daan; the north Indian manuals that observe Kharmas keep devotional practice going through it. A major Ekadashi and the Gita’s own day falling inside the window show where that custom draws the line.

The south has a name for the same stretch. In the Tamil calendar the Sun in Sagittarius is the month of Margazhi, kept in Vaishnava homes with the dawn recitation of Andal’s Tiruppavai, and the Shukla Ekadashi falling in that solar month is the one the Sri Vaishnava temples keep as Vaikuntha Ekadashi. The Ekadashi of 20 December sits inside the Sun-in-Sagittarius window above, but the temples fix Vaikuntha Ekadashi by their own calendars, and this page does not set that date. The coincidence is not fixed. In 2027 the table puts Mokshada on Thursday 9 December 2027, before that year’s Kharmas opens on 16 December 2027; the computed Mokshada Ekadashi 2027 page has that window.

Ashwini at the Tithi’s Start and at Sunrise (अश्विनी)

The festival row names Ashwini, and it is worth knowing what that field measures: the generator records the Moon’s nakshatra at the instant the tithi begins, here 22:09 on the 19th, not at the festival morning’s sunrise. The daily panchang, which is sampled at sunrise, has the Moon in Ashwini on 20 December 2026 as well, with Parigha yoga and Vanija karana. So for this row the two readings agree, which they do not on many rows of the same table.

The neighbouring mornings show the Moon moving. At sunrise on the 19th the daily table has it in Revati; by the time the Ekadashi opens that night it has crossed into Ashwini; and at sunrise on the 21st it is in Bharani. Ashwini occupies Aries 0°00′ – 13°20′, the first segment of the sidereal zodiac, so the crossing on the 19th is also the Moon leaving Pisces for Aries. The tables do not give the minute of that crossing and this page does not supply one.

The site’s nakshatra table gives its ruler as Ketu, its presiding deities as the Ashwini Kumaras, its symbol as a horse's head and its gana as Deva. None of that is a condition of the vrat: Mokshada is fixed by tithi alone, and the nakshatra is a fact about 2026 that changes every year. There is more on it in Ashwini nakshatra, and how to read a panchang explains the five limbs these figures come from.

Geeta Jayanti: Kurukshetra, ISKCON and the Dating (गीता जयंती)

The Bhagavad Gita is a passage of the Mahabharata’s Bhishma Parva, eighteen chapters and seven hundred verses in the received text, framed as Sanjaya’s report to Dhritarashtra of the dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna before the battle. The Gita itself names no tithi for that dialogue. The assignment of the day to Margashirsha Shukla Ekadashi is the tradition’s dating, carried in the festival calendars, not a statement the text makes about itself. The verse cited in support is in the tenth chapter, where Krishna, listing the forms in which he is to be recognised, says that among months he is Margashirsha — a verse that names the month but not the day.

At Kurukshetra in Haryana the day is the centre of the Gita Mahotsav, held by the state government as the International Gita Mahotsav, with recitation, arti and exhibitions on the ghats of Brahma Sarovar spread over several days around the Ekadashi. The local tradition places the dialogue at Jyotisar, a few kilometres from the town, where a banyan is identified as the tree under which it was spoken. This page does not give the 2026 festival’s programme dates; the organisers announce those.

ISKCON temples keep Gita Jayanti with a reading of the whole Gita, often all eighteen chapters, alongside the Ekadashi fast, and many temples use the day for distributing copies of the text.

The Vrat Katha of King Vaikhanasa

The vrat-katha collections attribute the story of this Ekadashi to the Brahmanda Purana, told, as each Ekadashi katha is, by Krishna to Yudhishthira. In it King Vaikhanasa of Champaka dreams of his late father suffering after death, asks the sage Parvata what it means, and on his advice keeps the Margashirsha Shukla Ekadashi and offers its merit to his father, whom the story then shows released. That is the katha’s own account and the source of the name. This page reports it as the story read aloud on the day; it makes no claim about what keeping the fast does for anyone, living or dead.

At a Glance

• Vrat and Geeta Jayanti: Sunday, 20 December 2026
• Margashirsha Shukla Ekadashi tithi: 22:09 on 19 December 2026 to 20:15 on 20 December 2026
• Sunrise and sunset on 20 December (New Delhi): 07:08 and 17:28
• Brahma Muhurat (New Delhi): 05:32-07:08
• Nakshatra, yoga, karana at sunrise: Ashwini, Parigha, Vanija
• Parana day: Monday 21 December 2026, Shukla Dwadashi at sunrise (07:09); no parana minute is computed here
• Dhanu Kharmas: 16 December 2026 to 14 January 2027

The rest of the year’s computed dates are in the festival calendar and on the festival pages. In Hindi: मोक्षदा एकादशी और गीता जयंती 2026: तिथि और पारण.