Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga: Rules and Debilitated Planets

Neecha and Its Breaking (नीच भंग)

A graha’s neecha rashi is its sign of debilitation, the sign opposite the one where it is exalted. Bhanga means breaking. Neecha Bhanga is the name Jyotish gives to a set of conditions under which the classical texts treat a debilitation as cancelled, and when certain of them are present astrologers call the combination Neecha Bhanga Raja Yoga. This page does three things with the site’s own tables: it lists the debilitation signs, it works out the two or three grahas each cancellation rule depends on, and it dates every spell of a graha in its debilitation sign in the 2026–2028 sky. It does not say what a cancelled debilitation gives a person, and it reads no one’s chart.

The Debilitated Planets List, and the Grahas Each Rule Turns On

For each of the seven classical grahas the table gives the debilitation sign from the planet table, the lord of that sign, the graha that takes its exaltation in the same sign, and the lord of the debilitated graha’s own exaltation sign. Those three are the grahas the commonly cited rules below are built from.

Three things fall out of the columns. Six of the grahas come in three mirrored pairs (the Sun with Saturn, Mars with Jupiter, Mercury with Venus): each is exalted in the sign where the other is debilitated, so each one’s entry in the fourth column is the other. The Moon is the exception, with none of the seven exalted in Scorpio, so the rule about the exalted graha has nothing to point at among them. And for Venus the third and fourth columns name the same graha, Mercury, because Mercury both rules Virgo and takes its exaltation there; Mercury is also the lord of its own exaltation sign.

Rahu and Ketu are left out of the table. The planet table gives Rahu’s debilitation as Scorpio by the most common reckoning and Sagittarius in others, and Ketu’s as Taurus by that reckoning and Gemini in others. A list of cancellation partners built on one of those would be choosing between authorities that do not agree.

The Cancellation Conditions as Astrologers Cite Them

The lists differ from author to author. The conditions below are the ones that turn up most often in the rule lists astrologers quote from the classical texts; other lists, including those drawn from the Parashari tradition, add, drop or combine conditions. A kendra here is the 1st, 4th, 7th or 10th house.

1. The lord of the debilitation sign (the third column) in a kendra counted from the lagna or from the Moon.
2. The lord of the debilitated graha’s exaltation sign (the fifth column) in a kendra from the lagna or the Moon.
3. The graha exalted in the debilitation sign (the fourth column) in a kendra from the lagna or the Moon.
4. The debilitated graha aspected by the lord of the sign it occupies.
5. The debilitated graha in its exaltation sign in the navamsa (D9) chart.

Writers on the subject also disagree about two larger questions: whether one condition is enough or several are needed, and whether every cancellation counts as a raja yoga or only some. This page does not choose between them.

The fourth condition can be worked out from the aspect rules alone. Every graha casts a full aspect on the 7th sign from it; Mars adds the 4th and 8th, Jupiter the 5th and 9th, Saturn the 3rd and 10th. So the lords that are the Sun, the Moon, Mercury or Venus can aspect the debilitation sign from one sign only, and the lords that are Mars, Jupiter or Saturn from three. The Moon’s Scorpio is aspected by Mars from Aries, Taurus and Leo; Mercury’s Pisces by Jupiter from Cancer, Virgo and Scorpio; Jupiter’s Capricorn by Saturn from Aries, Cancer and Scorpio; Saturn’s Aries by Mars from Virgo, Libra and Capricorn. For Venus in Virgo the only aspecting position for Mercury is Pisces, Mercury’s own debilitation sign, so a chart that meets the fourth condition for Venus has two debilitated grahas facing each other. For the Sun in Libra, Venus aspects it only from Aries, the Sun’s exaltation sign.

Debilitation Spells in the 2026–2028 Sky

The DE421 ingress table puts six of the seven grahas in their debilitation signs at some point in these three years. Jupiter is the one it never puts in Capricorn. The longest stay belongs to Saturn, which enters Aries on 3 June 2027, moves back into Pisces on its retrograde on 20 October 2027, and enters Aries again on 23 February 2028, where the table, which ends in 2028, still has it. Mars is in Cancer three times, the second time after slipping back from Leo; Venus is in Virgo four times, once on a retrograde return; the Sun is in Libra every October into November. Every date is a day, with no clock time. A Sun ingress here is the astronomical day in the table, not the date of any Sankranti observance.

The Moon is not listed spell by spell. It enters Scorpio 13 times in 2026 and 14 times in 2027, staying a little over two days each time, which comes to 8.9% and 9.2% of the clock time of those two years.

Half of the First Condition, Measured on the Sky

The first condition has two halves. The lagna half depends on the minute and place of birth and the sky cannot answer it. The Moon half can be measured: while a graha is in its debilitation sign, how much of the time is the lord of that sign in a kendra from wherever the Moon is? The table gives the answer for 2026 and 2027, as a share of the clock time of each graha’s debilitation spells. It is a property of the sky, not a count of births.

Five rows come out at about a third, which is what four kendras out of twelve signs would give if the Moon’s sign were independent of the lord’s. The Mars row reads 100% for a different reason: the lord of Cancer is the Moon itself, and counted from the Moon, the Moon is always in the 1st house. Read literally, the Moon half is met whenever Mars is in Cancer. Whether an astrologer counts it that way is a judgement this page leaves with the astrologer.

Checking a Kundli Against the List

Start with the row of the debilitated graha, then find the grahas in the third, fourth and fifth columns in the chart and count their houses from the lagna and from the Moon’s sign. The free kundli gives both the lagna and every graha’s sign; the navamsa test needs the D9 chart as well. The opposite dignity, with each graha’s spells in its exaltation sign, is on exalted planets 2026-28. Exaltation in a kendra is one of the routes into the Pancha Mahapurusha yogas, and the wider list is on kundli yogas and how common they are. Saturn’s two crossings into Aries, with the Sade Sati picture for each Moon sign, are on Saturn transit 2027, and Mars’s year, including its return to Cancer, is on Mars transit 2027. In Hindi: नीचभंग राजयोग: नियम और नीच ग्रहों की सूची.