Paya in Kundli: How Lohe, Tambe, Chandi and Sone Ka Paya Are Counted

“Lohe ka paya”, “tambe ka paya”, “chandi ka paya”: the phrases turn up in Hindi panchangs and in conversations about a new baby’s chart or about Shani changing sign. Behind each one is a small piece of counting. This page sets out the count, works one birth example through it, and applies it to the three days in 2027 and 2028 on which Saturn changes sign, using the site’s own ephemeris tables for Saturn and its lunar theory for the Moon.

Kundli Me Paya Kya Hota Hai (कुंडली में पाया क्या होता है)

Paya (पाया) is the everyday Hindi form of pada, a foot. In the popular Hindi panchang convention a chart, or a sign change of Saturn, is said to stand on one of four feet, each named for a metal: gold (swarna, सोना), silver (rajat, चांदी), copper (tamra, तांबा) and iron (lauh, लोहा). Which foot it is depends on one number, the house the Moon occupies counted from a reference sign. That is the whole method. The four names are labels on groups of houses, and nothing in the counting involves any metal.

The site’s data tables do not hold this convention, and this page has not traced it to a single classical text, so it is reported here as panchang practice. Practice also varies: panchang makers and family astrologers differ over the reference point and over details of the count, and some use schemes not shown here. What follows is the commonly printed form.

The Four Groups of Houses

Count from the reference sign to the Moon’s sign, calling the reference sign the 1st. The convention then sorts the twelve possible answers into four groups of three:

Every house from the 1st to the 12th falls in exactly one group, so every count gives exactly one paya; the page checks this when it is built. The groups are not the familiar classes of the birth chart. Iron takes the 4th, 8th and 12th, the three the site’s house table groups as the moksha trikona. But the 1st, a trikona as well as a kendra, sits in gold beside the 6th, and the other two trikonas, the 5th and 9th, sit in silver with the 2nd. Reading a paya off the ordinary meanings of houses does not reproduce the convention.

Panchangs that use the scheme also rank the four. In that ranking silver and copper are the favourable feet, gold is mixed, and iron is the hard one. Those are the convention’s own labels, reported as such. This site does not forecast anything from them, and nothing on this page says what a paya brings to a person.

Kundli Me Paya Kaise Dekhe: The Birth Paya

For a birth chart the reference sign is the lagna, the sign rising at birth. In a North Indian chart the top central diamond is always the lagna, and the numerals printed in the boxes are sign numbers, not house numbers; count from the lagna’s sign number forward to the Moon’s, wrapping from 12 back to 1. In a South Indian chart, where each sign has a fixed box, count from the box marked as lagna round to the Moon’s box in the order of the signs. Both inputs, the lagna and the Moon sign, come out of the free kundli. The lagna needs an accurate birth time and place, and a birth near a lagna boundary can change the count by one, and with it the paya.

A worked example (example signs, not anyone’s chart). Take Cancer (Karka, कर्क) as lagna and the Moon in Scorpio (Vrishchika, वृश्चिक). Count: Karka 1, Simha 2, Kanya 3, Tula 4, Vrishchika 5. The Moon is in the 5th house from the lagna, and the 5th is in the silver group, so in this convention the chart is said to have a chandi ka paya, a silver foot. Had the Moon been one sign earlier, in Tula, the count would be 4 and the label iron; one sign later, in Dhanu, it would be 6 and the label gold. No two neighbouring houses share a group, so moving the Moon or the lagna by one sign always changes the paya, which is why the birth time matters.

Shani Ka Paya: The Count at a Saturn Sign Change

The second use is the one panchangs print each time Saturn moves into a new sign. Here the reference is each person’s own Moon sign, the janma rashi, and the Moon counted to is the Moon in the sky at the moment Saturn crosses into the new sign. The result differs by rashi, so a panchang gives twelve answers for each crossing. If you do not know your Moon sign, the moon sign calculator works it out from date, time and place of birth, and says when the Moon changed sign on a birth date with no known time.

The site’s ingress table, generated from the JPL DE421 ephemeris, gives three Saturn sign changes in the years it covers: into Aries on 3 June 2027, back into Pisces while retrograde on 20 October 2027, and into Aries again on 23 February 2028. Saturn moves less than 0.1° a day at each of these, so the table’s own caveat applies: the day is reliable and the minute is not, and this page gives the day only. That matters here, because the Moon covers a whole sign in about 2.3 days on average (measured over 2027 with the site’s lunar theory). To allow for the uncertain moment, the page computed the Moon’s sign every ten minutes from twelve hours before the tabled instant to twelve hours after, and across the whole calendar day in Indian time, and prints a table only where the Moon stays in one sign throughout.

The convention as commonly printed speaks of a sign change and does not settle whether a retrograde return into the previous sign gets a paya of its own. This page runs the count for all three crossings and leaves that question open.

3 June 2027: Saturn into Aries

The Moon is in Aries (Mesha, मेष) for part of this day and moves into Taurus (Vrishabha, वृषभ) later the same day. The paya for each rashi therefore depends on the exact moment of Saturn’s entry, which this page does not publish, and no table is given. Two panchangs that put the crossing on either side of the Moon’s sign change print different payas for every rashi, since no two neighbouring houses share a group, and neither need be in error about the day.

20 October 2027: Saturn back into Pisces

The same thing happens here. The Moon moves from Taurus (Vrishabha, वृषभ) into Gemini (Mithuna, मिथुन) during the day, inside the window, so the paya depends on the minute of the crossing and the page prints no table for it.

23 February 2028: Saturn into Aries Again

On this day the Moon is in Capricorn (Makara, मकर) from twelve hours before the tabled crossing to twelve hours after, and through the whole calendar day, so the uncertainty in the minute does not change the answer. Counting from each janma rashi to Makara:

Each paya goes to 3 rashis, as it must when the Moon holds one sign: gold to Leo, Capricorn, Pisces; silver to Taurus, Virgo, Sagittarius; copper to Aries, Cancer, Scorpio; iron to Gemini, Libra, Aquarius. In the worked example above, whose Moon is in Vrishchika, this count gives the 3rd house and the copper label, while the same example’s birth paya is silver. The two uses answer different questions and are not expected to agree.

The paya at a sign change is a separate idea from Sade Sati and the dhaiya, which depend on the sign Saturn occupies counted from the Moon sign rather than on where the Moon is on one day. For those, see the Saturn transit 2027 page, the Sade Sati calculator, which shows whether Saturn is in the 12th, 1st or 2nd from a chosen Moon sign now, and the older Sade Sati 2026 guide. Counting the Moon’s house from a rashi is also the arithmetic of Chandra Bala, with a different grouping of the twelve. Saturn’s significations in the site’s graha table are on the Saturn page.

What This Page Does Not Do

It explains a count and runs it. It does not read anyone’s chart, say what a gold, silver, copper or iron paya means for a life, or time any event by it. It gives no minute for any of Saturn’s crossings, and no minute for the Moon’s sign changes on those days. It does not say that one convention for the count is right, and it lists no remedy, because no remedy changes a count: the paya is fixed by where the Moon was, and nothing done afterwards alters it. In Hindi: कुंडली में पाया: सोने, चांदी, तांबे और लोहे का पाया.