Shattila Ekadashi 2027: Date, Parana and Six Uses of Til

Shattila Ekadashi falls on Tuesday, 2 February 2027, eleven days after Paush Purnima, and the fast is broken on the morning of Wednesday 3 February. The bright-fortnight Ekadashi a fortnight earlier is a near thing; this one is not, and every reading and every city gives the same day. What does need explaining is the month, which almanacs print two ways, and the name, which comes from sesame.

Magha in the North, Pausha in the Amanta Calendars

The fortnight runs from one full moon to the next new moon, and everything in it is labelled by whichever month the almanac thinks it belongs to. In order, from the site’s tables:

• Full moon, 17:47 on 22 January: the end of Paush Purnima. A purnimanta calendar begins Magha here.
• Monday 25 January: Sakat Chauth, which the site’s amanta rules file under Pausha.
• Tuesday 2 February: Shattila Ekadashi.
• New moon, 21:26 on 6 February: Amavasya closes, and with it an amanta calendar’s Pausha; its Magha starts here.
• Thursday 11 February: Vasant Panchami, Magha Shukla Panchami in both reckonings.

So a north Indian almanac, counting full moon to full moon, prints Shattila as Magha Krishna Ekadashi, and a Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada or Telugu one, counting new moon to new moon, prints it as Pausha Krishna Ekadashi. The Sun can mislead here. It crosses into sidereal Capricorn at 21:05 on 14 January, so it is in Capricorn for the whole fortnight, and a reader who names months by the Sun’s sign might take that for Magha already. But an amanta lunar month takes its name from the Sun’s sign at the new moon that opens it, and this lunation opens at 01:54 on 8 January with the Sun still in Sagittarius, which makes it Pausha to the end. Only the new moon of the 6th, with the Sun in Capricorn, starts an amanta Magha.

Six Uses of Sesame (षटतिला एकादशी)

Shat-tila is “six sesames”. The vrat books that collect the Ekadashi mahatmyas place this one in the Bhavishyottara Purana, and they give the name a list: on this Ekadashi the account has sesame used in six ways.

• Tila snana: bathing in water with sesame in it
• Udvartana: rubbing the body with a sesame paste before that bath
• Tila homa: offering sesame into the sacred fire
• Tilodaka: offering water with sesame in it
• Tila daan: giving sesame away
• Tila bhojana: eating sesame

The fourth of these is the same gesture as tarpana, the offering to the ancestors that the site’s remedy notes describe as water with black sesame. The verse that carries the list closes by naming what it holds the six to accomplish. That is the text’s claim, and this page reports the list without repeating the claim as its own; it makes no statement either about what sesame does for the body, which is a question for a doctor and not for a calendar. How many of the six a household keeps, and in what form, is set by its own custom.

Dashami Is a Day Gone by the Vrat Morning

The Krishna Ekadashi begins at 08:42 on 1 February and ends at 11:11 on 2 February. The festival tables carry no row for it; these instants are the site’s own lunar computation, which strays no more than 1 minute from the DE421 tables over the 86 tithi instants they share.

An Ekadashi that begins in the morning can make people ask whether the 1st is the day. It is not. At New Delhi sunrise on the 1st (07:09) the tithi is still Krishna Dashami, and in all 38 cities the site computes a panchang for, the Ekadashi arrives at least 77 minutes after local sunrise, the least of them in Jammu. The first sunrise inside the Ekadashi is the 2nd’s (07:08), and it is the only one.

The Vaishnava reading agrees. Its concern is Dashami surviving into arunodaya, the stretch of roughly 96 minutes before sunrise, and by arunodaya on the 2nd the Ekadashi is more than twenty hours old. The sunrise and arunodaya readings therefore point to the same morning. One practical consequence falls on the eve: for a household that takes a single Dashami meal, the Dashami on the 1st lasts only until 08:42 that morning.

A Long Dwadashi Morning for the Parana (पारण)

Dwadashi takes over at 11:11 on 2 February and, by the same computation, lasts until 13:51 on 3 February. Its first quarter, Hari Vasara, which almanacs with a printed parana window treat as off limits, is over before the night of the 2nd is out. On Wednesday the New Delhi sun rises at 07:08, so the morning parana the custom asks for, after sunrise and inside Dwadashi, has more than six hours of room. The end of Dwadashi is the same instant everywhere, and it holds the 3rd’s sunrise in every city on the site’s list; the panchang calculator is fixed to New Delhi and prints that city’s sunrise only, so for a local sunrise elsewhere turn to the city panchang pages.

Mauni Amavasya Four Days Later

The Amavasya that closes this fortnight begins at 19:05 on 5 February and ends with the new moon at 21:26 on 6 February, after that evening’s sunset, so the daily table has it at sunrise on Saturday 6 February only. North Indian calendars call it Magha Amavasya and keep it as Mauni Amavasya; amanta calendars, by the same split as above, call it Pausha Amavasya. How its day is fixed is set out on the Mauni Amavasya 2027 page.

Shattila Ekadashi 2027 at a Glance

• Fast: Tuesday 2 February 2027
• Ekadashi tithi (computed): 08:42 on 1 February to 11:11 on 2 February
• Parana: Wednesday 3 February 2027, after sunrise (07:08) and before Dwadashi ends at 13:51
• Month name: Magha Krishna Ekadashi (purnimanta); Pausha Krishna Ekadashi (amanta)
• New Delhi sunrise and sunset on 2 February: 07:08 and 18:00; nakshatra at sunrise Jyeshtha

The bright-fortnight Ekadashi before this one, with its Dwadashi that reaches no sunrise, is on the Pausha Putrada Ekadashi 2027 page; the whole year is in the Ekadashi 2027 list, the 2027 festival calendar and, festival by festival, the festivals section. In Hindi: षटतिला एकादशी 2027: तारीख, पारण और तिल के छह प्रयोग.