Sunapha, Anapha and Durudhara Yoga: The Moon’s Neighbours

Three Names for Who Stands Beside the Moon

The Parashari texts name a group of Moon yogas after the signs immediately next to the Moon’s. With the Moon’s sign counted as the 1st, they look only at the 2nd sign (the one the Moon moves into next) and the 12th (the one it has just left), and only at five grahas: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. The Sun is not counted, nor are Rahu and Ketu.

• Sunapha (सुनफा योग): at least one of the five in the 2nd from the Moon, with the 12th empty of them.
• Anapha (अनफा योग): the reverse, a graha in the 12th and none in the 2nd.
• Durudhara (दुरुधरा योग), also spelt Durdhara: grahas on both sides.

The fourth possibility, nobody on either side, is Kemadruma, which has its own page because its cancellation rules carry most of the weight. So asking “anapha yoga kya hota hai” is really asking which of four boxes a chart falls into, and every chart falls into exactly one.

Four Boxes That Fill the Whole Year

Because the four definitions do not overlap and leave no gap, their shares of the year add to a hundred. The site’s ingress tables, cut at every sign change of the Moon and the five grahas, give these fractions of clock time; they describe the sky in each year, not the number of people born with each yoga.

Sunapha and Anapha come out almost level, each a little under a quarter of the year, with Sunapha slightly ahead in both years. That near-symmetry is what one would expect: the Moon laps the zodiac every month, so over a year each graha is ahead of it and behind it for similar lengths of time. Durudhara is the rarest of the four, needing occupants on both sides at once, and it is commoner in 2027 (9.6%) than in 2026 (7.6%).

Which Graha Forms Sunapha, and How Often Alone

Each of the five spends roughly a twelfth of the year in the 2nd sign from the Moon, as it must when the Moon passes it once a month. The last two columns are the telling ones: of the time a graha is in that sign, the share during which it is the only taragraha there.

Saturn is alone in the 2nd from the Moon for 81.9% of its time there in 2026 and 92.3% in 2027, and Jupiter comes next in both years. The two slow grahas hold one sign for months while the faster three move on, so when the Moon puts Saturn or Jupiter in its 2nd, the other three are usually somewhere else. Mars, Mercury and Venus are alone there no more than about three-fifths of the time.

Why Mercury and Venus Tend to Arrive Together

Mercury and Venus are both tied to the Sun’s neighbourhood, and therefore to each other. In the ingress table they share a sign 34.7% of the time in 2026 and 33.2% in 2027, and they are in the same or adjacent signs 75.9% and 79.5% of the time. So when Mercury is in the 2nd from the Moon, Venus is in the same sign for between a fifth and a third of those hours (21.8% in 2026, 31.0% in 2027), and a Sunapha that Mercury forms is then one the pair forms together. That is one reason both of them are alone in the 2nd less often than Saturn or Jupiter. The Sun-centred version of the same arithmetic, where the pair matters even more, is on the Veshi, Vasi and Ubhayachari page; their conjunction is covered under Lakshmi Narayan yoga.

How Many Grahas Share the 2nd

Most of the time the 2nd from the Moon holds none of the five; three together is a matter of about one hour in a hundred or fewer, and in neither year do four or five ever share it. These figures count the 2nd side only, whatever is happening in the 12th.

What the Tradition Associates With It

The classical texts give separate readings for each graha that forms Sunapha or Anapha, so astrologers who use these yogas start from which graha it is. The site’s planet table supplies the significations they work from: land and property for Mars; speech, writing and trade for Mercury; teachers and gurus and higher learning for Jupiter; art and music for Venus; karma and labour for Saturn. This page does not reproduce the per-graha results and draws no outcome from any of the three yogas; they are a description of the Moon’s surroundings, read alongside the lagna, the houses involved and the dashas.

The Moon’s sign is the starting point for all of this, and the Moon sign calculator finds it from a birth date, time and place. Other yogas counted from the Moon include Gajakesari, and the shares of the main classical yogas are compared on the kundli yoga list. In Hindi: सुनफा, अनफा और दुरुधरा योग: चन्द्रमा के पड़ोसी.