Vipreet Raja Yoga: Harsha, Sarala and Vimala by Lagna

The Condition (विपरीत राजयोग)

Viparita means reversed. In the Parashari tradition the 6th, 8th and 12th houses are the dusthanas, and Vipreet Raja yoga is formed when the lord of one of them occupies one of the other two: the 6th lord in the 8th or 12th, the 8th lord in the 6th or 12th, or the 12th lord in the 6th or 8th. The name records the logic its users give for it: a difficult lordship sitting in a difficult house is read as one adversity working against another, which is why a yoga built from the three worst-rated houses still carries the title raja.

Mantreswara’s Phaladeepika is the text usually cited for splitting the rule into three named forms by whose lord is involved. Harsha is the 6th-lord form, Sarala the 8th-lord form, and Vimala the 12th-lord form. Versions of the rule disagree at the edges. Some include a dusthana lord in its own dusthana, the 6th lord in the 6th for instance, and others require one of the other two houses. Some astrologers also count two dusthana lords conjoined in a dusthana. This page tabulates the narrow form and says where the wider ones would change a count.

Which houses are dusthanas is read from the site’s house table, which marks only the 6th, 8th and 12th that way. It labels the 3rd “Dusthana in some traditions”, and the tables below do not count it.

The Three Lords for Each Lagna

Lordship is whole-sign: the lagna’s sign is the 1st house, and each house’s lord is the ruler of the sign on it. Rahu and Ketu rule no sign in this scheme, so neither can be the lord in any of the three forms.

The table holds a fact that is easy to assume the other way. For no lagna does one graha rule two dusthanas, so each lagna’s three forms always involve three separate grahas. The reason is arithmetic. Counted the classical way, the three dusthanas lie an odd number of houses from each other: the 8th is the 3rd from the 6th, the 12th is the 5th from the 8th, and the 12th is the 7th from the 6th. The two signs of every graha that rules two are an even number apart. The Aries row shows the near miss: Mercury rules the 6th and the 3rd, and only the lenient count of the 3rd would give it two. Counting the 3rd would hand one graha two such houses for six lagnas (Aries, Cancer, Virgo, Libra, Capricorn and Pisces).

Three other patterns come straight off the rows. For Leo, Virgo, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces, one of the three lords is the Sun or the Moon, which rule a single sign each, so that lord has no second house to complicate it. For Aries, Taurus, Libra, Scorpio and Aquarius, the lagna lord is itself a dusthana lord (the 8th for Aries, 6th for Taurus, 8th for Libra, 6th for Scorpio and 12th for Aquarius), and the yoga then carries the chart’s own ruler into a dusthana. And for every lagna except Pisces, at least one dusthana lord also rules a kendra or a trikona other than the 1st; Gemini, Cancer and Leo have two such lords.

The last column and the lagna-lord rows are where astrologers part company. A Harsha, Sarala or Vimala placement moves the graha’s other lordship into a dusthana as well. Some read the yoga as formed regardless. Others hold that a lord of an angle, a trine or the lagna placed in the 6th, 8th or 12th is weakened for that other house, and that the yoga is compromised to the same degree. The texts do not settle it with one line, and this page does not choose between them.

Six Placements per Lagna, and the Sign Each Falls In

Three lords, each with two possible destinations, give six placements for every lagna and 72 across the twelve. Counting a lord in its own dusthana as well would add three per lagna, and each of those is a graha in its own sign by construction. The sign each lord lands in, and its standing there in the site’s dignity table, is below.

Of the 72, six put the lord in its exaltation sign and eight in its debilitation sign; none can put it in its own sign, for the parity reason above. The exalted cases are Mars in Capricorn for Gemini, Jupiter in Cancer for Leo, the Sun in Aries for Virgo, Venus in Pisces for Libra, the Moon in Taurus for Sagittarius and Saturn in Libra for Pisces. Authors differ on which they want. Some treat a dusthana lord that is weak in its new sign as the cleaner Vipreet case, since the lordship being reversed is a bad one; others want the lord dignified before the yoga is credited. A debilitated lord also brings in the cancellation rules discussed on Neecha Bhanga Raja yoga.

When two dusthana lords occupy each other’s signs, for example the 6th lord in the 8th and the 8th lord in the 6th, two cells of one row hold at once. Sign exchanges in general are tabulated on Parivartan yoga. Each column heading above opens the full twelve-ascendant page for that lord-in-house pair.

On “Activation Age”

One question searched about this yoga is the age at which it starts to work. This site gives no age for it, and no year, period or event in a person’s life. The tables above show where a lord sits; they say nothing about when anything happens. Astrologers who time a yoga do it through the dasha of the grahas involved, and that is a reading of one whole chart, not a figure that can be printed for everyone with a given lagna. The houses themselves are described on the 6th, 8th and 12th house pages, and the 12th in more depth in 12th house astrology.

Checking a Chart Against the Table

Find the lagna with the ascendant calculator, take its row in the first table for the three lords, and then see which house each of them occupies in the birth chart. Only a lord in one of the other two dusthanas forms the narrow yoga. The guide to the twelve houses explains how houses are counted from the lagna. The same lordship arithmetic gives the kendra-trikona raja yoga, which runs on the angles and trines instead, and kendradhipati dosha. The other named combinations are listed on the kundli yoga list. In Hindi: विपरीत राजयोग: हर्ष, सरल और विमल योग, हर लग्न के लिए.