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Your Janam Kundali: the rising sign, the nine graha positions, the twelve bhavas and their lords, and the Vimshottari dasha schedule — with the arithmetic behind each of them set out.
What it is
What is a Kundli?
A Kundli (also written Janam Patrika, Janam Kundali or birth chart) is a record of one sky at one instant, seen from one place on the earth. It states where each of the nine grahas stood along the ecliptic, which of the twelve rashis was rising in the east, and therefore how the twelve bhavas of the chart are laid out. Everything else — the nakshatra, the bhava lords, the dasha schedule — follows from those two things by arithmetic.
It is worth separating the chart from the reading, because they fail in different ways. A chart can be wrong only if the birth data is wrong or the ephemeris is wrong. A reading can be wrong for a dozen further reasons, and it is the part a person does rather than a program. What follows is mostly about the chart: what is in it, what each part of it is computed from, and how much of it your birth record actually pins down.
Lagna (Ascendant)
The rashi rising in the east at the birth moment. It is the only quantity in the chart that depends on where you were standing.
Navgraha Positions
Positions of all 9 grahas: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Rahu, Ketu.
Dasha & Antardasha
The Vimshottari schedule, a 120-year sequence of nine periods started by the pada the Moon occupies at birth.
12 Houses Analysis
Twelve departments of life, each owned by whichever graha rules the rashi that falls in it from your lagna.
Yogas & Doshas
Named combinations the classical texts single out, from Raja Yoga to Mangal Dosha. Each one needs a whole chart, not a house number.
Remedies
Gemstones, mantras and observances the tradition attaches to a graha. No remedy on this site is given a period in which it takes effect.
The arithmetic
Three inputs, six layers, and how long each one holds
The commonest question about a birth chart is not what it means. It is whether the birth time on the certificate is good enough. That question has no single answer, because the layers of a chart are computed from motions of wildly different speeds, and each layer is therefore sensitive to a different amount of error. Saturn takes 29.46 years to go round the zodiac. The Moon takes 27.32 days. A birth time an hour out cannot move the first and can easily move the last.
The table below sets out the layers in the order of how long each holds its value, longest first. Every figure in the middle column is a transit cycle from this site's rashi table divided by whatever the layer divides the zodiac into — twelve rashis, 27 nakshatras or 108 padas — so the right-hand column is arithmetic rather than an editorial estimate.
| Layer of the chart | Computed from | Holds the same value for about |
|---|---|---|
| Saturn's rashi | a circuit of 29.46 years, divided by the twelve rashis | 2.5 years |
| Jupiter's rashi | a circuit of 11.86 years, divided by the twelve rashis | 361 days |
| Rahu and Ketu's rashi | a shared circuit of 18.6 years (retrograde), divided by twelve | 566 days |
| Mars's rashi | a circuit of 687 days, divided by twelve | 57 days |
| The Sun's rashi | one year of ecliptic longitude, divided by twelve | 30 days |
| The Moon's rashi | a circuit of 27.32 days, divided by twelve | 2 days |
| The Moon's nakshatra | the same circuit divided by 27 strips of 13°20′ | 24 hours |
| The Moon's pada, and the dasha balance it fixes | the same circuit divided by 108 quarters of 3°20′ | 6.1 hours |
| The lagna, and with it all twelve bhavas | the rotation of the earth against the ecliptic, seen from one place | 120 minutes on average, and never evenly |
Read downward, that table is a ladder of required precision. The three slow grahas are settled by the date alone; nobody needs a birth time to know which rashi Saturn was in. The Sun and the Moon need the day. And then the bottom three rows change the problem completely. The Moon crosses one nakshatra in roughly 24 hours and one pada in roughly 6.1 hours — which means a birth time wrong by an afternoon can put the Moon in a different pada, and the pada is what fixes the balance of the mahadasha a life starts in. A dasha schedule built on the wrong pada is not slightly off. It starts in the wrong period.
The lagna is the most demanding row of all, and it is the only one that needs the birthplace as well as the clock. Across a full sidereal day the twelve rashis share 1436 minutes of rising time between them, so 120 minutes a sign is the average — but the twelve do not take equal turns, and how unequal they are depends on the latitude of the birthplace. The lagna calculator prints the full set of rising times for a chosen city and explains why the familiar two-hours-a-sign rule holds only at the equator.
Two of the nine grahas are deliberately absent from the ladder. This site's rashi table marks Mercury and Venus as mean-motion-only, because seen from the earth they turn retrograde and their apparent speed through a rashi varies by weeks. A single average figure for them would look like the others and would not mean the same thing, so it is left out rather than quietly printed.
None of this makes an uncertain birth time useless. It tells you which parts of a chart survive the uncertainty and which do not, which is a more useful thing to know. Where a recorded time is doubtful, the traditional response is rectification — adjusting the time against events that have already happened — and that is a job for an astrologer working with a person, not for a form.
The fixed input
The twelve bhavas and their karakas
Of the four things the classical method reads into a bhava, three come out of the chart and one does not. The rashi in a bhava, the grahas standing in it and the drishti reaching it all depend on a birth moment. The karaka does not. It is the graha the tradition treats as the natural significator of a subject — the Moon for the mother, Venus for a wife, Saturn for longevity — and it is the same in every kundli ever cast.
That makes the karaka the one input in a reading with no birth-time risk attached to it at all, which is exactly why the tradition leans on it when a chart is ambiguous. It is also the input most often skipped by software, because it cannot be computed from anything: it has to be looked up. The twelve are below, with the Sanskrit name of each bhava and the gloss this site's bhava table puts on that name.
| Bhava | What the name means | Natural karaka |
|---|---|---|
| 1stतनु भाव | Tanu means body — the house of the self | Sun, and the Lagna lord itself |
| 2ndधन भाव | Dhana means wealth — accumulated, not earned | Jupiter for wealth, Mercury for speech |
| 3rdसहज भाव | Sahaja means born together — siblings | Mars for courage, Mercury for communication |
| 4thसुख भाव | Sukha means comfort — happiness at rest | Moon for the mother and the mind |
| 5thपुत्र भाव | Putra means child — also the fruit of past merit | Jupiter, the Putra Karaka |
| 6thशत्रु भाव | Shatru means enemy — obstacles to be overcome | Mars and Saturn for conflict and disease |
| 7thकलत्र भाव | Kalatra means spouse — the house of the other | Venus for the spouse, Jupiter for the husband in a woman's chart |
| 8thआयु भाव | Ayu means lifespan — the house of endings and depths | Saturn for longevity |
| 9thभाग्य भाव | Bhagya means fortune — luck that is not earned | Jupiter for dharma and the guru, Sun for the father |
| 10thकर्म भाव | Karma means action — visible work in the world | Saturn for profession, Sun and Mercury for status |
| 11thलाभ भाव | Labha means gain — the house of fulfilled desire | Jupiter for gains |
| 12thव्यय भाव | Vyaya means expenditure — and moksha, final release | Saturn for loss, Ketu for moksha |
Put side by side, the column reads as an assignment rather than twelve separate notes, and two things about it only become visible once it is. The first is that eight of the nine grahas are natural karaka of at least one bhava, and one of them is karaka of none: Rahu. The scheme predates the treatment of the nodes as full grahas, and the karaka list is one of the places where that shows. The busiest is Jupiter (गुरु), named for five of the twelve — the 2nd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 11th.
The second is a hedge worth noticing rather than tidying away. One of the twelve rows — the 1st — names a fixed graha and then add the lagna lord as well, which is not fixed at all: it is whichever graha rules the rising rashi, so it differs from chart to chart. That row is therefore half universal and half personal, and it is the reason the first bhava is the one place where the karaka input carries the same birth-time risk as everything else.
What a karaka does not do is settle anything on its own. The tradition's method is corroboration: a matter is read as established when the bhava, its lord and its karaka agree, and as unclear when they do not. One of the three saying something on its own is a hypothesis. The twelve bhavas hub is where the classification families live, and where each of the twelve ascendants is worked through sign by sign; neither is repeated here.
One column of this site's bhava table is left out here on purpose. Each bhava also carries a limb of the Kalapurusha, the body mapped onto the zodiac in the abstract. Printed next to a reading it starts to look like a diagnosis, and a chart does not deliver one. That correspondence is documented on the bhava pages as the classical scheme it is, and it is never joined to a named condition anywhere on this site.
The nine
What separates the nine grahas in a chart
A kundli lists nine grahas and gives each of them a rashi and a bhava, which makes them look like nine interchangeable tokens. They are not. They differ in how far from the Sun they can stand before a reading discounts them, in how many rashis they own, in which weekday belongs to them, and in how far their glance reaches. Those differences are what a reading is actually made of, and none of them is visible from a chart drawing.
Two of the nine are different in kind rather than degree. Rahu and Ketu own no rashi at all — counted off the rulership column of this site's rashi table rather than taken on trust — which is what the classical vocabulary means by calling them chhaya grahas, shadows rather than discs. They are the two points where the Moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic, they are always half a zodiac apart, and the weekday column below records for them a day of observance rather than a lordship, because the seven-day week has seven lords and there are nine grahas.
| Graha | Rashis owned | Vara | Combust within |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sunसूर्य · Surya | 1 | Sunday | does not combust |
| Moonचन्द्र · Chandra | 1 | Monday | 12° |
| Marsमंगल · Mangal | 2 | Tuesday | 17° |
| Mercuryबुध · Budh | 2 | Wednesday | 14°, 12° retrograde |
| Jupiterगुरु · Guru | 2 | Thursday | 11° |
| Venusशुक्र · Shukra | 2 | Friday | 10°, 8° retrograde |
| Saturnशनि · Shani | 2 | Saturday | 15° |
| Rahuराहु · Rahu | 0 (chhaya graha) | Saturday (observance) | does not combust |
| Ketuकेतु · Ketu | 0 (chhaya graha) | Tuesday (observance) | does not combust |
The last column is the one most often flattened into a single number, and the table shows why that will not do. The orbs are read out of the graha table's own wording and then sorted, so the widest and the narrowest are found rather than remembered: Mars carries the widest at 17° and Venus the narrowest at 10°, a spread of 7 degrees across six grahas. Two of them — Mercury and Venus — carry a tighter orb when retrograde than when direct, so for those two the direction of travel changes the answer as well as the distance.
Three of the nine never combust at all, and for three different reasons: Sun, Rahu and Ketu. The first is the Sun itself, which is the thing being stood too close to. The other two are the nodes, and the field's own wording is worth keeping: the node is the cause of an eclipse rather than its victim. Combustion is a statement about proximity in longitude and nothing more — it is not a verdict on a graha, and whether it changes a reading depends on the rest of the chart.
Drishti divides the nine unevenly too. Three of them — Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — glance at bhavas beyond the seventh from where they stand; four carry the seventh alone; and for the remaining two, Rahu and Ketu, the sources themselves disagree, with many later authorities lending them a borrowed aspect and the classical texts giving them none. Those three groups are counted from the graha table at build time and checked to add up to nine. The forward table of which distance each graha reaches is set out once on the houses hub and is not repeated here. Sign-by-sign dignity, gemstones and mantras for each graha live on the nine grahas hub.
The clock
The nakshatra layer, and the 120-year clock it starts
The rashi layer of a chart divides the ecliptic into twelve arcs of thirty degrees. The nakshatra layer divides the same circle into 27 arcs of 13°20′, each of those into 4 padas of 3°20′, and so the whole circle into 108 quarters. The two divisions are genuinely independent, and the thing to know about them is that they do not nest. Nine of the 27 nakshatras straddle a rashi boundary — Krittika, Mrigashira, Punarvasu, Uttara Phalguni, Chitra, Vishakha, Uttara Ashadha, Dhanishta and Purva Bhadrapada — which is why knowing your Moon's nakshatra does not always tell you its rashi, and why the two are asked for separately.
The 108 padas do divide evenly into the twelve rashis, at 9 padas each, and that is not an accident of the numbering: a pada and a division of a rashi into 9 parts are the same arc, which is what the ninefold divisional chart is built on. So the two grids agree at the pada and part company at the nakshatra, and that is where nearly all the confusion between them starts.
What the nakshatra layer carries that the rashi layer does not is a lord for the dasha sequence. Each of the nine lords owns exactly three of the 27 nakshatras — counted here, not assumed — so the nine-lord order repeats three times around the zodiac. The nakshatra the Moon occupies at birth names the mahadasha a life begins in, and the fraction of that nakshatra the Moon has already crossed decides how much of it is already spent. A birth begins with the remainder of a period, never with the whole of it.
| Dasha lord | Mahadasha | The three nakshatras it owns |
|---|---|---|
| Ketuकेतु | 7 years | Ashwini अश्विनी, Magha मघा, Mula मूल |
| Venusशुक्र | 20 years | Bharani भरणी, Purva Phalguni पूर्व फाल्गुनी, Purva Ashadha पूर्वाषाढ़ा |
| Sunसूर्य | 6 years | Krittika कृत्तिका, Uttara Phalguni उत्तर फाल्गुनी, Uttara Ashadha उत्तराषाढ़ा |
| Moonचन्द्र | 10 years | Rohini रोहिणी, Hasta हस्त, Shravana श्रवण |
| Marsमंगल | 7 years | Mrigashira मृगशिरा, Chitra चित्रा, Dhanishta धनिष्ठा |
| Rahuराहु | 18 years | Ardra आर्द्रा, Swati स्वाती, Shatabhisha शतभिषा |
| Jupiterगुरु | 16 years | Punarvasu पुनर्वसु, Vishakha विशाखा, Purva Bhadrapada पूर्व भाद्रपद |
| Saturnशनि | 19 years | Pushya पुष्य, Anuradha अनुराधा, Uttara Bhadrapada उत्तर भाद्रपद |
| Mercuryबुध | 17 years | Ashlesha आश्लेषा, Jyeshtha ज्येष्ठा, Revati रेवती |
| Nine lords | 120 years | 27 nakshatras, 108 padas |
The total in the last row is added up in the render rather than typed, and it is the reason the system carries the name it does: the nine mahadashas sum to 120 years, a notional full span, so the sequence covers a life once and does not repeat within it. The lengths are far from equal — Venus runs 20 years and Sun runs 6, a factor of more than three — so where a birth falls in the cycle matters as much as which lord it falls under. Two people born a fortnight apart can start life in different mahadashas of very different lengths.
A cycle order fixed by nakshatra ownership also means the sequence after your first period is not a matter of interpretation. It is the same nine-lord order for everybody, entered at a different point. The dasha calculator works out the entry point and the sub-periods from a birth record, and the hub for the 27 nakshatras covers each strip in its own right — its gana, its deity, its symbol and the pada syllables.
One pattern in the table is easy to miss and turns out to be exact. The six nakshatras the tradition calls Gandmool — the junction strips at the meeting of a fire and a water rashi, for which a birth attracts a specific observance — are not scattered across the lords. They are the entire holdings of two of the nine, Ketu and Mercury, and no part of anybody else's. That is compared set against set at build time here rather than asserted, and it is a tidier fact than a list of six names suggests: Gandmool is a statement about two lordships, not about six arbitrary strips.
A dasha is a period, not an event, and this page attaches no outcome to any of them. Which mahadasha is running is one input a reading weighs against the bhava, its lord and its karaka; on its own it forecasts nothing, and no period on this site is offered as a window in which to act.
The Method
How to read your Kundli
Identify Your Lagna (Ascendant)
The first house of your Kundli represents your Lagna or rising sign. This is the zodiac sign that was rising on the eastern horizon at your birth time and location, and it is what fixes where every other bhava begins. Nothing else in the chart can be placed until it is settled.
Note the Planets in Each House
Each of the 12 bhavas covers a department of life, and a graha standing in one — or reaching it by drishti — is one of the four inputs the tradition weighs for that bhava. It is one input of four, which is why a single placement is a starting point for a reading rather than a conclusion from it.
Grade Each Planet's Placement
The classical scheme grades a graha by the rashi it occupies: its own, its moolatrikona, a friend's, a neutral's or an enemy's, with exaltation and debilitation at the two ends. Combustion, retrogression and directional strength are separate gradings again. The grade changes how much weight a reading gives the graha, and several of the gradings routinely disagree with each other in the same chart.
Identify the Named Combinations
Yogas and doshas are configurations the classical texts single out and give a name to, from Raja Yoga to Mangal Dosha. Every one of them is defined over several parts of a chart at once, so none can be established from a house number or a single placement, and cancellations are as much a part of the doctrine as the combinations themselves.
Locate Yourself in the Dasha Sequence
The Vimshottari sequence divides a notional 120-year span into nine periods in a fixed order, entered at the point the Moon's nakshatra sets. Knowing which mahadasha and sub-period is running tells you which lord's significations the rest of the chart is currently being read through.
The limits
How a reading corroborates itself, and what it cannot decide
Everything above describes structure, and structure is where a chart stops. It is worth being exact about the join between the two, because the gap between what a kundli contains and what it is often asked for is where most of the harm in this subject happens.
The method the classical texts describe is corroboration across independent inputs. A matter is read as supported when the bhava, the graha that owns it, the grahas reaching it and the natural karaka of the subject point the same way, and as unresolved when they do not — which, in real charts, is most of the time. The same placement in two charts is read differently not because the reading is arbitrary but because the other three inputs differ: a graha in the tenth from one lagna owns different bhavas than the same graha in the tenth from another, and owning a difficult bhava and a fortunate one at once is ordinary rather than exceptional. This is the reason a page cannot hand you a reading from a house number, and the reason any list of what a placement “means” is a list of hypotheses to test against the rest of a chart.
It is also why the honest answer to a great many questions about a chart is that the chart does not settle it. Where the inputs conflict, the tradition's own instruction is to weigh them, not to pick the one that agrees with what was hoped for. An astrologer who tells you a chart is unambiguous on a contested question is telling you something about their reading, not about your chart.
Four things a kundli on this site is not, stated plainly rather than buried. It is not a medical instrument: no chart on this site is joined to a named condition, no placement is offered as a symptom, and a question about your health belongs to a doctor. It is not financial advice: nothing here should be used to decide about money, and no dasha or transit is presented as a window in which to buy, sell or commit. It is not a basis for a decision about another person — a chart is not a reason to accept or reject someone, to withhold care, or to make a choice about anyone else's wellbeing on their behalf. And it is not a remedy schedule: where this site records the gemstones, mantras and observances the tradition attaches to a graha, none of them is given a period in which it takes effect, because the tradition does not give one and inventing it would be the whole problem.
What a kundli is good for is narrower and more durable than any of that. It is an accurate record of a sky, a vocabulary for talking about a life in terms of structure rather than incident, and a schedule that tells you which part of that structure is currently in view. Read that way it is not a set of predictions to be checked off. It is a frame, and the parts of it that survive an imprecise birth time are exactly the parts the table further up this page identifies.
On the arithmetic itself: the graha longitudes behind every chart on this site are computed from published astronomical algorithms, converted to the sidereal zodiac with a Lahiri-type ayanamsa, and checked against NASA/JPL's DE421 ephemeris. DE421 is the reference the output is checked against rather than the source it comes from, and the comparison is documented alongside the free kundli tool rather than summarised here.
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FAQ
Common questions
What is Kundli?
Kundli (also called Janam Patrika or birth chart) is a Vedic astrology map of where the nine grahas stood, and which sign was rising in the east, at the date, time and place of a birth. It is a record of a sky rather than a statement about a person: the reading is what an astrologer builds on top of it, and the two are worth keeping separate.
How is Kundli made?
Three inputs and nothing else: date of birth, time of birth, and place of birth. The date and time fix the positions of the grahas along the ecliptic. The place adds a horizon, which is what turns those positions into twelve houses. On this site the longitudes come from published astronomical algorithms, are converted to the sidereal zodiac with a Lahiri-type ayanamsa, and are checked against NASA/JPL's DE421 ephemeris — DE421 being the reference the output is compared with, not the source it is generated from.
What is actually in a Kundli?
Six layers, each computed from the same three inputs: the rashi each graha occupies, the nakshatra and pada the Moon occupies, the rising sign, the twelve bhavas that follow from it, the lord of each of those bhavas, and the Vimshottari dasha schedule that the Moon's pada starts. A chart is a structure, not a verdict. It is not a medical opinion, not financial advice, and not grounds for a decision about another person; where any of those are at stake the relevant professional is the right person to ask.
How precise does my birth time have to be?
It depends entirely on which layer you are asking about. Saturn's sign holds for roughly two and a half years, so the date alone settles it. The Moon's sign holds for a bit over two days. The Moon's nakshatra changes about every twenty-four hours and its pada about every six, and the pada is what sets the balance of the first mahadasha — so a birth time wrong by an afternoon can shift a dasha schedule. The rising sign is the most demanding of all: it needs the minute, and it needs the birthplace.
Is free Kundli accurate?
The arithmetic is as accurate as the birth data it is given, and it is checked against an independent ephemeris rather than asserted. What a free chart does not include is judgement: which of several competing factors in a chart to weigh first is the part a person does, and it is why a printed chart and a reading are different products.
Why does a Kundli need the place of birth and not only the date and time?
Because the place is what supplies a horizon. Date and time alone fix where the nine grahas stood along the ecliptic, which is enough to settle every graha's rashi, the Moon's nakshatra and pada, and therefore the Vimshottari schedule. What none of it settles is which degree of the zodiac was on the eastern horizon at that moment — and that is the rising sign. Without a birthplace there is no rising sign, and without a rising sign there are no twelve bhavas for anything to be placed in. Two births in the same minute at different latitudes share all nine planetary positions and can still differ in the rising sign, and therefore in which bhava each of those grahas falls.
What is a karaka, and why does it not change between charts?
A karaka is the graha the tradition treats as the natural significator of a matter — the Moon for the mother, Venus for the spouse, Saturn for longevity. It is assigned to the subject rather than derived from a chart, so it is identical in every kundli ever cast, which makes it the one input in a reading that carries no birth-time risk at all. The table on this page sets out all twelve.
What is the difference between my nakshatra and my rashi?
A rashi is one of 12 thirty-degree divisions; a nakshatra is one of 27 divisions of 13°20′. They do not nest: 9 of the 27 cross a rashi boundary, so knowing your Moon's nakshatra does not always tell you its rashi and vice versa. The nakshatra also carries something the rashi does not — a dasha lord, which is what starts the Vimshottari clock.
Why is the Vimshottari cycle 120 years?
Because the nine dasha lengths were fixed at figures that sum to 120 — Ketu 7, Venus 20, Sun 6, Moon 10, Mars 7, Rahu 18, Jupiter 16, Saturn 19 and Mercury 17. Each lord owns exactly three of the 27 nakshatras, so the nine-lord sequence repeats three times around the zodiac, and the lord of the nakshatra the Moon occupies at birth is the mahadasha a life begins in — with only the unelapsed remainder of it, not the whole.
What does combustion mean in a Kundli?
A graha too close to the Sun in longitude is read as combust, and the orb differs by graha rather than being one figure: Mars carries the widest at 17°, Venus the narrowest at 10°, and Mercury and Venus each have a tighter orb when retrograde. Three of the nine never combust at all. Whether it matters in a given chart is a question for the whole chart.
Is Kundli Milan part of a Kundli, or a separate reading?
Separate, and it needs two charts rather than one. Kundli Milan, also called Guna Milan or Ashtakoot matching, compares two birth charts across eight kootas on a scale of 36 points. Both charts have to be built from accurate birth data first, since several of the eight kootas are read from the Moon's nakshatra and pada. The dedicated page walks through all eight.
Is this page available in Hindi?
Yes. /hi/kundli/ is the Hindi counterpart of this page and the two are declared alternates of each other. It is a companion rather than a mirror: the two pages cover the same ground and neither is a translation of the other.
Go deeper
What each of the twelve bhavas and nine grahas is read for.
All eight kootas of the 36-point Ashtakoot scale, and the doshas that override a score.
Chart, dasha timeline, and the ephemeris comparison behind the numbers.
Rising sign for a birthplace, with the twelve rising times for that latitude.
The natural zodiac, the classical families, and the rashi in every bhava for all twelve lagnas.
Rulership, exaltation, debilitation, gemstone and mantra for each.
Spans, ganas, padas and the dasha each birth strip begins with.
Where a birth enters the Vimshottari sequence, and the sub-periods from there.
Hindi counterpart of this page: जन्म कुंडली.