Zodiac Compatibility Calculator

Ashtakoota Milan distributes 36 guna across eight tests, and they are not equal: the lightest carries 1 guna and the heaviest 8. That spread is the first thing a reader needs and the hardest to find, because a page that names one koota in isolation tends to describe it as the important one. The maxima below are read from ashtakoot.js, the module that actually scores a match, and the build fails if the eight of them stop adding to 36.

The last column is the one that decides what this tool may print. It was measured rather than assumed: the eight kootas were run over all 11,664 ordered pairs of the 108 nakshatra padas, each result filed under the pair of Moon signs the two padas fall in, and each koota then checked for whether it returns a single result across all 81 pada combinations inside a given pair of signs. A koota that does is fixed by the signs. A koota that does not cannot be reported from two dropdowns without inventing the part that is missing.

three kootas — Varna, Graha Maitri and Bhakoot — hold their result in all 144 combinations, and their guna add to 13. That is where the 13 in the card above comes from; it is not a figure chosen for this page. At the other end, Gana and Nadi hold their result in no of the 144, which is as pada-dependent as a koota gets: there is no pair of signs for which either of them is decided.

The middle of that column is the interesting part, and it corrects something this page used to say. Vashya is fixed for 118 of the 144 combinations and Tara for 36, so for most selections rather more than 13 guna happen not to depend on the padas at all. 13 is therefore the floor that holds for every selection, not a ceiling on what two signs can ever fix. The tool still reports only the three: a koota that appears for one pair of signs and vanishes for the next would make the tool's own scope move with the input, and a reader has no way to tell which case they are in from the card alone.

Two of the eight are marked as graded ranges — Yoni and Vashya — meaning the classical tables disagree about the middle values and ashtakoot.js returns a low and a high rather than picking one. Neither of those is among the three this tool reports, so nothing on the card is a range for that reason. The one range the card does show is Varna, and it is a range for an entirely different reason, set out further down.

Bhakoot is decided by mutual distance: count from the first sign to the second, count back the other way, and the pair of numbers names an axis. Because the two counts always sum to 14 there are only 7 axes for 12 signs, which is why a table of 7 rows can describe all 144 selections. Counting one way only would not do it — the 2/12 axis and the 6/8 axis both have a near side and a far side, and the classical readings of the two positions differ.

The last column is not flat, and the reason is structural rather than astrological. 1/1 and 7/7 are the axes a sign forms with itself and with its opposite, so each of them can only be reached 12 ways — one per sign. The other 5 come in near-side and far-side halves and are reached 24 ways each. Adding up, the three axes that score nothing on Bhakoot — Dwirdwadash dosha, Navpancham dosha and Shadashtak dosha — account for 72 of the 144 selections, which is exactly half of them. A Bhakoot dosha is not a rare event, and a page that treats one as a warning has to explain why it is warning about half its own grid.

The grid below is the axis label for every ordered selection, and the label is all it carries. There is no guna in the cells and no colour on the ones that score zero, because a shaded cell in a compatibility grid is a match-strength reading whatever the key at the bottom says. Look the label up in the table above. The grid is symmetric about its diagonal — all 144 cells agree with their mirror image — because the axis is defined from both counts at once.

Graha Maitri is the largest single stake two signs can settle, and it is not read from the signs directly. It is read from their lords. The 12 rashis are owned by 7 grahas, so most of them own two: Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn each hold a pair, and Sun holds only Leo and Moon holds only Cancer. All 12 of those assignments were checked against the ruler field in signs.js, which the horoscope and rashi pages are written from, and the two agree.

The table below is the natural friendship of those 7 grahas, read across the row: the row graha regards the column graha as friend, neutral or enemy. It is deliberately not a symmetric table, and that is the whole reason the koota counts both directions.

Of the 21 pairs of distinct grahas in that table, 11 are read differently in the two directions. Sun counts Mercury a neutral while Mercury counts Sun a friend, and there are ten further pairs like it. That is why Graha Maitri does not have a single grade for “friendly”: a mutual friendship and a one-sided one are different results in the classical tables, and the half-guna and one-guna outcomes exist precisely to hold the one-sided cases.

Two details in that table are worth reading on their own. Moon is the only one of the 7 with no natural enemy at all, which matters more here than anywhere else on this site, because Ashtakoota reads the Moon and the Moon is that graha. At the other end, Saturn counts the most grahas as enemies — three of them — and rules Capricorn and Aquarius, so selections involving those signs meet the low end of this koota more often than the rest. Read that as a description of the table, not as a forecast about anybody born under them.

This site holds that friendship table twice — once in compatibility.js, which the calculator and the 66 sign-pair pages read, and once inside ashtakoot.js, which scores the full eight-koota match. Two copies of one table is a drift waiting to happen, so they are compared at build time. All 49 ordered cells agree. Each graha's declared neutral list also matches exactly what is left after its friends and enemies are removed, for all 7.

Varna is the lightest koota at 1 guna and the only one on the card that comes back as a range. It follows the element of the Moon sign, which sorts the 12 rashis into 4 groups of 3, and it ranks those groups.

The rule is one-directional: the koota asks that the groom's varna not rank below the bride's. A sign pair has no bride and no groom in it, so there are selections for which the answer depends entirely on information the two dropdowns do not hold, and the honest output for those is both values. Counting them: 36 of the 144 ordered selections put both signs at the same rank, and those cannot move whichever way the roles fall. The remaining 108 can, and they are the ones the card returns as a range.

That figure is derived twice on purpose. 108 is what the varna ranks give when you compare the two elements, and 108 is what the koota engine gives when you swap the two people over the whole sweep and count the selections whose result changes. The build throws if those two numbers ever stop matching. Of the three kootas this tool reports, Varna is the only one that moves on a swap; Graha Maitri and Bhakoot give the same reading either way, since one counts in both directions and the other reads a mutual relationship.

Varna is not the only directional koota in the eight, though it is the only directional one two signs can reach. Gana sorts the nakshatras into three temperaments — Deva, Manushya and Rakshasa — and of the 9 ordered combinations of those, 4 score differently depending on which partner holds which. Swapping the two people over the whole sweep changes the result of two of the eight — Gana and Varna — so a page that describes Varna as the sole asymmetric koota has undercounted.

Bhakoot carries 7 guna and awards them whole or not at all: four of the 7 axes take the full amount and three take none, with nothing in between. The three that take none carry names of their own — Dwirdwadash dosha at 2/12, Navpancham dosha at 5/9 and Shadashtak dosha at 6/8 — and between them they cover 72 of the 144 ordered selections.

The classical texts state two exceptions that cancel a Bhakoot dosha, and both of them turn on the sign lords rather than on anything further in the chart, which means both can be checked from the two Moon signs alone. The first is the two signs sharing a lord. The second is the two lords being mutual friends in the table above. Counted over the 72 selections that score zero: 6 share a lord, 28 have mutually friendly lords, 34 meet one of the two on the face of it, and 38 meet neither.

Read those numbers as conditions met, because that is what they are. ashtakoot.js keeps the koota at zero whether an exception applies or not, on the grounds that cancelling a dosha is a classical judgement about the dosha and not a re-scoring of the test — and this page follows it. A met condition is not a pass and an unmet one is not a rejection; what it changes is whether the question can be settled from two signs or has to go to the rest of the chart.

The shared-lord cases are worth naming because there are so few of them. 5 pairs of rashis share a lord, and only three of those land on a forbidden distance: Aries and Scorpio under Mars, at 6/8, Taurus and Libra under Venus, at 6/8 and Capricorn and Aquarius under Saturn, at 2/12. The other two — Gemini and Virgo and Sagittarius and Pisces — sit on 4/10 and take the koota in full, so the exception never comes up for them.

The five kootas this tool leaves out carry 23 guna between them, and the heaviest of the eight is among them: Nadi, at 8 guna, is the one koota with nothing heavier above it. That superlative is derived here from the maxima rather than typed, because the same claim was made for a lighter koota on several pages of this site before the helper existed to check it.

Beyond the kootas, ashtakoot.js keeps its own list of what the system never looks at. These are the classical readings an astrologer works from that no guna count reflects, each stated there as an omission rather than as a factor to weigh:

• The seventh house of either chart, its lord, and any planet sitting in it — the house of marriage itself contributes nothing to the 36 guna.
• Venus and Mars, which between them carry most of what an astrologer reads about attraction, desire and marital friction.
• Mangal Dosha. It is checked separately and is not one of the eight kootas, despite being the objection families raise most often.
• The running Vimshottari dasha of either partner, which decides when a marriage is favoured rather than whether the pair matches.
• Every planet's strength, aspect and dignity — Ashtakoot uses only the Moon, so two people with identical Moons score identically no matter what the rest of their charts say.

That list is the reason this page treats a guna count as the output of one specific test rather than as a summary of two people. For a reading of the remaining kootas against both actual charts, our expert astrologers work from birth details rather than signs. For the arithmetic on its own, the Kundli Matching tool takes both birth charts and computes all eight, and if you do not know your rashi the moon sign calculator works it out from a date, time and place.