Dashas (Timing Periods)

Your running dasha is the Vimshottari mahadasha of the planet whose turn it is in a fixed 120-year cycle, and the tool finds it by reading the Moon's sidereal position at the moment of birth.

The nakshatra the Moon occupied names the lord who opens the sequence, and the fraction of that nakshatra the Moon had already crossed says how much of that lord's period was already spent before you were born. The remainder is the period you were born into, and the other eight lords follow it in fixed order.

The nine lords and their spans never change: Ketu 7 years, Venus 20, Sun 6, Moon 10, Mars 7, Rahu 18, Jupiter 16, Saturn 19 and Mercury 17, which sum to 120. Only the starting point moves from chart to chart. The panel at the top of this page prints the mahadasha, antardasha and pratyantardasha in force today, each with the date it begins and the date it ends.

Each mahadasha divides into nine antardashas in the same order, beginning with the mahadasha lord itself, every one of them in proportion to its own span. An antardasha lasts the mahadasha's years multiplied by the sub-lord's years and divided by 120, so inside an 18-year Rahu mahadasha the Rahu antardasha runs 2.7 years and the Sun antardasha 0.9 years.

Applying the same division again produces the pratyantardasha, then the sookshma and the prana level. This page shows three levels by default and will build the tree out to all five on request, since the deeper two multiply the row count and most readers never open them.

The first mahadasha needs one extra step. It did not begin at birth, it began earlier, and you were born partway through it. Its nine sub-periods are therefore cut from the full length of that dasha counted from its true pre-birth start, not from the balance counted forward from your birthday.

Cutting them from the balance displaces every boundary inside the first period and reassigns the sub-lords along with it, which for a Venus or Rahu opening dasha is the first fifteen to eighteen years of the reading. The rule followed here is the one P. V. R. Narasimha Rao states in Vedic Astrology: An Integrated Approach, section 16.3.

Yogini dasha runs a 36-year cycle of eight periods, each associated with a graha: Mangala 1 year, Pingala 2, Dhanya 3, Bhramari 4, Bhadrika 5, Ulka 6, Siddha 7 and Sankata 8. Chara dasha is the Jaimini sign-based system, where the periods belong to rashis rather than to planets and a sign's length is set by counting from that sign to the sign its lord occupies.

The direction of that count is set by the sign's footedness, which BPHS 46.155-156 states as odd and even padas taken in threes from Aries, so the forward-counting set is Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Libra, Scorpio and Sagittarius and the remaining six count backward. Footedness is not sign parity and the two sets differ on Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius. Because the count depends on where each lord actually sits, Chara period lengths vary from chart to chart while Vimshottari spans never do.

Ashtottari dasha totals 108 years across eight lords with Ketu excluded, and its spans are Sun 6, Moon 15, Mars 8, Mercury 17, Saturn 10, Jupiter 19, Rahu 12 and Venus 21. Its starting lord comes from the Ardradi arcs, which allocate unequal contiguous blocks of 4, 3, 4, 3, 3, 3, 4 and 3 nakshatras rather than one nakshatra per lord.

Kalachakra dasha, given at BPHS chapter 46 verses 52 to 95, works differently again: the Moon's nakshatra selects a savya or apasavya pattern and its pada selects one of four nine-sign sequences, whose totals are the paramayus figures of 100, 85, 83 and 86 years.

Three choices move a dasha date, and each of them is a setting rather than a mistake. The first is the ayanamsha, the offset between the tropical and sidereal zodiacs, because it decides which nakshatra the Moon falls in and therefore which lord opens the sequence; this page uses Lahiri.

The second is the length of a year: this engine uses 365.25 days everywhere, while some texts and programs prefer the 360-day savana year for nakshatra dashas, which shortens every period by roughly one and a half per cent and compounds across a century.

The third is the first-mahadasha rule described above. A program that cuts the opening period's antardashas from the post-birth balance prints different sub-lords, not merely different dates, for anyone born well into their first dasha. Where two results differ by days rather than by years, the cause is almost always the recorded birth time or the timezone rather than the method.

This engine is a clock, not an oracle. It says which lord governs which interval and to what depth, deterministically, from the Moon's longitude and the birth moment. Any reading laid over that interval belongs on the interpretive surfaces of the site, where a claim carries the name of the text it is drawn from and the chapter it sits in.

Positions are computed to sub-arcsecond precision, so the astronomy is not the limiting factor here. The birth time is. A four-minute error moves the Moon by about two arcminutes, which is immaterial at a mahadasha boundary but can matter at the pratyantardasha and sookshma levels, where periods are measured in days rather than years. If your recorded time is an estimate, treat the deepest levels as approximate.