Ashtakavarga

What Ashtakavarga is

Most of Jyotisha is qualitative — this planet is exalted, that one is aspected, the lord of the 7th is in the 12th. Ashtakavarga is the tradition’s attempt to put a number on a sign, and that is why people reach for it.

The mechanism is a voting system. Eight contributors each get an opinion about every sign, and where a contributor approves, the sign gets one point — a bindu. Count the points and you have a score.

The eight contributors are the seven grahas — Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn — plus the Lagna. That eighth one is the part people forget, and it is where the name comes from: ashta is eight. Rahu and Ketu do not contribute and have no Ashtakavarga of their own in the classical scheme.

How a bindu is actually earned

For each planet you want an Ashtakavarga of, there is a fixed classical table. It says, for each of the eight contributors, which houses counted from that contributor earn a bindu.

Take Saturn’s Ashtakavarga. The table says Saturn’s contribution to its own Ashtakavarga is houses 3, 5, 6 and 11. So: find Saturn’s sign, count to the 3rd, 5th, 6th and 11th signs from it, and drop a bindu in each. Now do the same for the Sun’s row (1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11 from the Sun), the Moon’s row (3, 6, 11 from the Moon), and so on through all eight contributors including the Lagna.

Every sign now holds between 0 and 8 bindus. Those twelve numbers are Saturn’s Bhinnashtakavarga.

Note what this means: nothing about aspects, dignity, or strength enters here. Ashtakavarga only asks where is each contributor sitting, then applies a lookup table. It is entirely determined by the twelve sign placements — which is both its elegance and its ceiling.

The three layers AstroShruti computes

All three are available. The prastara is the one worth opening when a sign’s score surprises you — it shows you who voted, so you can see whether a sign’s 6 came from the benefics or from Saturn and Mars.

The totals are fixed — this matters

Because the benefic-house tables never change, each planet always donates the same number of bindus, in every chart ever cast:

Your chart cannot have a Sarvashtakavarga totalling 340. If it does, something is wrong. What varies is only how those 337 points scatter across your twelve signs.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about SAV, and the thing most readings quietly ignore. SAV is zero-sum. A sign with 34 bindus has them at the expense of some other sign. There is no chart where every house is strong. When someone tells you your 10th house has a “high” SAV, the only meaningful question is: higher than what, in your chart?

The average sign holds 337 ÷ 12 ≈ 28.08 bindus. The conventional bands — above 30 strong, 25–30 middling, below 25 weak — are read against that average.

Reading it against transits

This is where Ashtakavarga earns its keep, and it is a BAV question, not an SAV one.

When a planet transits a sign, look up that sign in that planet’s own BAV. Saturn moving through a sign holding 6 bindus in Saturn’s BAV is a materially different two and a half years from Saturn moving through a sign holding 1. The same transit, the same sky, two different charts.

Check the sign a planet currently occupies in the Gochar view, then read that sign’s number off the transiting planet’s BAV row.

What Ashtakavarga is not

Worth being blunt, because the numeric look of it invites over-reading:

• It is not a strength measure. That is Shadbala, which is a different calculation with different inputs and can disagree completely. A planet can sit in a high-bindu sign while being weak in every Shadbala component.
• It is not sensitive to degree. Ashtakavarga only reads sign placements, so a planet at 0°01’ of a sign and one at 29°59’ of the same sign produce identical bindus. Your birth time can be off by an hour and — as long as no planet or the Lagna changes sign — your Ashtakavarga will not move at all.
• It has no aspects in it. No drishti, no conjunction weighting, no retrogression. The lookup tables absorbed all of that a thousand years ago and will not tell you their reasoning.

Notes on this feature

• Contributors: the seven grahas plus the Lagna. Nodes excluded.
• Benefic-house tables are the classical Parashari set; the resulting donation totals (48/49/39/54/56/52/39 → 337) match the canonical figures exactly.
• Bindus are computed from sidereal sign placements, so your ayanamsha setting matters only when it pushes a planet across a sign boundary.
• Ashtakavarga is computed on the D1 Rashi chart. It is not run on divisional charts.