Bala (Planetary Strength / Shadbala)

What Shadbala measures

Every chart reading eventually hits the same question: this planet promises something — can it actually deliver? Dignity alone will not answer it. A planet can be in its own sign and still be hemmed in, slow, badly aspected and born at the wrong hour.

Shadbala — shad six, bala strength — is the classical attempt to total that up into one number. Six independent sources of strength, each measured in virupa, added, and divided by 60 to give Rupas.

The number is only half the point. Each planet is then measured against its own required strength, and the ratio is what you read.

The six balas

Sthana Bala — positional

The largest and most composite of the six. Five sub-balas, all computed:

• Uchcha — distance from the planet’s debilitation point, scaled 0–60. A planet at exact exaltation scores 60; at exact debilitation, 0.
• Saptavargaja — a dignity sweep across seven charts: D1, D2, D3, D7, D9, D12 and D30. Moolatrikona scores 45, own sign or exaltation 30, then down through the friendship grades to 1.875 for a bitter enemy’s sign. This is the single heaviest contributor in the whole of Shadbala, and it is the seam where divisional charts and the Maitri Chakra feed strength arithmetic directly.
• Ojayugma — 15 virupa each for the Rashi and Navamsha signs having the right parity. Moon and Venus want even signs; the other five want odd.
• Kendradi — 60 for an angle (1, 4, 7, 10), 30 for a succedent (2, 5, 8, 11), 15 for a cadent.
• Drekkana — 15 virupa if the planet’s gender matches its third of the sign: male planets in the first third, neutral in the second, female in the third.

Dig Bala — directional

Each planet has a direction it is strongest in, expressed as a house from the Lagna: Jupiter and Mercury east (1st), Sun and Mars south (10th), Saturn west (7th), Moon and Venus north (4th). Strength scales smoothly with angular distance from that point, 60 at the point and 0 at the opposite one.

Kala Bala — temporal

The most fiddly, and the reason Shadbala needs your birth time and not just your birth date. Nine sub-balas, all computed:

• Nathonnatha — diurnal planets (Sun, Jupiter, Venus) gain toward noon; nocturnal ones (Moon, Mars, Saturn) toward midnight. Mercury always scores 60.
• Paksha — the Moon’s elongation from the Sun. Benefics gain with a bright Moon, malefics with a dark one. The Moon’s own paksha bala is doubled.
• Tribhaga — the day and the night are each cut in three; the lord of the part you were born in gets 60. Jupiter gets 60 unconditionally.
• Abda — 15 virupa to the lord of the solar year you were born in.
• Masa — 30 virupa to the lord of the solar month you were born in.
• Vara — 45 virupa to the lord of the weekday. Note this uses the Hindu day, which runs sunrise to sunrise, not midnight to midnight.
• Hora — 60 virupa to the lord of the hora you were born in.
• Yuddha — planetary war. See below; it is 0 on almost every chart.
• Ayana — from the planet’s declination, computed from its actual ecliptic latitude. Most planets favour northern declination; the Sun’s ayana bala is doubled.

Abda, Masa, Vara and Hora are one ladder of nested periods — year, month, day, hour — worth 15, 30, 45 and 60 virupa. A planet ruling all four at once collects 150 virupa, two and a half Rupas, from time alone.

How we find the year and month lords. The solar year begins when the Sun enters Aries and each solar month when it enters the next sign; the lord is the weekday lord of the day that ingress fell on. That day is a Hindu day, so an ingress between midnight and sunrise belongs to the previous weekday — which is not a technicality. On our reference chart the solar month began at 02:50 on a Saturday, before sunrise, so the 30 virupa went to Venus (Friday’s lord), not Saturn.

The classical texts also give an arithmetic shortcut for the same two lords, counting days since an epoch and stepping the weekday by 3 per year and 2 per month (a 360-day year of twelve 30-day months). We do not use it, because its answer depends entirely on which epoch you count from, and the published sources do not agree on one — the same birth comes out with different lords under different epochs, with nothing in the result to tell you which you got. The astronomical rule is what the shortcut approximates, so we compute that directly.

Yuddha Bala — planetary war

When two of the five star-planets (Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn) come within one degree of each other, they are at war. The luminaries and the nodes never fight. The winner is the planet further north; the quantum is the difference between the two combatants’ strength-so-far divided by the difference between their apparent disc sizes, added to the victor and subtracted from the vanquished in equal measure.

The disc difference in that denominator is doing real work. Jupiter and Saturn have big discs and similar ones, so a war between them barely moves either; Mercury and Mars have small discs 2.8 arc-seconds apart, so the same strength gap buys a much larger correction. That is the rule as written, and we do not cap it.

Most charts have no planetary war at all, and on those every planet’s Yuddha Bala is exactly 0.

Cheshta Bala — motional

Retrograde planets score the full 60 — motion against the crowd is strength here, not weakness. For direct motion, strength scales inversely with speed: slower is stronger. The Sun and Moon never retrograde, so they borrow: the Sun’s cheshta bala is its ayana bala, the Moon’s is its paksha bala. That substitution is classical.

Naisargika Bala — natural

A constant. 60 ÷ 7 × rank, in the fixed brightness order:

This is identical in every chart ever cast. Saturn is always the weakest planet by nature and there is nothing you can be born under to change it.

Drik Bala — aspectual

Net aspect onto the planet, graded by exact separation. Every drishti arriving at the planet is valued on the classical sputa drishti curve — 0 to 60 virupa, where 60 is a full aspect — then the benefic total minus the malefic total is divided by 4. Drik Bala can be negative, and it is the only one of the six that can subtract from a total.

The grading matters. Drik Bala used to pay a flat ±15 virupa for every aspect it found, which made a Saturn three degrees off an exact 7th worth exactly as much as one twenty-eight degrees away, and made Saturn’s own special 3rd — a full drishti in the classics — worth the same as an ordinary planet’s weak 3rd. It was the one component of the six carrying no information beyond a count. It now reads the real curve, which is the same curve the Graha Drishti atom prints, so the two can never disagree. The strength of a drishti and its listing are one computation.

The pass mark

Compare totals to these, not to each other. Saturn at 6 Rupas has cleared its bar comfortably; Mercury at 6 Rupas has not cleared its own. The ratio column is the honest comparison, and the rank is by total Rupas.

Bhava Bala — strength of the houses

The same idea applied to the twelve houses. Each house totals three things: its lord’s Shadbala (Bhavadhipati, in Rupas — so a house is only as strong as whoever rules it), a directional Bhava Dig component, and Bhava Drishti, the net aspect onto the house.

Bhava Dig Bala depends on the nature of the sign the house’s midpoint falls in, not on whether the house is an angle. Signs sort into four kinds, each strongest in one direction:

Strength falls smoothly from 60 virupa on the ruling cusp to 0 on the opposite one — ten virupa per house — and it is measured cusp to cusp, so unequal houses move it.

One thing worth knowing when you read the table: the kind is read at the house’s midpoint, which is not always in the same sign as the house. If your ascendant is late in its sign, most midpoints fall in the following sign, and the app prints that sign in the Dig nature column so you can see which rashi the classification actually came from.

(If those four words look familiar from Kundli Milaan: they are a different scheme there. Vashya koota uses five kinds and puts Leo on its own as Vanachara. Here Leo is Chatushpada.)

Bhava Drishti is the graded sputa value of every drishti landing on the same midpoint — computed on the same Sripati cusps the Bhava Chalit table uses — rather than a flat count against the whole sign.

What we do not compute

Nothing, now — every classical sub-bala in Shadbala and Bhava Bala is computed.

This section used to list three: Abda Bala, Masa Bala and Yuddha Bala all contributed 0 rather than be faked, and Bhava Dig Bala was a two-value placeholder. All four are now real, and the sections above describe each.

Where we still make a judgement call, we say which one and why rather than hide it:

• The year and month lords come from the actual sankrantis, not from the classical ahargana arithmetic, because that arithmetic needs an epoch the sources disagree about (explained under Kala Bala above).
• Yuddha Bala is uncapped. The classical divisor can produce a large number for a war between two small-disc planets. An uncapped rule that visibly does something surprising is more honest than a silent clamp.
• The 125% benefic / 75% malefic rectification of Drik Bala, described by one source and by neither of the other two we checked, is not applied.

This is why every planet’s result carries its full component breakdown in the app. You can see each of the six balas, the five Sthana sub-balas and the nine Kala sub-balas individually, and check any total yourself.

Notes on this feature

• Computed for the seven grahas only; Rahu and Ketu excluded.
• 1 Rupa = 60 virupa. Totals are reported in Rupas, components in virupa.
• Needs birth time and place: Kala Bala reads the hour, and sunrise/sunset at your birthplace set the tribhaga and hora boundaries.
• Ayana Bala uses each planet’s true ecliptic latitude, not an ecliptic approximation.
• Cheshta Bala for the five taras uses mean-motion ratios, which is an approximation to the classical epicyclic (cheshta kendra) construction.