Divisional Charts (Shodashvarga)

What a divisional chart actually is

A varga — a divisional chart — is built from one rule, and it is a much simpler rule than the mystique around it suggests:

Cut each sign into N equal parts. Work out which part a planet’s degree falls in. Map that part to a sign. That is the planet’s sign in the D-N chart.

Nothing else changes. The birth moment is the same, the longitudes are the same, the planets are the same. What changes is resolution. In D1 a planet occupies a 30° sign; in D9 it occupies a 3°20’ slice of that sign; in D60 it occupies half a degree. The finer the cut, the more the chart depends on your birth time being right — which is the honest reason D60 is both the most prized and the least trustworthy chart in anyone’s collection.

The consequence practitioners care about: a planet can look excellent in the Rashi chart and land in a hostile sign in D9. Both are true. The varga is where the promise of D1 gets tested.

The Shodashvarga — the sixteen

Shodasha is sixteen. These are the sixteen AstroShruti’s Divisional Charts tab computes, in the order it renders them, with the classical subject of each:

Note what is not in that list: D5, D6, D8, D11. That is deliberate and it is not an omission — Parashara names sixteen vargas, and those four are not among them. Our Shodashvarga tab holds the line at the classical sixteen. (The four do exist in our engine, with the widely-used “Parashara method” rules, and they appear in the extended series below.)

Not every varga is built the same way

The rules are not one family. It is worth knowing which kind you are looking at, because it explains why some vargas behave oddly:

• Counted from the sign itself — D12 and D60 simply count their parts forward from the natal sign. So does D1, trivially.
• Counted from a start sign chosen by parity — D7 and D10 start from the sign for odd signs and from the 7th or 9th for even ones. D24 starts from Leo or Cancer, D40 from Aries or Libra.
• Counted from a start sign chosen by movability or element — D16, D20 and D45 key off movable/fixed/dual; D9 and D27 key off fire/earth/air/water.
• Fixed destination lists — D2 Hora is the extreme case: it maps only to Cancer and Leo. Every planet in your Hora chart sits in one of two signs. This is correct, not a bug, and it surprises people every time.
• Unequal divisions — D30 alone does not divide evenly. Its five segments are ruled by the five non-luminaries (Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury, Venus) and have different widths, with the odd-sign order mirrored for even signs. The Sun and Moon rule nothing in D30.

Vargottama

If a planet occupies the same sign in D1 and D9, it is vargottama — “highest in the varga” — and is read as unusually firm: its D1 promise survives the test. This is the single most-quoted varga observation and it costs nothing to check; put the two charts side by side.

D9 also feeds strength arithmetic directly. Two of the five Sthana Bala sub-components in Shadbala read the Navamsha — the dignity sweep across seven vargas, and the odd/even parity check that scores the Rashi and Navamsha signs together.

Beyond the sixteen — the D1…D108 series

The Pro Divisional Charts view returns the uniform series D1 through D108 (the engine will go to D150 if asked). This is real, and here is exactly what it is, because a “108 charts” claim deserves scrutiny:

• For every divisor that has a named rule — the classical sixteen plus D5, D6, D8 and D11 — the series uses that bespoke rule. So the extended view reproduces the Shodashvarga tab exactly for those charts. Twenty of the 108 are classical.
• For every other divisor — D13, D14, D15, D17, and so on up to D108 — there is no classical rule. Parashara does not define them. Nobody does. We apply one generalized default: divide the sign into N parts and count them forward from the natal sign, which is precisely the D1/D12/D60 rule extended.

So D108 is not an ancient chart we have recovered. It is a well-defined extrapolation from a classical rule, computed consistently. Treat the twenty named charts as the tradition and the rest as what they are.

What this depends on

• Your birth time. D9 changes sign every 3°20’ of the Moon’s or Lagna’s arc; D60 every half degree. The Lagna moves roughly a degree every four minutes. A ten-minute error is survivable in D1 and fatal in D60.
• Your ayanamsha. Every varga is derived from sidereal longitudes, so the ayanamsha you choose in Advanced Settings propagates to all sixteen. Planets near a division boundary are the ones that move.
• Whole-sign houses. Each varga chart’s houses are counted whole-sign from that varga’s own Lagna, not from the D1 Lagna.

Notes on this feature

• The sixteen vargas use Parashari (BPHS) rules throughout.
• D5, D6, D8 and D11 have no BPHS rule; where we compute them we use the Parashara method as given by PVR Narasimha Rao, and we keep them out of the Shodashvarga tab for that reason.
• Every chart in the series is a sign re-mapping of the same longitudes, so the whole D1…D108 run costs one ephemeris pass — the extended view is not slower or less exact than the sixteen.