Maitri Chakra (Planetary Friendship)

What is the Maitri Chakra?

The Maitri Chakra — the “friendship wheel” — answers a question the rest of a chart keeps assuming: when two grahas meet, do they cooperate?

A graha sitting in a sign is a guest in another graha’s house. Whether that is a comfortable stay or a hostile one changes what the placement is worth. Jupiter in Cancer is Jupiter in the Moon’s sign, and the Moon and Jupiter are natural friends — that placement reads differently from Jupiter in Capricorn, sitting in the sign of a graha it does not much like.

The chakra builds this in three layers, following Parashara’s Panchadha Maitri. AstroShruti computes all three and shows them as separate grids, because the interesting part is usually where two layers disagree.

Layer 1: Naisargika (natural) friendship

A fixed table. It does not depend on your chart, your birth time, or anything else — it is the same for everyone.

Read each row as this graha’s opinion of the others. Anyone not named a friend or an enemy is neutral.

The table is not symmetric — and that is deliberate

This is the part most explanations quietly smooth over, and it is worth knowing before you notice it in the grid and assume the page is broken.

The Moon counts Mercury a friend. Mercury counts the Moon an enemy. Look up both rows above; they genuinely disagree. The same happens between Mars and Mercury: Mars calls Mercury an enemy, while Mercury regards Mars as merely neutral.

And the extremes are lopsided. The Moon has no natural enemies whatsoever — its enemy set is empty. Saturn has three. Nothing in the structure forces this; it is simply what the classical table says.

We follow the classical table as printed rather than symmetrising it into something tidier. A “corrected” friendship table that agrees with no standard text would be worse than useless — it would silently change every Graha Maitri score, every Saptavargaja Bala, and every dignity reading downstream of it.

Layer 2: Tatkalika (temporal) friendship

This layer is pure chart position, and it is the same rule for every pair:

• A graha in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 10th, 11th or 12th sign from another is its temporal friend.
• A graha in the 1st, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th or 9th is its temporal enemy.

Counted by whole signs, inclusive, from the graha whose row you are reading.

Two consequences catch people out:

1. There is no temporal neutral. Every pair is a temporal friend or a temporal enemy, always. The rule has no third bucket.
2. A conjunction is a temporal enmity. Two grahas in the same sign are in the 1st from each other, which is an enemy position. Grahas that are near each other — a sign or two away — are the temporal friends.

Because it counts signs and not degrees, the temporal layer is a property of the rashi chart, and it stays the same across the divisional charts derived from it.

Layer 3: Panchadha (compound) — the five-fold result

The compound is what you actually judge a placement by. It combines each pair’s natural relation with its temporal one:

Notice the two rows that both land on Sama. A natural friend sitting in a temporally hostile position and a natural enemy sitting in a temporally friendly one arrive at the same verdict from opposite directions: the layers cancel. That cancellation is the whole reason the chakra exists — a natural friendship that the chart contradicts is not a friendship you can lean on.

Dignity: how a graha sits in its own sign

Alongside the three grids, AstroShruti reports each graha’s dignity — how comfortable it is in the sign it actually occupies. This is the same friendship logic applied to a graha and its host sign’s lord, with the special positions checked first.

The engine tests in this fixed order, and the first match wins:

1. Exalted — in its exaltation sign.
2. Debilitated — in the sign opposite its exaltation.
3. Moolatrikona — in its moolatrikona sign.
4. Own — in a sign it rules.
5. Otherwise: Friendly / Neutral / Enemy, by the natural relation between the graha and the sign’s lord.

Two honest notes on how this is computed:

• The precedence order is visible in the output. The Moon’s exaltation and moolatrikona are both Taurus, and Mercury’s exaltation, moolatrikona and own sign are all Virgo. Because exaltation is tested first, a Taurus Moon reports Exalted, never Moolatrikona, and a Virgo Mercury reports Exalted rather than the other two. That is a labelling choice, not a claim that the lesser dignities stopped applying.
• Moolatrikona is treated as a whole sign. The classical texts give it a degree range within the sign (the Sun’s, for instance, does not run the whole of Leo). AstroShruti’s dignity uses whole-sign moolatrikona, so a graha late in its moolatrikona sign is still reported as Moolatrikona rather than Own. Where you need the degree to matter, read the longitude on Grah Stithi alongside this.

Where the chakra is used elsewhere

The Maitri tables are not a standalone curiosity — several other calculations in the app read from exactly these tables, which is why their values agree:

• Saptavargaja Bala, one of the components of Shadbala, scores each graha’s dignity across seven divisional charts using this dignity logic. See Bala.
• Graha Maitri, the fifth koota of Ashtakoota compatibility matching, scores the natural relation between the two Moon-sign lords.
• The Jaimini rashi dashas use the same dignity function for their exaltation/debilitation year adjustment.

Notes on this chakra

• Covers the seven grahas; Rahu and Ketu are excluded, per the classical rule.
• The natural layer is a fixed table and is asymmetric by tradition.
• The temporal layer is read from whole-sign positions in the rashi chart.
• Temporal friendship is binary — there is no temporal neutral.
• Dignity is reported for each graha in the sign it occupies, whole-sign.