Narayana Dasha

A dasha of signs, not planets

Everything most people know about dashas comes from Vimshottari, and almost none of it transfers here.

Narayana Dasha is a Jaimini rashi dasha. Its periods are zodiac signs. You do not run a Jupiter Mahadasha; you run a Scorpio Mahadasha. The chain reads Scorpio / Gemini / Pisces rather than Jupiter / Mercury / Saturn.

That one change pulls a whole set of consequences behind it:

Narayana is the best known of the Jaimini rashi dashas and the one most often meant when someone says “rashi dasha” without qualifying. AstroShruti computes six of them: Chara, Narayana, Kalachakra, Sthira, Shoola and Mandooka.

Step one: the seed sign

Take the Lagna and the 7th sign from it. Whichever is stronger opens the dasha.

Strength here is a Jaimini comparison, and it is where implementations start to part company. Ours ranks the two signs on this ladder, taking the first factor that separates them:

1. Planets present — more occupants wins.
2. Benefic association — Jupiter or Mercury in the sign, or the sign’s own lord sitting in it.
3. The lord’s dignity — exalted (3) beats own sign (2) beats neutral (1) beats debilitated (0).
4. The sign’s nature — dual beats fixed beats movable.
5. Ordinal — a deterministic last resort so the answer is never random.

The app tells you which sign it picked and why — “Scorpio stronger (planets present)” — precisely because you will want to compare against other software and know what moved.

Step two: the progression

Having a seed does not give you the order. Narayana does not simply walk the zodiac from the seed. The sequence of twelve signs is a progression table, looked up by seed sign, and it is emphatically not a straight line: seeded at Taurus, the order runs Taurus, Sagittarius, Cancer, Aquarius, Virgo, Aries…

Two exceptions override the table entirely, and they key off the seed sign’s occupants:

• Saturn in the seed sign → the progression collapses to plain forward zodiacal: seed, seed+1, seed+2, and so on.
• Ketu in the seed sign → a different table again, broadly the reverse-flavoured counterpart of the normal one.

These tables are the PyJHora baseline — the reference implementation this engine follows, cited throughout the internal dasha plan. They are not derived from a rule we can restate in a sentence, and we did not invent them.

Step three: how long each sign lasts

This is the heart of the system, and it is what makes Narayana chart-specific rather than tabular.

For each sign in the progression:

1. Find the sign’s lord, and find which sign that lord occupies.
2. Count from one to the other — inclusive, zodiacally. The direction depends on the sign’s “foot”:
   • Odd-footed signs (Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius) — count from the sign to its lord.
   • Even-footed signs (Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces) — count from the lord back to the sign.
3. Years = count − 1.
4. If that lands on zero — meaning the lord sits in its own sign — the period is 12 years, the maximum.
5. Optionally ±1 year if the lord is exalted or debilitated.

Worth pausing on the odd/even-footed split: it is not the odd/even-numbered signs. The footed grouping is Aries–Gemini and Libra–Sagittarius against Cancer–Virgo and Capricorn–Pisces. Mandooka uses the other grouping — plain index parity — for its own rule, and confusing the two is an easy way to produce plausible-looking wrong dates.

The exaltation adjustment is a choice

The ±1 for an exalted or debilitated lord is optional in the classical material, and AstroShruti exposes it as an advanced setting. What we want to be honest about is the default:

• narayana_exalt_debil is on.
• chara_exalt_debil — the same adjustment, for the sibling Chara dasha — is off.

Two systems, one rule, opposite defaults. That is not an inconsistency we overlooked; it is what the baseline behaviour we validate against does. But it should tell you plainly that this adjustment is not settled, in either system. If your Narayana dates are a year off someone else’s, this is the first thing to check.

The second cycle

Narayana runs two cycles, not an endless loop.

Cycle one is the progression with the counted durations above. Cycle two repeats the same twelve signs with complementary lengths: 12 minus the first cycle’s years. A sign that got 3 years the first time gets 9 the second. A sign that got the full 12 gets nothing at all and is dropped from the timeline.

The two cycles therefore sum to 144 years — twelve signs at a nominal twelve years each, split between the passes. And then the timeline ends. Chara, Sthira, Shoola and Mandooka all loop their sequence for as long as coverage is needed; Narayana does not, because the two-cycle structure is the system.

Antardashas: strength-seeded, not just subdivided

The sub-periods are twelve equal twelfths of the parent — but the order is derived from the chart afresh at every level, and that is the part that matters.

For a mahadasha sign:

1. Find the sign of that sign’s lord, and the sign of the 7th sign’s lord.
2. The stronger of those two is the antardasha seed — the same strength comparison as the top-level seed.
3. Direction is set by parity: the seed being an odd sign runs forward, an even sign runs reverse.
4. Saturn in the seed sign forces forward regardless.
5. Ketu in the mahadasha sign flips whatever direction you had.

So Narayana’s antardashas are genuinely a strength-seed order, not a rotation of the mahadasha progression. (Chara and Mandooka do rotate their maha progression; Narayana re-derives.) This recurses the same way all the way down.

The EQUAL setting throws this away. With dasha_antardasha_mode=EQUAL the sub-periods become a plain zodiacal walk from the parent sign — same durations, cruder order, no chart rebuild needed on every tap. That is a speed option, not a second opinion. CLASSICAL is the default and is the one to read.

What we do not compute

Being straight about the edges:

• The full Jaimini strength ladder is not implemented. The classical rules include aspects on the sign, the comparative strength of the two lords, and the exact degree of the sign lord as a final tiebreak. We ship the five factors listed above and stop; our last resort is the sign’s ordinal, not its lord’s longitude. On charts where the Lagna and the 7th are closely matched, our seed can differ from a fuller implementation’s — and if the seed differs, the whole timeline differs.
• The Scorpio and Aquarius co-lord question is not exposed. We use the traditional lords throughout. Whether Ketu co-rules Scorpio and Rahu co-rules Aquarius for duration counting is a live dispute in the Jaimini literature; we do not offer a switch for it.
• Divisional Narayana dasha is not offered. Narayana is classically also run on vargas — the D-9, the D-10 — for domain-specific timing. AstroShruti computes it on the rasi chart only.
• We do not interpret the periods. A Scorpio Mahadasha is a fact about a timeline; what it means depends on what Scorpio holds and rules in your chart.
• The progression tables are a baseline, not a proof. They come from PyJHora. We have validated the structure, not re-derived the tables from the Sanskrit.

Notes on this timeline

• Periods are signs. The lord column shows a rasi, not a graha.
• Starts exactly at birth — there is no balance to prorate.
• Seed = stronger of Lagna and the 7th, with the reason shown.
• Progression is a table lookup, with Saturn and Ketu exception tables.
• Duration = count to the lord − 1, direction by foot; own sign → 12.
• Exalt/debil ±1 is ON by default for Narayana (and off for Chara).
• Two cycles, complementary lengths, 144 years total, then it ends.
• Antardashas are strength-seeded and chart-derived under CLASSICAL.
• A dasha year is 365.2425 days, as everywhere else in the app.