Shoola Dasha

The longevity dasha

Shoola Dasha is a Jaimini rashi dasha — its periods are signs, not grahas. That is the first and biggest thing to hold onto if Vimshottari is your reference point. A Shoola chain reads Capricorn / Aquarius / Pisces, not Saturn / Rahu / Jupiter. There is no Moon in it, no nakshatra, and no balance at birth: the timeline starts at the moment you were born, with the seed sign’s full nine years ahead of it.

Shoola means a spike, a pain, a piercing thing. The name is not decorative. This is classically a longevity dasha — one of the tools the Jaimini system uses to examine vulnerable stretches of a life, read alongside its longevity apparatus rather than on its own.

We will come back to what that does and does not license.

Nine years, every sign

Shoola has the simplest duration rule of any dasha the app computes:

Every sign gets nine years.

Not by modality, not by lord placement, not adjusted for dignity. Twelve signs at nine years each is a 108-year cycle, and the cycle repeats for as long as the timeline needs to run.

Compare the family: Narayana counts each sign’s years out to its lord, so its lengths vary chart to chart. Sthira reads 7, 8 or 9 off the sign’s modality. Mandooka counts to the lord too, with its own twists. Shoola alone says: nine, next.

Which means, as with Sthira, that all of Shoola’s chart-dependence is concentrated in the seed — and the seed is exactly where the tradition splits.

The seed and direction are disputed — here is our side

This is the most important section on the page.

There are two rules in circulation for starting Shoola, and they are not variants of each other in any gentle sense. They pick different signs and often run in different directions, so the two timelines diverge immediately and stay diverged.

What we ship: STRONGER. The seed is chosen by the same Jaimini strength comparison Narayana uses — occupancy first, then benefic association, then the lord’s dignity, then the sign’s nature, with the sign’s ordinal as a deterministic tiebreak — and the sequence then runs plainly forward.

Why: consistency with the baseline. The whole dasha engine is validated against PyJHora, which forces the forward stronger-seed rule, and a system that silently follows a different oracle for one of seventeen tabs is worse than one that follows its baseline and tells you so.

Why that is not the same as being right: the odd-Lagna rule is the one you will find in the classical sources, and it is not a fringe reading. If you are working from a text, ODD_LAGNA is probably the switch you want. The internal engineering notes record this as a documented divergence, in the same list as the Sthira seed and the Mandooka duration branch — that list is not an apology, it is the record of every place this engine had to pick a side.

So: we picked one. You can pick the other. Neither of us can prove it from a web page.

Antardashas

Twelve sub-periods per mahadasha, each an equal one twelfth of the parent — nine months apiece, since every mahadasha is nine years.

The order is the interesting part, and it mirrors the top-level rule in miniature. For each mahadasha sign, the antardasha sequence is seeded from the stronger of that mahadasha sign and its own 7th, then runs twelve signs forward from there.

The consequence surprises people: a mahadasha’s first antardasha is frequently not the mahadasha sign itself. If the 7th from a Cancer mahadasha is stronger, Cancer’s antardashas open at Capricorn. That is the rule working, not failing.

Setting dasha_antardasha_mode=EQUAL replaces this with a plain zodiacal walk from the parent sign — the same durations in a cruder order, cheap to compute because it does not need the chart rebuilt on every drill. CLASSICAL is the default and is the one to read.

What we do not compute — and will not

• Longevity verdicts. At all. This is a longevity dasha and we will not use it as one. We compute and display a timeline of signs and dates. We do not mark periods as dangerous, do not compute an ayush estimate, and do not surface any claim about lifespan anywhere in the app. Classical longevity judgement is a multi-factor discipline that no responsible practitioner performs from a single dasha, and it is not something software should hand a stranger unprompted.
• The Jaimini longevity apparatus. The three-fold ayurdaya schemes, the Maheshwara and Rudra significators, the shoola trikonas that Shoola is classically read against — none of these are computed. Shoola here is the timeline only, without the framework that gives it its classical meaning.
• The full strength ladder. Aspects on the sign, the relative strength of the two signs’ lords and the lord’s exact degree are not in our comparison. Our last resort is the sign’s ordinal. On a close Lagna/7th call, our seed may differ from a fuller implementation’s — and the seed is the whole system.
• Applicability. We compute Shoola for every chart. Whether the classical conditions for reading it are met in yours is not something we assess.
• Interpretation. The dasha names a sign. What that sign means is your chart’s business.

Notes on this timeline

• Periods are signs, not grahas.
• Nine years per sign, flat — a 108-year cycle, repeating.
• Starts exactly at birth; there is no balance to prorate.
• Seed = stronger of Lagna and the 7th, forward — the PyJHora baseline.
• shoola_seed=ODD_LAGNA switches to the classical direct/reverse rule. This is a documented dispute, not a settled rule.
• Antardashas: 12 equal twelfths, seeded from stronger(parent, parent’s 7th) — so the parent sign often is not its own first antardasha.
• Classically a longevity dasha; we compute no longevity claims.
• A dasha year is 365.2425 days.