Sthira Dasha

The fixed dasha

Sthira Dasha is a Jaimini rashi dasha: its periods are zodiac signs, not grahas. If you have only ever read Vimshottari, that is the headline. You do not run a Venus Mahadasha here — you run a Leo Mahadasha, and the chain reads Leo / Virgo / Libra, not Venus / Sun / Moon.

Sthira means fixed, and the name is doing double duty. It points at the fixed modality — Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius — which is where the durations come from. And it points at the character of the system: the period lengths are fixed for everybody.

That is the interesting thing about Sthira, and it is best seen against its sibling. Narayana counts each sign’s years out to wherever that sign’s lord actually sits, so no two charts agree on how long Leo lasts. Sthira just looks at the sign’s modality and reads off a number. All the chart-dependence in the system is concentrated in one place: where it starts.

The three durations

That is the whole duration rule. 96 years per cycle, no counting, no lord placements, no exaltation adjustments. There is a pleasing logic to the ordering — the modality that is most stable in nature gets the longer stretch, the movable signs the shorter one — and the sequence then runs forward zodiacally from the seed, wrapping around, repeating the cycle for as long as the timeline needs.

There is no balance at birth. The seed sign’s full period begins at the moment you are born.

The seed: Brahma, and why that is contested

Everything Sthira has to say about you specifically is in the starting sign, so it is worth spending the time on.

The orthodox Jaimini rule seeds from the sign of the Brahma graha. Brahma is one of the three Jaimini functional significators (with Maheshwara and Rudra), and it is found roughly like this:

1. Take the stronger of the Lagna and the 7th — the same strength comparison Narayana uses for its own seed.
2. From that sign, take the lords of the 6th, 8th and 12th — the dusthana lords. Three candidate planets.
3. The strongest of those three is Brahma. Sthira starts from the sign it occupies.

Step 3 is where honesty is required.

Our Brahma is a v1 approximation

We score the three candidates on two things: whether the planet sits in a sign of good dignity (exalted, moolatrikona, own, or friendly), and whether it sits in an odd sign. Those two add, higher wins; ties fall back to good-dignity alone, and then to the sign’s index as a deterministic last resort.

That is a simplification, and the internal engineering notes say so in as many words: it is “AstroShruti v1 Brahma”, an approximation of the baseline implementation’s own scoring. The classical determination of Brahma is a genuinely involved piece of Jaimini — different schools weigh dignity, oddness, degrees and placement differently, and reasonable implementations disagree about which of three planets is Brahma in a given chart.

When Brahma differs, the entire Sthira timeline differs. There is no partial disagreement here; a different seed is a different dasha from year zero.

The sthira_seed setting

Because of all that, the seed is exposed as a real advanced setting:

We ship BRAHMA because it is what the tradition actually says. We expose LAGNA because a great deal of published material — and some software — quietly does that instead, and if your Sthira dates disagree with a book, this switch is almost certainly the reason.

The point we want to make is not that one is right. It is that this is a choice someone made, and you are entitled to know it was made. A page that presents the Brahma seed as settled fact would be lying to you by omission.

Antardashas

Twelve sub-periods per mahadasha: forward zodiacally from the mahadasha sign, each exactly one twelfth of the parent. So an 8-year Leo mahadasha yields twelve antardashas of 8 months each — Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, and on round. The same rule recurses to every deeper level.

Sthira is a happy special case among the rashi dashas: the classical sequence and the fast EQUAL fallback are the same sequence. The dasha_antardasha_mode setting genuinely does nothing here. For Narayana — which re-derives a strength seed at every level — and for Mandooka, it changes the order substantially.

What we do not compute

• A rigorous Brahma. Covered above, and it is the big one. Our two-factor scoring is explicitly a v1 approximation; the sign-index tiebreak is arbitrary rather than astrological.
• Maheshwara and Rudra. Brahma’s two companions in the Jaimini scheme are not computed at all — Sthira only needs Brahma, so only Brahma is derived.
• The full Jaimini strength ladder for the stronger-of-Lagna-and-7th step. Aspects on the sign and the sign lord’s exact degree are not part of our comparison; the last tiebreak is the sign’s ordinal.
• Sthira’s classical applicability. The Jaimini corpus does not intend every dasha for every chart. We compute Sthira for everyone, always, so you can look at it — we do not tell you whether your chart is one it was meant for.
• Longevity judgement. Sthira is used in classical longevity work alongside Shoola. We produce the timeline; we do not produce verdicts about lifespan, and we would not put one on a web page if we did.
• Interpretation. What a Scorpio period does depends on what Scorpio holds and rules in your chart.

Notes on this timeline

• Periods are signs, not grahas.
• Durations are fixed by modality: movable 7, fixed 8, dual 9.
• One cycle is 96 years; the cycle repeats to cover the timeline.
• Direction is forward zodiacal, always.
• Starts exactly at birth — no balance.
• Seed = the Brahma graha’s sign by default; sthira_seed=LAGNA switches it.
• Our Brahma is a v1 approximation and is the system’s main uncertainty.
• Antardashas: 12 signs forward from the parent, equal twelfths — the one rashi dasha where CLASSICAL and EQUAL agree.
• A dasha year is 365.2425 days.