Karana

What is a karana?

A karana is half a tithi — the fifth and last of the five limbs (angas) of the panchang, and the finest division of the lunar month. Since one tithi is the Moon gaining 12° on the Sun, a karana is 6° of that same gain. Two karanas therefore pass in every tithi, and because a lunar month holds thirty tithis, it holds sixty karanas.

The karana is the sharpest hand on the panchang clock: where the tithi tells you the lunar day, the karana tells you which half of it — a useful precision when a muhurat turns on a window of a few hours.

The eleven karanas

Those sixty slots are filled from just eleven named karanas, in two families:

The seven movable karanas (Bava through Vishti) rotate again and again through the month. The four fixed ones each appear exactly once.

How sixty slots fill a month

The pattern is fixed and worth seeing whole. Counting karana slots from the new moon:

• Kimstughna opens the month — the first half of Shukla Pratipada.
• The seven movable karanas then cycle eight times in order (Bava, Balava, Kaulava, Taitila, Gara, Vanija, Vishti), filling the next fifty-six slots — from the second half of Shukla Pratipada all the way to the first half of Krishna Chaturdashi.
• The month closes with the other three fixed karanas back-to-back around the new moon: Shakuni (second half of Krishna Chaturdashi), Chatushpada (first half of Amavasya) and Naga (second half of Amavasya).

So 1 + 56 + 3 = 60, and Vishti — the one to avoid — recurs eight times a month, once in each cycle of the movable seven.

Vishti (Bhadra) — the karana to watch

Of the eleven, Vishti is the one almost everyone is actually looking up. Under its common name Bhadra, it is treated as inauspicious for beginnings — weddings, travel, housewarming, new ventures — and traditionally reserved for harsher work where its edge is an asset.

This is the one karana caution that AstroShruti computes and flags: whenever a Vishti karana is running, the panchang marks the Bhadra window with its start and end, so you can steer a muhurat around it. That makes the karana limb unlike the yoga limb, whose “caution” yogas are named but never stamped.

Reading a karana in AstroShruti

Open the Panchang for any date and location and the karana appears as the fifth limb, paired with its tithi. An illustrative reading looks like this:

Karana: Vanija — until 11:05, then Vishti (Bhadra)

Read plainly: the current half-tithi is Vanija (a movable, auspicious karana); it ends at 11:05 am, after which Vishti — Bhadra — begins, and the panchang will raise the Bhadra window from that moment. The end time is a fixed astronomical instant shown in the local clock time of the date and location you chose, so the same boundary reads differently in another time zone.

Open the Panchang for any date and location to see the current karana, its end moment, and any Bhadra window computed for your location.

Common mistakes

• Treating the karana as a whole tithi. It is half of one; two karanas share every tithi, so “the karana changed” does not mean the tithi did.
• Thinking Bhadra is rare. Vishti recurs eight times a lunar month — Bhadra windows are common, which is exactly why muhurat-makers check for them.
• Assuming all fixed karanas are ill-omened. Two of the four (Chatushpada and Kimstughna) are auspicious; only Shakuni and Naga carry a caution, alongside the movable Vishti.
• Reading the karana in isolation. Like every limb it is weighed with the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and vara, not applied alone.

What AstroShruti computes — and what it doesn’t

AstroShruti computes the astronomical karana: the Moon–Sun elongation for any date, time and location, the karana’s name and its exact end moment, the sequence of karanas across the sunrise-to-sunrise day, and — uniquely among the “caution” markers of the tithi/yoga/karana trio — the Bhadra (Vishti) window, with real start and end times.

What it does not do is legislate the observance. The finer classical refinements of Bhadra — its “residence” and the graded severity some traditions attach to it — and the ritual question of exactly which work a given Bhadra rules out are tradition-level judgments. We give you the exact karana and the exact Bhadra window so those judgments rest on solid astronomy.

Related concepts

• Tithi — the lunar day the karana halves; sixty karanas to its thirty.
• Yoga — the fourth limb, whose caution list is named but, unlike Bhadra, not flagged.
• Nakshatra — the Moon’s mansion, another limb read alongside the karana in muhurat.
• Vara — the weekday, the first limb.
• Masa — the lunar month whose sixty karana slots this all fills.