Panjika Yoga

What is Panjika Yoga?

Panjika Yoga — the Ananda-adi Yoga, “the series beginning with Ananda” — is formed by pairing two things the panchang already knows: the weekday and the nakshatra the Moon is riding.

Seven weekdays against twenty-eight nakshatras give a name and a verdict for the day, drawn from a list that runs from Ananda (“bliss”) at one end to Pravardhamana (“thriving”) at the other, taking in Mrityu (“death”) and Rakshasa (“demon”) along the way. It appears in Bengali and eastern almanacs — the panjika — as a single line, which is where the name on this page comes from.

Its appeal is that it needs nothing personal. Unlike Tarabalam or Chandrabalam, it is the same for everyone; you read one word for the day and move on.

Not the same as the panchang’s Yoga

This trips up almost everyone, so it is worth being blunt about.

The panchang’s five limbs — tithi, vara, nakshatra, yoga, karana — include a Yoga. That is the Nithya Yoga: twenty-seven names from Vishkambha to Vaidhriti, computed by adding the Sun’s and Moon’s longitudes together. It is explained separately.

The Ananda-adi Yoga on this page shares the word and nothing else. Different count (28, not 27), different names, different inputs. If a source tells you Anandadi Yoga comes from “the longitudinal difference between the Sun and Moon”, it has confused the two — that is the other yoga’s formula.

How it is counted

Each weekday has a starting nakshatra. Count from it to today’s nakshatra, and the position you land on names the yoga.

So on a Wednesday the count starts at Hasta: Hasta itself is Ananda, Chitra is Kaladanda, Swati is Dhumra, and so on down the list.

The twenty-eight yogas

Roughly half are favourable. Amrita, Siddhi and Ananda are the ones traditionally singled out as excellent; Mrityu, Rakshasa, Kaladanda and Utpaata are the ones to avoid.

The Abhijit rule

Here is the detail that decides whether a Panjika Yoga table is right or wrong, and it is the reason the list above has twenty-eight entries and not twenty-seven.

The modern panchang uses twenty-seven nakshatras. But the Ananda-adi series belongs to the older twenty-eight-nakshatra reckoning, which includes Abhijit, sitting between Uttara Ashadha and Shravana. The Moon is never reported as being in Abhijit here — that would need the 28-fold division the panchang doesn’t use — but Abhijit still takes up a place in the count.

The consequence is precise: every nakshatra from Shravana onward is one place further along the series than a naive count suggests. Skip Abhijit and every yoga from Shravana to Revati comes out one name early — and since the good and bad names are interleaved, “one name early” frequently flips the verdict rather than merely renaming it.

You can see the scheme is genuinely 28-based from the starting nakshatras themselves. Counted with Abhijit in place, the seven weekday starts fall exactly four apart — Ashwini, Mrigashira, Ashlesha, Hasta, Anuradha, Uttara Ashadha, Shatabhisha — a clean arithmetic step of four, seven times, closing the circle at twenty-eight. Drop Abhijit and that pattern breaks at Shatabhisha. The regularity is the tell.

One further consequence, which looks like a bug and isn’t: because the Moon never lands on Abhijit, exactly one yoga per weekday is unreachable — the one whose place Abhijit occupies. That is inherent to the scheme, not an error.

A worked example — where the rule bites

Take Thursday 30 July 2026, with the Moon in Shravana. Thursday’s count begins at Anuradha. Counting Anuradha, Jyeshtha, Mula, Purva Ashadha, Uttara Ashadha, then Abhijit, then Shravana, the Moon’s star lands on the 7th name — Dhwaja, a good yoga.

Now drop Abhijit, as many tables mistakenly do. Shravana moves up one place, the count lands on the 6th name — Dhwanksha, a bad yoga. Same day, opposite verdict. Drik Panchang shows Dhwaja for that date, so counting Abhijit is the correct reading — and this is exactly the row AstroShruti is verified against.

Day and night

The Moon changes nakshatra roughly once a day, and it does not wait for midnight. When it moves during the night, the yoga moves with it.

AstroShruti evaluates the yoga twice: once at sunrise, and once at the midpoint of the night. When those differ you will see two lines, labelled Day and Night, each naming the nakshatra it came from. When the Moon holds the same nakshatra throughout, one line covers everything.

How much weight to give it

Honestly: not a great deal.

This is among the coarsest readings in the almanac. It takes two inputs and returns one verdict for an entire day, for everyone alive. It cannot know what you are planning, and it does not consult the lagna, the tithi, or anything about you. Bengali and eastern almanacs print it as a quick line near the top of the day’s entry, and that is roughly the weight it carries in practice — a first filter.

For anything that matters, the personal readings (Tarabalam, Chandrabalam) and a proper muhurat both outrank it.

Common mistakes

• Confusing it with the panchang’s Nithya Yoga. Different scheme entirely — 28 names from weekday × nakshatra, not the 27 Sun+Moon yogas.
• Counting on 27 and skipping Abhijit. From Shravana onward that lands you one name early and often flips good to bad, as the worked example shows.
• Reading it as a verdict on your plans. It is the coarsest of filters — one word for the whole world for a whole day; the personal readings and a real muhurat outrank it.
• Using the midnight weekday. The vara runs sunrise to sunrise, so a pre-dawn hour still belongs to the previous day’s yoga.

Notes on this table

• The Moon’s nakshatra is sidereal, using the Lahiri ayanamsha.
• The weekday is the Hindu day, which runs sunrise to sunrise — so the hours between midnight and sunrise still belong to the previous weekday’s yoga.
• The count includes Abhijit as the 28th nakshatra, between Uttara Ashadha and Shravana. Verified against Drik Panchang across weekdays, including the Shravana rows where the Abhijit rule decides the answer.