Hora, Digbala & the Indian Calendar Systems

The Concept of Hora

Why are weekdays in the order Sun–Moon–Mars–Mercury–Jupiter–Venus–Saturn?

Each weekday belongs to one of the seven planets: Budha Vara is Mercury's day, Guru Vara Jupiter's, Shukra Vara Venus's, Shani Vara Saturn's. PVNR asks the class whether the order has any basis. It has, and the basis is Hora.

• Each day is divided into 24 Horas. A Hora is an hour.
• The day here is the Hindu civil day: sunrise to the next sunrise. The first Hora starts at sunrise.
• Each Hora is ruled by one of the seven planets. The rulers follow one another in the order of average speed with respect to Earth, slowest first:

These are average speeds, "not always true". The order is cyclic: after Moon comes Saturn again. So a Mars Hora is always followed by a Sun Hora, a Sun Hora by a Venus Hora, and so on.

This is the same order by which the rasis were distributed to the planets. That distribution has an astronomical basis, and so does the weekday order.

Weekday Derivation (Full Worked Example)

One more axiom: the first Hora of a weekday is ruled by the planet that rules the weekday.

• Take Sunday first, because Sun is the king of the planets. First Hora = Sun. Then Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. That is one cycle of 7 Horas.
• Repeat the cycle 3 times: 21 Horas.
• Three Horas remain before the next sunrise: Sun, Venus, Mercury.
• The next Hora is Moon's, and it starts a new day. So the day after Sun's day is Moon's day — Monday.
• Monday: the cycle Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury runs 3 times; the last three Horas are Moon, Saturn, Jupiter. The next Hora is Mars's → Tuesday (Mangala Vara, Bhauma Vara).
• Pattern: in the speed order, leave two planets and take the next one.
  • Sun → leave Venus, Mercury → Moon
  • Moon → leave Saturn, Jupiter → Mars
  • Mars → leave Sun, Venus → Mercury
  • Mercury → leave Moon, Saturn → Jupiter
  • Jupiter → leave Mars, Sun → Venus
  • Venus → leave Mercury, Moon → Saturn
  • Saturn → leave Jupiter, Mars → Sun
• The same on Saturday: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon runs 3 times; the last three Horas are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars. The next Hora is Sun's, so the day after Saturday is Sunday.

"Because these are the Horas that are starting those days, that is why the respective weekdays are allotted to these planets in this particular order."

The step is three because 24 modulo 7 is 3. Counting the starting planet as one, the next day's lord is the 4th planet.

Why 24 Horas?

A student asks who fixed 24. PVNR says he has no definite answer.

• What he has heard: there are 12 rasis, one set for the day and one for the night, 12 × 2 = 24.
• Hora comes from ahoratra: aho = day, ratra = night.
• A student offers "Earth rotates in 24 hours". PVNR does not accept that as the reason: it is 24 only because the hour was fixed as the unit. With 60 ghatis it would be 60; with a unit of 1.5 hours it would be 18.

"Under the assumption that there are 24 horas and the horas are ruled by planets in this particular order, which has a strong astronomical basis to it… under those axioms the order of the weekdays can be derived. It is not just random."

The same week in the West

A student notes that the Western week has the same seven days and the same rulers. PVNR: it is unlikely the two developed separately and happened to agree. Knowledge was probably shared between civilizations long ago, or came from one source, and that history is lost.

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The Four Epochs of the Day (Four Gayatris)

Every day has four important epochs. At these four points the rising sign is exactly at the Sun, or 90°, 180° or 270° from the Sun — the 360° divided into four.

• Because this is Kali Yuga, people gave so much importance to Kali Gayatri that they began the day at midnight.
• For Hindus the day starts at sunrise and runs to the next sunrise.

A student asks whether the Tithi also starts at sunrise. No. Tithi does not belong to this calendar; it belongs to the lunar calendar (section 8).

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Digbala and the Purusharthas

The question

A student asks whether the number 4 has a significance: each weekday lord is the 4th from the previous one, and there are four Purusharthas, each with its three houses.

PVNR's answer:

• Houses 1, 4, 7 and 10 are the bases of the four Purusharthas.
• He cannot say for certain that this is linked to the weekday step. "Maybe there is a link, maybe there is not."
• In the weekday order the 4 comes from arithmetic: 24 modulo 7 = 3, and counting from zero that lands on the 4th planet.

The bases and their planets

Digbala

• Planets have several kinds of strength — Kala Bala, Dig Bala, Sthana Bala — by placement and by time.
• Digbala depends on how close a planet is to its own base.
• In that house it is fully strong. Exactly opposite, it is fully weak. In between it is graded by distance.
• This association of planets with the four bases goes into Shadbala, the reckoning of a planet's strengths.
• The details are for a later class.

Pronunciation: it is artha, not "ardha". Ardha has one meaning: half. Artha means purpose, meaning, money, and is one of the four Purusharthas. In Telugu script dha and tha differ by one dot, and most Telugu speakers say dha for tha (kadha for katha). In the sankalpa, "dharma-ardha-kama-moksha" asks God for half of dharma. Say dharma-artha-kama-moksha.

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Civil (Savana) Calendar

• A day runs from one sunrise to the next sunrise.
• It does not look at where Sun and Moon are, together or opposite. "Sun rose, so a civil day started."
• It is neither lunar nor solar. It is the civil calendar, also called the Savana calendar.
• This is the calendar that decides the weekday and the 24 Horas within it.
• It is a fixed calendar, based on fixed time.

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Indian Solar Calendar

Popular in South India. Everything is defined by the motion of the Sun through the zodiac.

How It Works

• When Sun enters Mesha (Aries), Mesha Masa starts. It lasts as long as Sun is in Mesha.
• When Sun enters Vrishabha, Vrishabha Masa starts. And so on to Meena Masa. The month is the sign occupied by the Sun.
• On the day of the class (June 6) the Sun was in Vrishabha; he enters Mithuna around June 15.
• In the original solar calendar each month has 30 days, one for each degree:
  • Day 1 = Sun between 0° and 1° of the sign
  • Day 2 = Sun between 1° and 2°
  • Day 30 = Sun between 29° and 30°
• The year has 360 days.
• There is no Adhika Masa in the solar calendar. There are just 12 masas.

A student points out that the Western sign dates do not agree with these months. PVNR: the West has no calendar based on its signs; if it had, the gap would be about 23 days, because its zodiac differs from ours by about 23°.

Solar Day ≠ Civil Day

• A solar day is the time the Sun takes to cross one degree. It is not exactly 24 hours.
• "One day may be 27 hours, another day may be only 19 hours."
• The Sun's motion is variable: about 29 days in one sign, 31 in another.
• The 360 solar days together make one circuit of 360°, which is 365.2425 civil days.

How people fit it to civil days

For daily life people use the sunrise-to-sunrise day, so they take the Sun's degree at sunrise and give the whole civil day that number.

• Sun at 3.5° at sunrise → the whole day is the 4th day, even though the 5th solar day starts during it.
• So sometimes two consecutive civil days carry the same day number.
• And sometimes a day goes missing: Sun at 2.9° at one sunrise (3rd day) and at 4.05° at the next sunrise (5th day). The 4th day is gone.
• Some places take the Sun's position at noon instead of sunrise.

"There is nothing really logical or scientific about this, because we are mixing two calendars… It is just a matter of having a convention."

Controversy: What Is a "Year" in Dasha Calculations?

Mars dasha is 7 years, Rahu dasha 18 years. Dashas come in a later class, but PVNR flags a controversy now: what is a year?

• Some take 365 days — the solar year.
• Some take 360 days.
• Some hold that the controversy is unneeded: the year is 360 days, but those are solar days of one degree each, not civil days. 360 such days are the same span as 365.2425 civil days.

PVNR reports the three positions. He does not rule between them here.

Why the solar calendar is scientific

• In the Western calendar the Sun is not at the same degree on the same date every year. On June 6 this year he may be at 29°01′; on June 6 a few years later, at 28°03′.
• Leap years come in some years and not others; months have 28, 29, 30 or 31 days.

"If you say the 4th day of Mesha Masa, Sun is in the 4th degree of Mesha. So that is the beauty about our calendar. Our calendar is very scientific."

"They put so much stress on that calendar" — the civil, sunrise-to-sunrise, 24-hour day — "that they ended up corrupting both."

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Multiple Calendars and Their Purposes

Which masa starts the year?

There are different opinions.

• Mesha Sankramana — Sun enters Mesha, around April 15. Mesha is the beginning of the zodiac, so it is a new beginning. Tamil people celebrate their new year then.
• Makara Sankranti — Sun enters Makara, around January 14. This is Pongal. Some astrologers hold this ingress more important than Mesha, for the reason below.
• Astrologers cast a chart for the exact moment of the ingress — some for Makara, some for Mesha — and predict the whole year from it.

The four movable rasis and the Yugas

Like the four Gayatris of the day, the four movable rasis are associated with the four Yugas:

• Makara is a highly tamasic sign. It is owned by Saturn, and Mars is exalted there.
• Mars is the planet of Kali Yuga — aggression, strife.
• So for some, the new year of this age starts at Makara.

No calendar is the only right one

"No calendar is absolutely perfect, no calendar is wrong… Each calendar is for a particular purpose."

• You do not see everything about the year from one calendar. Financial matters are seen from one; political matters relating to kings from one; political matters relating to the masses from another.
• There are 10 or 15 calendars, each with its own use. PVNR does not say here which calendar serves which of these matters; that is for later.
• Sun's entry into Ardra nakshatra (in Mithuna) starts another year. Its chart is for weather: how the rainfall will be for the next 365 days.
• Which calendar is popular in a region depends on what matters most there — money, spiritual matters, the health of the masses, politics.

A student asks what Ardra is. It is a nakshatra. There are 27 nakshatras: the 360° divided into 27 equal parts, each with its name and its ruler. PVNR leaves them for a later class.

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The Soul–Mind Analogy: Why We Need Both Sun and Moon

Before the lunar calendar, PVNR lays down its basis.

• Sun is the soul of the individual. In the universe he is the soul of the Paramapurusha.
• Moon is the mind. Jupiter is the intellect, and so on.
• The soul is the king of our existence. But we cannot perceive it. We do not know how it looks, feels or thinks. We perceive only the mind.
• The mind is the agent. Intellect, learning ability, happiness, hard work — what Jupiter, Mercury, Venus and Saturn show — reach the soul through the mind.
• You cannot stare at the Sun; you cannot stare at your soul. You can look at the Moon, and all the Moon's light is the Sun's, reflected. So the mind has whatever it has from the soul.

"It is not correct to say that soul is the only important thing. It is correct to say that soul and mind are both important. So Sun and Moon are both important in their own right."

So the calendars called "lunar" should be called soli-lunar. They are based on both Sun and Moon.

"Mind does not exist by itself, mind exists with reference to soul… So you take Sun as the reference, and from that you see the relative displacement of Moon."

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Soli-Lunar Calendar: Tithis

Phases of the Moon

The phases (chandra kalas) depend on how far the Moon is from the Sun.

• Moon exactly with Sun: no Moon is seen — Amavasya.
• Moon 90° ahead: half Moon.
• Moon exactly opposite: full Moon.
• Moon 270° ahead: half Moon again, waning.
• The Sun is not fixed while this happens. He moves about one sign in roughly 30 days, and in that time the Moon goes once round the zodiac and catches up with him again.

Definition of Tithi

Take Moon's longitude − Sun's longitude. It runs from 0° to just under 360°, then back to 0°. Divide it into 30 parts of 12° each. Each part is one day of the lunar month.

A student asks why 12°. One way to see it: it relates to the 12 rasis. The simple way: we want 30 days, as in the solar calendar, and 360 ÷ 30 = 12.

Two Pakshas (Fortnights)

• Shukla Paksha (Shuddha Paksha): days 1–15. The Moon is waxing.
• Krishna Paksha (Bahula Paksha): days 16–30. The Moon is waning.
• The same names are used in both, with the prefix: Shukla Pratipada, Shukla Dvitiya… Krishna Pratipada, Krishna Dvitiya…
• The 15th of Shukla Paksha is Purnima. The last day of Krishna Paksha is Amavasya.

Kalachakra — Tithi Rulerships

A student asks whether Purnima and Amavasya have an astrological significance. They have; the detail is for later.

• There is a Kalachakra, the wheel of time. The divisions of time are given to the planets to rule.
• The first tithi is ruled by Sun, the second by Moon, the third by Mars, "and so on".
• From the rulerships and the planets' placement in the Kalachakra, certain tithis are auspicious for worshipping certain Devas. On some tithis some energies of the universe are strong; on others, other energies.

Purnima and Amavasya

PVNR performs Satyanarayana Vratam every Purnima.

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Amanta vs Shuklanta Calendars

Within the lunar calendar there are two reckonings of the month.

Why a month has to do with "matters" at all: at the moment a month starts you can cast a chart, as if a child were born then, and say how things will be for the world, a country or a town during that month. Some cast it for the conjunction, some for the opposition. One kind of chart shows mundane matters more, the other spiritual matters more.

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Names of the Twelve Lunar Months

Taking the Amanta calendar, which Andhra uses: the month is named by the rasi in which Sun and Moon conjoin.

Why the name comes from the opposite side of the zodiac

• Chitra nakshatra is not in Meena. It is on the border of Kanya and Tula.
• Vishakha is on the border of Tula and Vrishchika, yet Vaishakha starts with the conjunction in Mesha.
• Jyeshtha is at the end of Vrishchika, yet Jyeshtha month starts with the conjunction in Vrishabha.
• So the name is taken from the nakshatra roughly 180° from the sign of the conjunction — the nakshatra the Moon most often occupies on the Purnima of that month.
• It is "most often", not always. On Chaitra Purnima the Moon may be in Hasta or Swati a few times; more often he is in Chitra. A student notes that 12 names cannot cover 27 nakshatras; PVNR agrees.

"Even though we are starting the month based on Amavasya in the Amanta calendar, the naming of the month is actually based on Pournima."

The naming follows Shuklanta. PVNR takes this as a sign that a few thousand years back people used the Shuklanta calendar and later changed to Amanta.

Pronunciation: it is Phalguna, not "Falguna". The fa sound is Arabic and is not in Sanskrit, which has only pa, pha, ba, bha. The same goes for phala (fruit). This mistake is common across India, not only in the South.

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Adhika Masa (Extra / Intercalary Month)

Why It Occurs

• Say Moon catches up with Sun in the first degree of Mesha. Vaishakha starts.
• Moon goes round the zodiac and catches up with Sun again about 29 days later.
• 29 days is less than the 30 the Sun takes to cross a rasi. So now and then the Sun has not left the rasi when the Moon reaches him again.
• It happens when the first conjunction is in the first or second degree of the rasi and the second falls in the last or second-last degree.
• It can happen in only one rasi in a year. After it, each conjunction falls further into the next rasis.

Result

The month is named by the rasi of the conjunction. Two conjunctions in Mesha are both Vaishakha. No new name is made.

• One is Adhika Vaishakha — adhika means extra.
• The other is Nija Vaishakha — nija means real.
• The next conjunction, in Vrishabha, is Jyeshtha as usual. Nothing is pushed over or skipped.
• There are still 12 months. One of them comes twice.

Frequency: on average twice in 5 years.

Purpose

Adhika Masa synchronizes the lunar calendar with the solar calendar.

A student offers the arithmetic, and PVNR accepts it as another way of looking at the same thing:

• A lunar month is 29-and-a-fraction days, so a lunar year without an Adhika Masa is about 354 days.
• That leaves about 10 days a year. In 5 years, 50-odd days — roughly 2 months.

The arithmetic tells how often it comes. The conjunction falling twice in one rasi tells why it comes.

The month is named at its first moment

A student asks whether the month then "extends into the next sign". It always does.

• The name is fixed by the sign Sun and Moon occupy at the moment the month begins — not the whole first day, the moment.
• It does not mean Sun and Moon stay there. During Vaishakha the Moon passes through all the signs, and the Sun through Mesha and part of Vrishabha.

Nothing arbitrary

• If someone says "today is Vaishakha Krishna Chaturthi", anyone with the right instruments can look at the sky and check it.
• When an Adhika Masa comes is not decided by a king or a king's astronomer, as in the Western calendar. Anyone can compute it.
• The Western calendar rests on the Sun's motion, yet it has a degree of arbitrariness built in.

"This is a calendar that was devised in Kali Yuga, when man is under the influence of Kali. On the other hand, all these calendars of India and most of the world were devised in the old time, in other yugas, when man was more intelligent, man was closer to God."

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Festival Timing: India vs USA

The tithi of a civil day is the tithi at sunrise

• Tithis are not aligned with the civil day. Navami of Chaitra — the tithi of Sri Rama's birth — may in some year start at 1 in the afternoon and run to 1 the next afternoon.
• A tithi can also be longer than a civil day: 25 or 26 hours.
• So people take the tithi running at sunrise and count the whole civil day as that tithi.

Worked example

Say a Purnima — PVNR takes Guru Purnima as the example — runs, by Indian time, from 3:30 pm on March 4 to 3:30 pm on March 5.

• In India: at sunrise on the 4th the previous tithi is running. At sunrise on the 5th the Purnima is running. The festival is kept on the 5th.
• In Massachusetts: 3:30 pm in India is about 6 in the morning there, so the tithi runs from about 6 am on the 4th to about 6 am on the 5th. If sunrise is at 6:30, the Purnima is running at sunrise on the 4th.
• So the tithi at sunrise, and with it the day of the festival, can differ between the two countries. It turns on whether sunrise comes before or after the tithi begins.

(PVNR notes he used the summer-time gap for a March date and asks the class to ignore that.)

How to find the day in the US

1. Take the exact start and end of the tithi from a panchanga made in India.
2. Convert those moments to local time. Nothing else changes.
3. See which tithi is running at local sunrise.

"If a particular tithi started at a particular time in India, it will start exactly at that moment of time here also."

The same holds for a horoscope: from an Indian panchanga, convert the time and read off the planets, the nakshatra and the tithi. Only the lagna cannot be taken that way.

Geocentric vs Topocentric

• The tithi is an angle seen from the centre of the Earth between the line to the Sun and the line to the Moon. Hyderabad or Boston makes no difference. These are geocentric positions.
• A topocentric zodiac takes the actual place on the surface as the centre.
• The Earth's diameter is very small beside the distances to the Sun and the Moon, so the angle is nearly the same. A tithi's start and end shift by "maybe a minute or two".
• PVNR advises geocentric coordinates.

Lagna is the one thing that differs

• Rasi and degree of every planet are the same everywhere on Earth. The house a planet occupies differs, because the lagna differs.
• This is still geocentric. Lagna is what rises in the east, and the tangent drawn eastward from one place points to a different part of the zodiac than the tangent drawn from another. Both the sign and the degree change.
• Even between two towns in the same state the lagna's degree differs a little.
• The lagna passes through all twelve rasis in a day because the Earth rotates on itself.

What the ancients knew

A student says the ancients had no idea the Earth moves. PVNR: not true.

• Surya Siddhanta has formulas for how Earth moves round the Sun, how Mars moves round the Sun, how Moon moves round Earth and how Earth turns on itself. It models the motion round the Sun and then converts it to motion with respect to Earth. Astrology uses geocentric positions because we live on Earth.
• Whether the formulas were exact we cannot be sure. The basic facts were right.
• The Earth was never called flat in the classics. From the Mahabharata and earlier it is Bhugola; gola is a sphere.
• The Sun is not fixed either. The Puranas say he goes round Vishnu Nabhi, the navel of Vishnu, in an elliptical orbit. This is the basis of Ayanamsa. The galaxy in turn goes round another Narayana Nabhi, and so on without end.
• Surya Siddhanta gives the period of the Sun's circuit — some twenty-three-thousand-odd years as PVNR quotes it — and the modern estimate is close to it.

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Ayanamsa

Janma rasi and lagna

A student asks about "Kumbha rasi" versus "Kumbha lagna". It is convention.

• "Born in Kumbha rasi" means the janma rasi is Kumbha: the Moon is in Kumbha.
• "Born in Kumbha lagna" means the rising sign is Kumbha.

The Problem

A student asks why one chart was given two different birth stars by different astrologers — Pushyami by some, Ashlesha by others.

• The zodiac starts from a line: 0° Mesha. That line is not drawn in the sky. Where it should be placed is a matter of controversy.
• Ayanamsa fixes where the zodiac starts.
• Each nakshatra is 13°20′. A Moon in the middle of a nakshatra stays there under any ayanamsa. A Moon within half a degree of the border of Pushyami and Ashlesha moves across when the start of the zodiac shifts by a degree.

Lahiri / Chitrapaksha Ayanamsa (Most Recommended)

• Panchangas disagreed so much that the Indian government set up a committee of astronomers and astrologers. Lahiri chaired it.
• The committee took the visible star Chitra to stand at the exact junction of Kanya and Tula, and fixed the start of the zodiac from that. Hence the name Chitrapaksha.
• Chitrapaksha and Lahiri are the same ayanamsa.
• It is very widely accepted. The Pidaparti panchangam (published near Rajahmundry), the Asthana panchangam of the Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, uses it.
• PVNR uses it and advises it.

Raman Ayanamsa

• Given by Dr. B.V. Raman, "a greatly gifted astrologer".
• About 1.5° from Lahiri.
• Raman read from the Rasi and Navamsa chakras. With a 1.5° difference the Rasi chart is the same except in border cases, and the Navamsa mostly the same.

Why divisional charts decide the matter

• Parashara gave the varga chakras: one chart for education, one for career, one for parents, one for marriage.
• With a 1.5° error in the longitudes these charts are "totally randomized".

"People who use those charts get good results only using Chitrapaksha ayanamsa. That's why 90% of astrologers today use only Chitrapaksha ayanamsa."

• With Raman, Devadatta, KP (Krishnamurti) or other ayanamsas, "your divisional charts will be totally off. All planets will be moved by 1 or 2 signs."

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Key Pronunciation Notes (PVNR)

1. Artha, not "ardha". Ardha means half.
2. Phalguna, phala, not "Falguna", "fala". Sanskrit has no fa.
3. Telugu tithi names are corruptions of the Sanskrit: Vidiya from Dvitiya, Tadiya from Tritiya, Chavithi from Chaturthi through the Hindi Chauthi.
4. Chitra is often said as "Chitta".

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Summary Table: Hora-Based Weekday Sequence

Hora order (slowest to fastest): Saturn → Jupiter → Mars → Sun → Venus → Mercury → Moon → Saturn…

Derivation rule: the weekday lord rules the 1st Hora of the day. The 25th Hora from it rules the next day. 24 modulo 7 = 3, so the next day's lord is the 4th planet in the Hora order, counting the current lord as the first.

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