Free Avakhada Chakra Calculator

Enter your birth date, time and place above and this free calculator draws up your Avakhada chakra, the short table that printed kundalis carry on their first pages. It gives your Moon sign and its lord, your birth star (nakshatra) and its pada, the first syllable for a name, the varna, vashya, yoni, gana and nadi that kundli matching uses, the yunja and the paya, the element of your Moon sign, and the tithi, yoga and karana at the moment of birth; with a birth time it adds your rising sign and a second way of reading the paya. The time of birth makes it exact, but you can leave it out: the tool then takes the Moon at midday and tells you if the Moon changed sign or star that day.

How it works

Most lines of the Avakhada chakra follow from where the Moon stood at birth; the tithi, yoga and karana come from the Sun and the Moon together, and the rising sign, shown when you give the time, from the time and place of birth. The calculator finds the Moon’s sidereal position (Lahiri ayanamsa) from the NASA JPL DE440 tables, as every chart tool on this site does, and reads off:

• the Moon sign (rashi) and its lord, and from the sign the varna, the vashya group and the element (tattva);
• the birth star (nakshatra) and its lord in the Vimshottari order, and from the star the yoni (animal), the gana and the nadi;
• the pada, one of four quarters of the star, and from the pada the syllable for a name, from the Sanskrit Avakahada chakra of 108 syllables, four for each of the 27 stars;
• the yunja, from the star: Narada Samhita (ch. 6, verses 47 and 48) and Vriddha Vasishtha Samhita (Chandracharadhyaya, verse 16) give the same rule, the six stars from Revati to Mrigashira in the first part (purva), the twelve from Ardra to Anuradha in the middle part (madhya), and the nine from Jyeshtha to Uttara Bhadrapada in the last part (apara);
• the paya, as almanac practice, by both methods printed books give (see below): from the star, and, when you give a birth time, from the house of the Moon counted from the rising sign;
• the tithi, yoga and karana running at the moment of birth, from the positions of the Sun and the Moon.

The varna, vashya, yoni, gana and nadi are read from the same tables as our Kundli matching and Nakshatra compatibility tools, and the syllable from the same table as the Nakshatra calculator, so the site gives one answer wherever you look. For the element, Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (ch. 4, verses 6 to 24, Santhanam’s edition) names it for eight signs: Aries and Sagittarius fiery, Taurus and Capricorn earthy, Gemini and Aquarius airy, Cancer and Pisces watery. It names none for Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. For those four this page follows the pattern the eight show, in which a sign shares the element of its trines (the signs 5th and 9th from it), so Leo is taken as fiery, Virgo earthy, Libra airy and Scorpio watery. That step is our reading, not a line of the text, and the result says so when your Moon sign is one of the four.

Reading the result

Most of the table is used for two things. The syllable is the traditional first sound for a child’s name, chosen at the naming ceremony; our baby names by date of birth lists names that begin with it. The varna, vashya, yoni, gana and nadi are the groups that kundli matching compares between two people; on their own they place a person in a traditional group and do not grade anyone as better or worse.

The tithi, yoga and karana are three of the five parts of the panchang at the moment of birth. The Janma panchang calculator shows when each one began and ended, and the weekday by the sunrise rule.

Where traditions differ

The name is spelt both Avakhada and Avakahada, and published kundalis do not all print the same lines.

The yunja has a classical source, quoted above, and this page follows it. The paya does not: we found no classical rule for the paya of a birth, and printed books give two methods, so the tool shows both and labels them almanac practice. The first goes by the birth star: gold for Revati, Ashwini and Bharani, iron for Krittika, Rohini and Mrigashira, silver for Ardra to Anuradha, and copper for Jyeshtha to Uttara Bhadrapada, as in R. P. Gaud’s Nakshatra Jyotish (1997) and Kishan Lal Sharma’s Sampurna Rashi Nakshatra aur Muhurt Vigyan. The second goes by the house of the Moon counted from the rising sign: gold for the 1st, 6th and 11th, silver for the 2nd, 5th and 9th, copper for the 3rd, 7th and 10th, and iron for the 4th, 8th and 12th, as in Kishan Lal Sharma’s book and the Braj Bhoomi Panchang. Those house numbers come from a verse on the paya of Saturn in transit, in Sangrah Shiromani (Trayodashi Prabha, verses 92 and 93). The second method needs the rising sign, so without a birth time only the first is shown. The two methods can give different metals for the same birth, and the tool does not choose between them. Nor does it say whether a paya is good or bad: the books read gold paya in opposite ways, so any reading would be one book’s view.

Within the lines shown, the Vashya tables differ a little between books, and the Vashya group of Sagittarius and Capricorn changes at the middle of the sign; where a pada lies across that line, this tool uses the half in which the pada begins, as the matching tools do. Regional naming traditions, Tamil, Telugu and Bengali among them, sometimes give a different syllable for a pada. If your family follows a regional almanac, trust it.

What it does not do

It does not score a match between two people: use Kundli matching for that. Apart from the Sun, which the tithi, yoga and karana need, it does not read the planets other than the Moon, and it makes no prediction. For the whole chart, open the free kundali.

Frequently asked questions