Method: The Editions, Rules and Limits Behind Every Page

Most astrology sites ask you to trust a person. This one asks you to check a method.

That is a deliberate choice, and it is the harder one. A name and a photograph are quick to produce and impossible to verify. A method can be inspected. Every dating rule we use is stated below, every edition we read is named, every calculation can be reproduced with software you can download, and every mistake we have found in our own work is published with a date on it. If you disagree with a page here, you should be able to find the exact step where we went wrong without knowing anything about who wrote it.

This page applies to every article, table, panchang result and consultation on this site.

The editions we actually read

Jain chronology and calendar material circulates online mostly as summaries of summaries. We work from named translations, read straight through rather than searched for keywords, and we cite the edition rather than the tradition.

Hemachandra’s Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra, in Helen M. Johnson’s translation (Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, 1931 onward, six volumes). This is the backbone of the kalyanaka data on this site. Hemachandra is a twelfth-century Shvetambara source, so it is a late and sectarian witness, not a primary one, and we treat it that way. Johnson’s English uses archaic synonyms for several nakshatras, and we resolve them consistently rather than passing them through: Hastottara is Uttara Phalguni, Paushna is Revati, Radha is Vishakha, Tvashtra is Chitra, Varuna is Shatabhisha, Maitreya is Anuradha.

The Kalpasutra, in Hermann Jacobi’s translation (Sacred Books of the East, volume 22, 1884). We use it for the four Tirthankaras it narrates in detail: Rishabhanatha, Neminatha, Parshvanatha and Mahavira. Jacobi’s apparatus matters as much as his text. Where he brackets a passage and footnotes that it is missing from his oldest manuscript, we quote the bracket and the footnote, because that is exactly the material that gets stripped when the passage is quoted onward. The whole Mahavira kundali question turns on one such bracket.

The Surya Prajnapti and Chandra Prajnapti, the Upanga Agamas on solar and lunar motion, and the Jyotisha Karandaka on time reckoning and muhurta. These are the tradition’s own astronomical literature. They also give us the 28-nakshatra scheme with unequal muhurta durations, which is why Abhijit appears on this site where most panchangs have dropped it. We present the Jain cosmographic model in these texts, including the two suns and two moons over Jambudvipa, as sacred cosmography and part of the tradition’s self-understanding, not as a description of the sky we compute against. Blurring those two things would flatter readers rather than inform them.

The Tiloya Pannatti and other Digambara material, for sect comparison. Here we depend more on digital reference collections such as Jainkosh than on printed critical editions, and we say so on the pages where it matters. Reporting a Digambara reading through a Shvetambara summary of it is a known way to get Jain material wrong.

For calculation, the sidereal Jyotisha framework used across Indian astrology, with positions from the Swiss Ephemeris (Moshier model) and independent reproduction using the algorithms in Meeus where a result matters enough to double-check. Sunrise, sunset and tithi boundaries are computed from the coordinates of the city you enter, not from a table printed for Ahmedabad.

One limitation, stated plainly: we read translations, not manuscripts. Where the translations disagree, we can report the disagreement but rarely settle it.

Purnimanta and amanta, the rule that resolves most contradictions

More apparent contradictions between Jain date sources come from this single convention than from any real disagreement about the facts.

An Indian lunar month is counted two ways. In the purnimanta convention it ends at the full moon, so the dark fortnight comes second. In the amanta convention it ends at the new moon, so the dark fortnight comes first. The days themselves are identical. Only the month label moves.

Hemachandra uses purnimanta, so the kalyanaka tables on this site are purnimanta and say so in every caption. Gujarati and Marathi practice is amanta, which is why a reader in Ahmedabad comparing our tables to a local panchang will find a one-month offset on dark-fortnight dates and none on bright-fortnight dates. That is the signature of the convention, not of an error. If you ever see an offset on a Shukla date, one of us has genuinely made a mistake, and we would like to hear about it.

The rule is not obscure. It is simply almost never stated, which is how the same Tirthankara ends up with two different birth months across two sites that agree completely about the underlying day. The kalyanaka calendar states it in the caption of every table.

The tithi at sunrise

A tithi is the time the moon takes to gain twelve degrees on the sun. Because the moon’s angular speed varies through its orbit, a tithi is not twenty-four hours. It runs between roughly nineteen and twenty-six hours, so it begins and ends at odd clock times rather than at midnight.

By near-universal convention, the tithi running at local sunrise names the whole civil day. Every date on this site follows that convention, and the panchang shows you both the tithi and the exact time it ends, so you can see the label and the underlying reality at once.

Two consequences follow, and both are places where traditions genuinely differ. A tithi that begins and ends between two sunrises is never current at any sunrise. It is kshaya, lost, and no civil day carries it. A tithi that spans two sunrises is counted twice. It is vriddhi, increased. Observance is tied to the tithi and not to the weekday, so every sangh needs a rule for a parva tithi that is lost or doubled, and those rules are not the same. The long-running Ek Tithi and Be Tithi divergence within the Tapa Gaccha is precisely this question. Shvetambara and Digambara calendars resolve it differently again, and outside India a local sunrise can move a date by a full day.

So the dates on this site are computed astronomical tithis at sunrise. They are not a ruling. Before you fix a vow, book leave or buy a ticket, check the published panchang of your own sangh. Where the traditions differ, none of them is wrong, and we will not adjudicate between them from a website.

Why we show sect differences instead of reconciling them

The tempting thing to do with a disagreement is to pick the majority reading and present a clean answer. We do not, for two reasons.

The first is that the disagreements are usually the most informative part of the record. The Kalpasutra gives Mahavira’s birth as Chaitra Krishna 14; Hemachandra gives Chaitra Shukla 13, which is the date the whole community actually keeps as Mahavir Jayanti. That gap tells you something real about how the two texts were transmitted, and averaging it away would destroy the only evidence a reader has.

The second is that a reconciled answer would be a claim to authority we do not have. In the Shvetambara tradition Mallinatha is a woman; the Digambara tradition holds that all twenty-four Tirthankaras were male. Samvatsari is kept on Bhadrapada Shukla 4 by most Murtipujak sanghs and on Shukla 5 by many Sthanakvasi and Terapanth sanghs. These are not data errors waiting to be cleaned. They are living traditions, and a site run by nobody in particular has no standing to rule on them.

So both readings go on the page, labelled by tradition, and the reader takes their own sangh’s practice as governing. Where a source genuinely does not state a value, we say so rather than inferring one and letting it harden into fact through repetition. Suparshvanatha’s chyavana and kevala paksha are blank in our tables for exactly this reason.

What this site will not claim

These are standing limits, not case-by-case judgements, and they apply to free pages and paid readings alike.

• No gemstones. Coral is the skeleton of a marine animal, pearls are taken from living oysters, and mined stones involve himsa to earth-bodied beings. We treat this as applied Jain ethics and note openly that it rests on community reasoning rather than a single scriptural verse.
• No fire rituals or paid ritual packages. Karma is not appeased. It is shed, by the person who bound it.
• No fear-based selling. No death predictions, no “this dosha will destroy you unless.” A hard dasha is karmic weather, and weather is survived with preparation rather than with a panic purchase. If a page here ever makes you feel you must buy something to be safe, we have failed our own standard and you should tell us.
• No vashikaran, enemy removal or occult services. These violate ahimsa, and they are frauds besides.
• No horoscope for any Tirthankara. No Jain text records a planetary position or a birth time for any of the twenty-four. We tested the one chart that circulates and found it cannot be real.
• No claim of monastic endorsement. Jain monastic literature is itself ambivalent about prediction, and practising nimitta for livelihood is listed among faults for ascetics. Astrology’s place in the tradition was preserved for the practical dharma of householders. This site is householder’s work and says so.
• No claim that our panchang overrides your sangh. It is a computation offered as a check, not an authority.

What we do not know

Naming the gaps is part of the method, so here are the ones we currently carry.

Mahavira’s chronology is genuinely unsettled. The traditional nirvana date of 527 BCE is an arithmetic result rather than a record, no inscription or coin or foreign synchronism attaches to him, and serious scholars place the nirvana anywhere from 527 to about 425 BCE. Sumatinatha’s nirvana nakshatra and Shitalanatha’s diksha tithi are flagged in our tables for further verification and should not be quoted from us as settled. On the Abhinandananatha page we have left a mismatch between the Mithuna and Abhijit data unresolved rather than smoothing it, and if you hold a commentary that settles it, that would be a real contribution.

There will be more of these. There should be. A site in this subject with no open questions is not being careful.

Our correction policy

Four commitments, and they are the substance of this page rather than an afterthought to it.

We correct rather than quietly delete. When something here is wrong, the page is fixed and the error is logged with a date on our corrections page: what was wrong, why it was wrong, and what it is now. Silently editing a mistake away is the cheapest thing a website can do, and it is the reason so little on the internet can be trusted.

We correct our own errors on the same terms as anyone else’s. The first entry in the log is a date this site published wrongly on its own homepage.

Factual errors are fixed as fast as we can verify them. A wrong date, nakshatra, attribution or sourcing claim is urgent, because someone may be planning an observance around it. Matters of interpretation get a note on the page rather than a rewrite.

Nothing here is above correction because of who wrote it, which is straightforward, because nobody’s reputation is holding any of it up.

How to report an error

Use the contact form, or write to [email protected]. Corrections are seva and we mean that literally: they are the most useful thing a reader can send us.

What helps most, in rough order:

1. The URL of the page and, if you can, the sentence or the table row.
2. What you believe the correct value is.
3. Where you are getting it from: an edition and chapter, a published panchang, your sangh’s calendar, or a commentary. “My panchang says otherwise” is still worth sending, and naming the panchang makes it actionable.

Purnimanta against amanta, or a tithi taken at a different city’s sunrise, accounts for a large share of what looks like disagreement, so it is worth checking those first. We read everything. Where a correction changes a page, it is logged with a date. Where it does not, we will usually still write back and say why.

Sources and method. Editions as named above: Hemachandra's Trishashti-Shalaka-Purusha-Charitra in Helen M. Johnson's translation, the Kalpasutra in Jacobi's translation with his apparatus, the Surya Prajnapti, Chandra Prajnapti and Jyotisha Karandaka for the tradition's own astronomy, and the Tiloya Pannatti line via digital reference collections for Digambara comparison. Positions are computed with the Swiss Ephemeris (Moshier model) and independently reproduced with Meeus algorithms. We read translations, not manuscripts, and say so. Corrections are seva: tell us, and see the corrections log.