What Aṣṭakavarga is actually for
Aṣṭakavarga is a transit instrument first and a natal one second. Its central use is simple: when a graha moves through a sign, look at that graha's own Bhinnāṣṭakavarga for that sign. Four bindus or more and the transit tends to deliver; one or two and the same transit passes with very little to show for it.
That is why two people can have Saturn crossing the same sign in the same month and experience nothing alike. The transit is identical. The support it finds is not.
Read natally, the Sarvāṣṭakavarga tells you which parts of your life have broad backing and which are thinly supported. The sign holding your 10th house with 34 bindus is a career that the rest of the chart agrees with; the same house at 22 is one you will have to carry alone.
What it does not do is replace dignity and placement. A graha can sit in a sign with high bindus and still be debilitated, combust and badly placed. Aṣṭakavarga measures consent, not capability — for capability read Ṣaḍbala, and for favourability read Vimśopaka Bala.
How many bindus each graha has to give
The totals are fixed and identical in every chart ever cast — only their distribution across the twelve signs changes. If a published table does not add up to these numbers, it is wrong.
| Graha | Total bindus | Average per sign |
|---|---|---|
| Mercury | 54 | 4.5 |
| Jupiter | 56 | 4.7 |
| Venus | 52 | 4.3 |
| Moon | 49 | 4.1 |
| Sun | 48 | 4.0 |
| Mars | 39 | 3.3 |
| Saturn | 39 | 3.3 |
The seven sum to 337, which is the Sarvāṣṭakavarga total across the whole zodiac — about 28 per sign on average. The Lagna has its own table of 49 bindus, which this calculator shows, but it is not counted into the 337: the Sarvāṣṭakavarga is the sum of the seven grahas only. Adding the Lagna in is the commonest arithmetic error in published tables.
Reading a Sarvāṣṭakavarga figure
With 337 bindus spread over twelve signs, the average sign holds just over 28. That average is the only honest baseline — a sign is strong or weak relative to it, not against some absolute scale.
| Bindus in a sign | What it means |
|---|---|
| 32 and above | Strongly supported. Transits through it tend to go well and the house it holds carries its own weight. |
| 28 to 31 | At or just above average. Unremarkable, which is not a criticism. |
| 25 to 27 | Below average. The matters of that house need deliberate effort rather than arriving on their own. |
| 24 and below | Thinly supported. Malefic transits here are felt more and benefic ones deliver less. |
These bands are practice, not scripture. The texts give the arithmetic and the transit rule; the thresholds are how practitioners read the arithmetic, and different schools draw the lines a point or two apart.
The kakṣyā method — the finer transit reading
Each sign divides into eight kakṣyās of 3°45′, and each kakṣyā belongs to one of the eight contributors, in a fixed order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, the Lagna.
A transiting graha is favourable while it crosses a kakṣyā whose owner gave that sign a bindu in that graha's own table, and unfavourable while it crosses one that withheld it. This is what turns a two-and-a-half-year Saturn transit into a sequence of distinct passages rather than one long verdict — and it is why a difficult transit can have a good month inside it.
Saturn spends roughly three months in each kakṣyā, Jupiter about a month and a half, and the faster grahas a few days. For daśā-level timing the bindu count of the sign is enough; for picking a month, the kakṣyā is the tool.
The reduction — trikoṇa and ekādhipatya śodhana
The raw tables are not the end of the method. Two reductions follow, and their output — the śodhita grid — is what the piṇḍas are built from.
Trikoṇa śodhana works on each trine of signs: where all three members of a trine hold bindus, the common count is subtracted from all three, on the reasoning that a point shared by an entire trine distinguishes nothing. Ekādhipatya śodhana then handles pairs of signs under one lord, reducing the weaker member where both are occupied or both empty, with the rule varying by whether a planet sits in either sign.
The reduced totals are much smaller than the raw ones and are not meant to be read as "support" any more. They exist to feed the piṇḍas, which are the figures used for longevity work and for the finer transit methods.
The piṇḍas
A piṇḍa is a weighted total: the śodhita bindus of each sign multiplied by that sign's rāśi guṇakāra, plus the contribution of any graha occupying it through the graha guṇakāra, summed for the graha whose table it is.
These are the numbers the classical longevity methods consume, and they also rank the grahas for transit emphasis — the graha with the largest piṇḍa is the one whose transits are most worth tracking in that chart. They are shown here for completeness; they are not a score, and a large piṇḍa is not a blessing.
Aṣṭakavarga in the divisional charts
The arithmetic does not care which chart it is given. This calculator follows the chart selector, so you can compute the Aṣṭakavarga of your navāṁśa or your daśāṁśa as readily as of the rāśi.
Classical practice runs it on the rāśi, and that is the default here. Divisional Aṣṭakavarga is a modern extension — useful for seeing which parts of a specific divisional chart carry support, but not something the texts prescribe. Treat the D-1 figures as the reading and the rest as corroboration.