How the Drekkāṇa is constructed
Each sign is divided into three parts of 10° each — thirty-six drekkāṇas in the zodiac.
- First drekkāṇa (0°–10°)
- The sign itself. Ruled by Nārada.
- Second drekkāṇa (10°–20°)
- The 5th sign from it. Ruled by Agastya.
- Third drekkāṇa (20°–30°)
- The 9th sign from it. Ruled by Dūrvāsa.
- The pattern
- Because the three divisions are the 1st, 5th and 9th from the sign, every drekkāṇa of a sign falls in a sign of the same element. A planet never changes element in the D-3 — which is why this chart reads temperament so consistently.
Reading siblings from the D-3
Elder and younger siblings are read from different houses, and the distinction is not optional. The 3rd house carries younger siblings; the 11th carries elder ones. Read each from the D-3 Lagna, look at the lord and the occupants, and read the 3rd and 11th of the birth chart alongside for the outward relationship.
Mars is the natural significator of siblings — of brothers particularly — and its condition in the D-3 colours the whole subject. In the Jaimini scheme the Bhrātṛkāraka, the graha with the third-highest degree, carries the same office for this chart and for the guru.
What the D-3 will not tell you is a count. Sibling number is one of the least reliable predictions in the whole subject, and the classical rules for it contradict each other freely. The chart is far better at describing the relationship — support, rivalry, distance, dependence — than at arithmetic.
Courage, effort, and why they belong in the same chart
The 3rd house is parākrama — prowess, the strength you exercise yourself. It is deliberately distinguished from the 9th, which is fortune that arrives from elsewhere. A person with a strong D-3 and a weak 9th earns everything they get; the reverse is a person carried by circumstance who struggles the moment they must push.
Siblings sit in this house for a structural reason: they are the first people you must contend with as equals, the first arena in which you either assert yourself or do not. The chart of siblings and the chart of self-assertion are the same chart because the first is where the second is learned.
Read the D-3 for skills that require repetition and nerve — performance, arms, sport, negotiation, anything where the result depends on being willing to go again after a failure.
The Drekkāṇa at a glance
Every figure here is specific to this division. The Vimśopaka rows give the share of the twenty-point strength score the Drekkāṇa carries in each classical scheme — a blank means the division is not counted in that scheme at all.
| D3 | |
|---|---|
| Divisions per sign | 3 |
| Arc of one division | 10° |
| Divisional Lagna changes every | about 40 minutes |
| Vimśopaka weight · Ṣaḍvarga (6) | 4 |
| Vimśopaka weight · Saptavarga (7) | 3 |
| Vimśopaka weight · Daśavarga (10) | 1½ |
| Vimśopaka weight · Ṣoḍaśavarga (16) | 1 |
Counted in 4 of the four schemes. The more schemes a division appears in, the more the tradition treats it as load-bearing rather than specialist.
How accurate your birth time needs to be for the Drekkāṇa
The Rāśi Lagna moves through a whole sign in roughly two hours, which is why the birth chart tolerates an approximate time. This division cuts each sign into 3, so the D3 Lagna moves to a new sign about 40 minutes — and the planets near a boundary shift with it. If your recorded time is uncertain by more than that, treat the D3 Lagna and any house-based conclusion drawn from it as provisional, and rectify the time against dated life events before relying on it. Sign placements of the slower grahas stay stable much longer than the Lagna does.
How this is computed
Positions come from an astronomical ephemeris, converted to the sidereal zodiac on the Lahiri (Citrapakṣa) ayanāṁśa and computed by our own Parāśara engine — no pre-written results, and no language model anywhere near a number. Where the classical texts disagree, this page names the convention we follow instead of quietly picking one.