Mūla Daśā Calculator — the Jaimini graha daśā of root karma

A Jaimini system that is nevertheless a planet daśā

Most of what is called Jaimini daśā is rāśi daśā: a sign takes the period, becomes the functional Lagna, and the whole chart is re-read from it. Nārāyaṇa, Sudāśā and Dṛg all work that way. Mūla does not — each of its nine periods belongs to a planet, and you read the planet as you would in Vimśottarī.

What is Jaimini about it is how the lengths and the order are derived: from mūlatrikoṇa distance, from sign strength, from the odd/even direction rule. The machinery is Jaimini; the output is a planetary sequence.

That makes it unusually easy to bring into an ordinary reading. You do not have to rotate the chart or recount the houses — you have a planet and a date range, the same shape of information Vimśottarī gives you.

How each period's length is computed

This is the part worth checking by hand, because it is exact arithmetic and it is what distinguishes Mūla from every other graha daśā.

1 — count back to mūlatrikoṇa

Count backwards from the sign the graha occupies to its own mūlatrikoṇa sign, 1 to 12. A graha already sitting in its mūlatrikoṇa counts 12, not 0.

2 — subtract from its Vimśottarī years

Take the graha's Vimśottarī allotment and subtract that count. Jupiter has sixteen Vimśottarī years, so a Jupiter five signs back from Sagittarius gives 16 − 5 = 11.

3 — adjust for dignity

One year is subtracted if the graha is exalted and one added if it is debilitated — but not at all when the sign it occupies is its mūlatrikoṇa, because mūlatrikoṇa outranks exaltation.

4 — take the absolute value

The result is the length in daśā years, as an absolute value, and a result of zero becomes the graha's full Vimśottarī allotment. The absolute value is not a technicality: where the count exceeds the Vimśottarī years, the dignity adjustment moves the signed figure toward zero, so a debilitated graha can come out a year shorter rather than longer.

The order of the nine lords — and the one part that is not fully settled

The sequence is not a planetary order at all. It is blocked by sign: grahas sharing a sign always run consecutively, and the sign-blocks are grouped by modality — the four kendras (1, 4, 7, 10 from a reference point), then the four paṇapharas, then the four apoklimas. That grouping is what "Kendrādi" names.

Four rules settle it. The reference point is the strongest of three standpoints — the Lagna, the Sun's sign and the Moon's sign — by the Jaimini strength chain, and its modality class goes first. The direction follows Jaimini's odd/even rule: the blocks run zodiacally from an odd reference sign and against the zodiac from an even one. Within a block, signs are taken in descending Jaimini sign strength. Within a sign, grahas are ordered by dignity — exalted, then mūlatrikoṇa or own sign, then neutral, then debilitated — with ties going to the more advanced graha.

Here is the honest part. The first two of those rules are firm; the two that rank signs and resolve the remaining ties are fitted, and they do not reproduce every published sequence. Where a reading hinges on which of two adjacent periods you are in, verify the order against a second tool before building anything on it. The period lengths and the dates within a given order are exact; the ordering itself is where this system still has an unsettled edge, and a page that did not say so would be misleading you.

How to read a Mūla period

Short version: read the graha, in the chart the daśā was cast in, against the D-60.

Start with the graha

What it rules from the Lagna, where it sits, what condition it is in. This is ordinary graha-daśā reading and nothing about Mūla changes it.

Then read it in the Ṣaṣṭyāṁśa

The pairing with the D-60 is the point of the system. The same planet's D-60 placement tells you what the root of the period is — the karma the period exists to deliver — where the D-1 tells you its outward shape.

No balance at birth

Unlike Vimśottarī and unlike Yoginī, the first Mūla period starts exactly at birth. Nothing is back-dated, so the first row on the page is the period you were actually born into, from its first day.

Sub-periods are proportional

A mahādaśā is divided among all nine grahas in proportion to their own Mūla period lengths, in the same lord order, rotated to begin at the mahādaśā lord. Because the lengths are chart-specific, so is every sub-period boundary.

Cast it in a division when the question is specific

The selector recasts the daśā on any divisional chart. Read it on the D-1 for the life as a whole, and on the division that owns your question when the question is narrow.