Yoginī Daśā Calculator — the 36-year cycle of the eight yoginīs

The eight yoginīs, their grahas and their years

The cycle is fixed and runs in this order. Note that there are eight lords, not nine: Ketu takes no part in Yoginī daśā at all.

The names carry their meaning plainly: Maṅgalā is the auspicious one, Dhānyā the wealthy, Siddhā the accomplished — and Saṅkaṭā, the longest period of the eight, is the one named for difficulty.

Which yoginī your life begins in

The cycle is seeded by the Moon, as Vimśottarī is, but by a different rule.

The rule

Take the number of the Moon's nakṣatra, counting Aśvinī as 1 through Revatī as 27. Add 3, and take the remainder on division by 8. A remainder of 0 is read as the 8th. That is your starting yoginī.

An example

A Moon in Mṛgaśirā — nakṣatra 5 — gives 5 + 3 = 8, remainder 0, read as 8: the cycle opens in Saṅkaṭā. A Moon in Aśvinī gives 1 + 3 = 4: Bhrāmarī.

The balance at birth

The first period is back-dated, not started fresh. Whatever fraction of its nakṣatra the Moon had already crossed at birth is the fraction of that first period already spent — so the opening row begins before your date of birth, and what remains of it is what you actually lived.

Why it is a remainder and not a count

Several of the conditional nakṣatra daśās count forward from a seed nakṣatra and wrap at 27 before dividing, which makes their mapping jump. Yoginī does not: it is a plain remainder, continuous across all twenty-seven nakṣatras.

How to read a Yoginī period

Read the graha, not the name. The yoginī is what the period is called; the planet is what acts in it. A Siddhā period is Venus's seven years, and what it brings depends on where Venus sits in your chart, what it rules from your Lagna, and what condition it is in — not on the word "accomplished".

This is the commonest misuse of the system. Lists circulate assigning fixed outcomes to each yoginī — Maṅgalā auspicious, Saṅkaṭā disastrous — and applied without the chart they are worthless. A Saṅkaṭā period for someone whose Rāhu is strong and well placed is not eight years of calamity, and a Maṅgalā period for someone with an afflicted Moon is not a gift.

Use it as the second opinion. Read the Vimśottarī period first, because its hundred-and-twenty-year frame is the primary one; then check what Yoginī has running. Where the two name the same planet or the same kind of planet, the indication is doubled and worth acting on. Where they conflict, Vimśottarī holds and the Yoginī period describes the texture rather than the event.

And use the repetition, which is the one thing this system gives you that Vimśottarī cannot. Work out when the same yoginī last ran — thirty-six years earlier — and look at what that stretch of your life actually held. That is a test you can perform on your own biography, and it will tell you more about how this daśā behaves in your chart than any general list of meanings.

Sub-periods, and what this page builds

The split is proportional, which keeps the arithmetic simple enough to check by hand.

The antardaśā split

A mahādaśā of D years is divided among the eight yoginīs in proportion to their own years: the antardaśā of a yoginī holding x years is D × x ÷ 36. The order runs the same cycle, rotated to begin at the mahādaśā's own yoginī.

How deep

This page builds three levels — mahādaśā, antardaśā and pratyantardaśā — across three full 36-year rounds, which covers a hundred and eight years from birth.

The year used

One daśā year is one complete revolution of the Sun's sidereal longitude back to its natal position, not a fixed count of days. Over a long sequence that choice moves boundaries by days, which is why it is stated rather than assumed.

Any division

Because the seed is the Moon's nakṣatra, the cycle can be seeded from the Moon as placed in any divisional chart. The selector above the sequence does that; D-1 is the standard reading.