How Sarpa Yoga forms
This is the exact condition the check above applies.
| Condition | Requirement |
|---|---|
| The grahas | The natural malefics — Saturn, Mars, Sun, and the nodes |
| The houses | Three of the four kendras — 1, 4, 7, 10 |
| Its opposite | Benefics in three kendras gives Māla Yoga instead |
| How often it occurs | 16.3% of charts in our sample |
This is not Kāla Sarpa. Kāla Sarpa is all seven grahas hemmed between Rāhu and Ketu — an entirely different rule with an entirely different meaning. The shared word is a coincidence of naming.
What Sārāvalī says Sarpa Yoga gives
Sārāvalī gives a crooked disposition, pitilessness, constant grief, poverty, and living in another's house on another's food.
The last clause is the substance: dependence. Malefics on the structural houses do not remove the structure, they harden it — and the classical result describes someone whose foundations belong to somebody else.
It is the negative Dala yoga, and its severity should be read against the Dala class result, which the chapter gives as mixed rather than ruinous.
Dala yogas — the kendras filled by one side
Sarpa is the malefic Dala yoga — and is constantly confused with Kāla Sarpa, which is an unrelated rule.
We measured it rather than guessed: across a sample of 398 charts, Sarpa formed in 16.3% of them.
The two Dala yogas turn on who occupies the angles: benefics give Māla, malefics give Sarpa. Sārāvalī gives the class a divided result — sometimes enjoying one's own fortune and sometimes another's, picking up what others have discarded, happy at times and sorrowful at others. Which of the two you carry decides which half predominates.
Two things true of every Nābhasa yoga
They run continuously — Sārāvalī says the Nābhasa yogas are "effective at all times independent of Daśās", which sets them apart from almost every other yoga in Jyotiṣa. And they constrain all seven grahas at once, so most charts carry only a few and a "not present" result is the ordinary answer.
How this check works
Your chart is computed from an astronomical ephemeris on the Lahiri (Citrapakṣa) ayanāṁśa, and the formation rule stated on this page is tested against it directly — the same rule, not a paraphrase. Where the classical texts disagree about a condition, the page names the reading we follow.