Ashtakavarga (八分图)

The Bindu Strength Map — Where Your Chart Is Supported, House by House

Overview

Ashtakavarga (अष्टकवर्ग, 'eight-fold division') is the great strength-scoring system of Vedic astrology — a layer of analysis that sits on top of the birth chart and answers a question the chart alone cannot: not where the planets are, but how much support each sign and house actually has. Where Jyotish gives the snapshot (your rising sign, your Moon's nakshatra, your current planetary period), Ashtakavarga reduces the whole chart to a grid of dots — bindus — that quantify benefic strength. Each of the seven classical planets contributes points to the signs it favours, counted from itself and from the other planets and the rising sign; add a planet's eight contributors together and you get its Bhinnashtakavarga, its own strength across the zodiac; add all seven planets together and you get the Sarvashtakavarga, a single map whose twelve numbers always sum to exactly 337. Those numbers tell you, at a glance, which areas of life carry natural tailwind and which face headwind — and, crucially, when a transiting planet will deliver or struggle. askTIAN computes the entire grid with exact sidereal astronomy and the canonical Parashara tables, surfaces it honestly as a symbolic strength framework, and never uses it to estimate lifespan.

Origin & history

Ashtakavarga is one of the oldest layers of Indian horoscopy. Varahamihira's 6th-century 'Brihat Jataka' already refers to it as established practice, and it is set out in full in Parashara's 'Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra' (BPHS), the encyclopedic root-text of the tradition, across its chapters on the bindu schemes (chapter 66 and following). The method assigns, for every planet, a fixed table of 'benefic places' counted forward from each of eight contributors — the seven visible planets (Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn) and the Lagna or rising sign. Rahu and Ketu, the lunar nodes, are deliberately excluded; the classical system is built on the eight visible reference points alone, which is the origin of the name. The schemes of Parashara and Varahamihira differ slightly — chiefly in the Moon's and Venus's tables — and the Parashara/BPHS version is the modern de-facto standard, popularised for contemporary readers by B.V. Raman's 1948 'Ashtakavarga System of Prediction'.

For centuries Ashtakavarga was used as a practical filter over the more elaborate chart analysis: a quick, numerical way to grade houses for prediction and, especially, to judge transits — a Saturn or Jupiter moving through a sign was read very differently depending on how many bindus it held there. Traditional practice extended the raw grid into a longevity apparatus through a sequence of reductions (the Trikona and Ekadhipatya shodhanas) and weighted sums (the Shodhya Pinda), feeding the Pindayu method of estimating lifespan. These reductions are mathematically delicate, vary between authorities, and break the clean 337-point total that makes the base system self-checking — and because they exist chiefly to serve a longevity model, askTIAN intentionally leaves them out of scope, along with the degree-level Kakshya subdivision, which needs information the sign-based grid does not carry. What remains — the Bhinnashtakavarga rows, the Sarvashtakavarga map, the strength bands and the transit rule — is the part of the tradition that is both well-attested and internally verifiable, and it is what virtually every modern Jyotish program computes.

How it works

askTIAN converts the birth date, time, timezone and place to a single instant, computes the seven classical planets and the Lagna with its own Meeus-precision ephemeris, and applies the Lahiri ayanamsa to place each on the sidereal zodiac — exactly the path the Jyotish endpoint uses, so the two agree. Only the SIGN of each body matters (Ashtakavarga is a rasi technique, robust to small differences in ayanamsa), which makes the result stable. For each planet it then walks its eight benefic-place tables: from each contributor's sign it counts forward — the contributor's own sign being the first place — and drops a bindu wherever the table says, producing that planet's twelve-sign Bhinnashtakavarga row. Each planet's row is guaranteed to sum to its fixed total (Sun 48, Moon 49, Mars 39, Mercury 54, Jupiter 56, Venus 52, Saturn 39); summing the seven rows gives the Sarvashtakavarga, which is guaranteed to total 337. These invariants are enforced at runtime — a corrupted table or indexing error throws rather than returning a quietly-wrong grid. The engine then reports each house's bindu count from the Lagna with a strength band (30 or more strong, 26–29 average, 25 or fewer weak, the average being about 28), flags the strongest and weakest life-domains, and for each planet surfaces the bindu it holds in the sign it occupies — the single most-used transit gauge, where five or more means the planet tends to deliver and three or fewer means it struggles. A transparent 0–100 emphasis score, computed in code, measures how much benefic weight the chart concentrates in its auspicious houses; it is a symbolic summary, not a probability.

Good for

Use cases

House Strength Dashboard

Send a birth chart and the API returns the Sarvashtakavarga: each of the twelve houses with its bindu count (totalling the invariant 337) and a strong/average/weak band, plus the three strongest and three weakest life-domains. A clean, fully deterministic spine for a Vedic strength report — no LLM required.

Transit Forecasting

Each planet's Bhinnashtakavarga reports the bindu it holds in every sign, so an app can tell users whether an upcoming Saturn or Jupiter transit lands in a high-bindu (supportive) or low-bindu (challenging) sign — the classic, most practical use of the system — and combine it with the house's SAV strength for a layered call.

Layer Over a Jyotish Reading

Because Ashtakavarga shares the same sidereal chart as the Jyotish endpoint, apps can show the natal snapshot (rising sign, nakshatra, dasha) alongside the bindu strength map, giving users both 'where the planets are' and 'how supported each area of life is' from one birth input.

Planetary Strength Comparison

The per-planet totals and rows let a product visualise how each of the seven classical planets is distributed across the zodiac and how strong it is in its own occupied sign, a compact numerical complement to the qualitative dignities of a standard chart.

Key terms

Bindu
A benefic point or 'dot'. Each planet receives bindus in the signs favoured by its eight contributors. A sign can hold 0 to 8 bindus in any one planet's grid; the count is the unit of strength throughout the system.
Bhinnashtakavarga (BAV)
A single planet's bindu row across the twelve signs, formed by adding the contributions of all eight reference points (the seven planets and the Lagna). Each planet's row sums to a fixed total — Sun 48, Moon 49, Mars 39, Mercury 54, Jupiter 56, Venus 52, Saturn 39 — and is the prime tool for judging that planet's transits.
Sarvashtakavarga (SAV)
The aggregate map made by summing all seven planets' Bhinnashtakavarga rows. Its twelve sign-totals always add to 337 (average about 28 per house). High-SAV houses carry natural support; low-SAV houses face friction. It is the headline strength map of the chart.
Contributor & the count-forward rule
The eight reference points — Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and the Lagna — each donate bindus to specific places counted forward from its own sign, the planet's own sign being place one. Counting 'from, not to', with the own sign as house one, is the rule most often gotten wrong.
Strength bands
A convenience overlay on the SAV: 30 or more bindus is strong, 26–29 average, 25 or fewer weak, against an average of about 28. Thresholds vary by author, so the raw bindu number is treated as the source of truth and the band as a reading aid.
Transit gauge (five-bindu rule)
A planet transiting a sign where it holds five or more bindus in its own Bhinnashtakavarga tends to give good results; three or fewer is weak (seven or eight excellent, four neutral). Combined with the house's SAV strength, this is the most practical everyday use of the system.
Out of scope: Kakshya & Shodhya Pinda
The degree-level Kakshya subdivision (needing the exact degree, not just the sign) and the longevity reductions — Trikona and Ekadhipatya shodhana and the Shodhya Pinda — are deliberately excluded: they are source-divergent, break the self-checking 337 total, and exist chiefly to feed a lifespan model this endpoint does not provide.

API

The askTIAN Ashtakavarga API computes the Vedic bindu strength map with exact, self-verifying astronomy: the seven classical planets and the Lagna placed on the sidereal (Lahiri) zodiac, each planet's Bhinnashtakavarga built from the canonical Parashara benefic tables, and the Sarvashtakavarga aggregate whose twelve houses always sum to the invariant 337. It returns each house's bindu count and strength band, the strongest and weakest life-domains, every planet's transit gauge in its occupied sign, a transparent 0–100 emphasis score and a fixed-section LLM reading. The bindu tables are locked cell-by-cell against a reference library and checked at runtime by their fixed totals. Rahu/Ketu, the Kakshya subdivision and the longevity reductions are out of scope, and the endpoint never estimates lifespan. Set interpretation:false for structured data only.

Endpoint: POST /trpc/ashtakavarga.compute — 6 TIAN Points. See the API documentation and Playground.