Anapha Yoga is formed when a planet other than the Sun occupies the twelfth place from the Moon, the place immediately preceding it. It is the counterpart of sunapha and is read for health, a pleasant disposition, good reputation and freedom from want, with the character of the result shaped by which planet occupies the place. The twelfth from the Moon is otherwise a difficult position in Jyotisha, associated with loss and expenditure when reckoned from the Ascendant, and the difference shows how much depends on the reference point chosen; the same house counted from a different starting place is read quite differently. The three yogas sunapha, anapha and durudhara are given in Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra among the chandra yogas and are among the oldest and best attested of the named combinations.
The reversal of association between the twelfth house counted from the Ascendant, read for loss and expenditure, and the twelfth counted from the Moon, read here favourably as Anapha, is one of the clearest demonstrations in the whole system that Jyotisha treats a house's meaning as inseparable from its reference point rather than as a fixed property of the position itself. Commentators sometimes explain the shift by noting that the twelfth from the Moon is also the eleventh sign ahead in the natural zodiac order beginning from the Moon's own sign taken as a notional first house, so that what looks like loss from the body's vantage, the Ascendant, can present as quiet accumulation from the mind's vantage, the Moon, an interpretive move that is characteristic of how the chandra lagna is used throughout the lunar yogas.