Dhana yogas are the wealth combinations, built on the lords of the houses that Jyotisha assigns to resources: the second, of accumulated wealth and of the family estate, and the eleventh, of income and gains, supported by the fifth and ninth as houses of merit and fortune and by the Ascendant lord as the significator of the person who is to hold the wealth. Associations among these lords, by conjunction, aspect or exchange, form the class. The tradition is careful about timing: a wealth combination is held to yield during the dasha and antardasha periods of the planets that form it, so the same chart may show prosperity in one period and difficulty in another. The category also illustrates a general feature of Jyotisha, that its house meanings are more finely divided than in western practice, with separate houses for held wealth and for incoming gain.
The core rule is commonly traced to the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, a foundational Jyotisha text traditionally attributed to the sage Parashara though its surviving form is now generally dated by scholars to somewhere in the seventh or eighth century CE, later than the tradition's own attribution suggests. A separate text, the Bhavartha Ratnakara, adds that an exalted planet placed in the fifth or ninth house makes a person exceptionally fortunate, a specific case within the broader class rather than a distinct yoga of its own, and the general rule across the sources is that the Ascendant and its lord must themselves be strong and unafflicted for a Dhana combination to fully mature rather than remain a latent potential in the chart.