D-60 Shashtiamsha, the Chart of Past-Life Karma

The Shashtiamsha chart, D-60, is the sixteenth and finest of the divisional charts, formed by dividing each sign into sixty parts of just half a degree each. It signifies past-life karma and the overall totality of the nativity, the deepest layer of a chart's meaning. Because its divisions are so narrow, an accurate D-60 demands a precisely known birth time, and the classical authority Parashara gives it very high importance in judging the whole. Each of its sixty parts carries a named quality, benefic or malefic. An astrologer consults the D-60 for the karmic substratum of the life. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the chart is the most sensitive of the harmonic subdivisions drawn from the birth longitudes, and the one most affected by any error in the recorded time.

The rule again follows odd and even parity: in the odd signs the sixty half-degree divisions are counted forward from the sign itself, cycling five full times through all twelve signs before completing the thirty degrees, while in the even signs the count instead begins from the seventh sign from the one being divided. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra supplies a full list of sixty named qualities, some benefic and some distinctly harsh, Ghora and Rakshasa among the more severe names recorded, attached to the sixty positions in fixed order, and disagreement over how exactly this list of sixty names is meant to be paired with the odd and even counting sequence is a genuinely live, unresolved point of technical debate among contemporary Jyotisha practitioners and software authors alike.