Shravana is the twenty-second nakshatra, from 280 to 293 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac in Capricorn, near the star Altair. Its Vimshottari ruler is the Moon, its presiding deity is Vishnu, the preserver, and its symbol is an ear, or the three footprints with which Vishnu strode across the worlds. The name means hearing or listening. Jyotisha reads Shravana through the act of listening, learning, tradition received by ear, the connection made through attentive hearing, and classes it as Deva gana. The three footprints tie it to Vishnu's cosmic strides and to the preservation of knowledge across the worlds. These are interpretive conventions of the tradition, laid over the Capricorn stars near Altair that Indian astronomy assigns here.
Shravana's padas run through Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. The three strides of Vishnu, by which the god is said in the Rigveda to have measured out the three worlds in a single act, are among the oldest and most frequently cited images in the whole Vedic corpus, predating the elaborate avatar mythology of later Puranic Vishnu worship, so the mansion's symbol connects it to a genuinely archaic layer of the tradition rather than to later devotional accretion. Altair, the bright star near this segment, is also the anchor of the well-known separated-lovers myth found independently in Chinese and Japanese star lore, the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd kept apart by the Milky Way and permitted to meet once a year, a parallel of shared subject matter between unrelated traditions rather than a documented case of transmission.