Sukarma is the seventh nityayoga, and its name means good works, virtuous action. It is one of the auspicious yogas, favourable for beginning meritorious undertakings, charitable acts, and righteous endeavours. Like all the nityayogas it is found from the combined longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven equal parts, advancing through the lunar month. In the panchanga the yoga is one of the five daily limbs weighed in choosing an auspicious time, and a benefic yoga such as Sukarma commends the moment for actions meant to bear good fruit. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, resting on the steady separation of the two luminaries that carries the reckoning through the succession of named yogas.
Sukarma, good action, combines su, good or well, with karma, action or deed, the same term central to the whole Indian ethical and metaphysical vocabulary of action and its consequences developed at length in texts such as the Bhagavad Gita, where the discipline of selfless action, karma yoga, is treated as a path to liberation in its own right. The nityayoga's narrower, calendrical sense, a day or period favourable for meritorious acts, draws on this same root concept of action bearing fruit, though the yoga itself is a technical panchanga classification rather than a philosophical teaching, and the two uses of the shared vocabulary should not be collapsed into one another.