Vaidhriti is the twenty-seventh and final nityayoga, closing the cycle. Its name is glossed as poor support or divided holding, and it is one of the inauspicious yogas, with Vyatipata, one of the two the tradition marks most strongly for avoidance, sometimes set aside for expiation and charity rather than ordinary activity. The panchanga counts it among the configurations most to be shunned for auspicious undertakings. Reckoned like the others from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it completes the round before the cycle begins again at Vishkambha. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, which fixes the malefic character of Vaidhriti; the astronomical basis is only the combined motion of the two lights through the lunar month.
Vaidhriti closes the cycle of twenty-seven immediately before it restarts at Vishkambha, and the two yogas most strongly marked for avoidance, this one and Vyatipata seventeen positions earlier, are sometimes treated together in classical muhurta literature as a linked pair of maximally inauspicious moments bracketing the sequence, comparable in the weight given to their avoidance to the way Vishti among the eleven karanas stands apart from its companions. Of the full twenty-seven nityayogas, nine in total are classed inauspicious in the standard reckoning, Vishkambha, Atiganda, Shula, Ganda, Vyaghata, Vajra, Vyatipata, Parigha and Vaidhriti itself, exactly a third of the set, with the remaining eighteen read as favourable to varying degrees.