Kaulava

Kaulava is the third karana and the third of the seven movable (chara) karanas. It recurs eight times through the lunar month, each occurrence spanning half a tithi. The almanac tradition reads the movable karanas as broadly benefic, and Kaulava is associated with friendship, sociability, and favourable dealings. Within the panchanga the karana is the finest of the five daily limbs in the sense that it subdivides the tithi, letting the tradition distinguish the first and second halves of a lunar day when judging an auspicious time. These are the conventions of the calendar; the astronomical basis is simply that the Moon completes another six degrees of separation from the Sun over the span of the karana, one of the sixty such steps that make up the synodic month.

Kaulava's name is generally traced to kula, clan or lineage, which fits the almanac's reading of the karana toward sociability, friendship and dealings among kin and community, a reading that sits it naturally alongside Vanija's mercantile association and Bava's general auspiciousness among the seven recurring karanas. As with the other movable karanas, Kaulava recurs at a fixed position in the sequence of eight repetitions across the month, so the same karana governs widely separated dates within a single lunar cycle, and a muhurta chosen for a favourable karana can therefore fall at almost any point in the month depending on where in the sequence of eight repetitions the desired date happens to land.

Kaulava is third in the rotation of seven movable karanas, and within the span from position 2 to position 57 it takes 4, 11, 18, 25, 32, 39, 46 and 53.

Reading those into the almanac by the rule that position p occupies tithi ceiling of p over two, in the first half when p is odd and the second when p is even: Kaulava holds the second half of tithi 2, the first of 6, the second of 9, the first of 13, the second of 16, the first of 20, the second of 23 and the first of 27.

Four of those tithis lie in the bright fortnight and four in the dark, the standard split for a movable karana.

There is a symmetry in the set worth noticing. The eight positions are spaced exactly seven apart, as they must be for any karana in a rotation of seven, and because 56 is a multiple of 7 the whole rotation closes cleanly at position 57 with no partial cycle left over. That is the arithmetic reason the scheme uses four fixed karanas rather than three or five: sixty minus four is fifty six, and fifty six is eight complete turns of seven. Any other number of fixed karanas would leave the rotation broken across the new moon.

A karana averages 11 hours and 49 minutes and ranges from about ten to about thirteen and a half, depending on how fast the Moon is separating from the Sun at the time.