Shakuni

Shakuni is the eighth karana and the first of the four fixed (sthira) karanas, which appear only once each in the lunar month, clustered around the new moon rather than rotating like the seven movable karanas. Shakuni falls on the second half of the fourteenth tithi of the waning fortnight, just before the new moon. Its name is linked to a bird, and the almanac tradition treats the fixed karanas of the dark of the Moon with caution, as periods suited to inward, dissolving, or ancestral matters rather than bright new beginnings. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition. The four fixed karanas exist because the sixty half-tithis of the month do not divide evenly among seven rotating names; the four fill the remaining positions around the conjunction of Moon and Sun.

Because shakuni is the ordinary Sanskrit word for a bird in general, some modern popular sources connect this karana's name to Shakuni, the cunning maternal uncle of the Kaurava princes in the Mahabharata, but the two are best kept separate: the epic character's name derives from the same common noun rather than the karana being named after him, and there is no textual basis in the muhurta literature for reading the epic Shakuni's scheming reputation into the karana's own character. As the first of the four fixed karanas, falling at the second half of the fourteenth tithi of the waning fortnight, Shakuni opens the run of karanas clustered around the new moon that the tradition treats with the same general caution given to the whole dark-of-the-Moon period.

Shakuni is the first of the four fixed karanas and it occupies exactly one position in the lunation, position 58, which is the second half of tithi 29, Krishna Chaturdashi. It never occurs anywhere else and it never occurs twice.

The fixed karanas are usually explained by their character. The arithmetic explanation is simpler and is worth having alongside it. A lunation holds sixty karanas. A rotation of seven cannot divide sixty, but it divides fifty six exactly, eight times over. Removing four karanas from the sequence leaves the seven-fold rotation running whole from position 2 to position 57 with nothing broken across the boundary. The four fixed karanas are what makes the seven-fold cycle close. Any other count would leave the rotation cut short at the new moon and starting mid-cycle in the following month.

Where those four sit is then a matter of design rather than necessity, and the scheme puts three of them at the very end of the waning month, at positions 58, 59 and 60, and one at the very start of the waxing month, at position 1. Shakuni, Chatushpada, Naga and Kimstughna therefore form an unbroken run of four half-tithis straddling the conjunction of the Sun and Moon, roughly two days in which no movable karana falls at all.

Like every karana it averages 11 hours and 49 minutes and varies by two or three hours either way.