Parigha

Parigha is the nineteenth nityayoga, and its name means an iron bar or a barrier that blocks a gate. It is one of the inauspicious yogas, associated with obstruction and impediment, and the panchanga counts it among the configurations to be avoided for auspicious undertakings, especially those that need a clear path. Like the others it is derived from the combined longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven equal parts. In choosing a muhurta an astrologer sets aside the malefic yogas, and Parigha, with its image of the barred gate, is one the tradition treats with caution. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, which fixes the character of each yoga; the astronomical basis is only the summed motion of the two lights through the month.

Parigha combines pari, around or surrounding, with the root ghatt, to strike or fix in place, together describing a bar drawn across and fixed to block a gateway, the everyday defensive fitting the word names outside any astrological context in descriptions of fortified cities and palace architecture in classical Sanskrit literature. The yoga's association with obstruction is thus drawn from a specific, concrete piece of everyday material culture, a literal iron door-bar, rather than from a more abstract or mythological source the way several of the other inauspicious yogas, Vajra's divine weapon or Shula's piercing point, draw on.

The yoga is the limb of the panchanga that has no counterpart in the sky. Nothing about the day looks different when one ends and the next begins. Where the tithi measures the Moon's separation FROM the Sun, the yoga measures the two longitudes ADDED together, and cuts the resulting circle into twenty seven equal arcs of thirteen degrees twenty minutes. Parigha is the arc from 240 degrees 00 minutes to 253 degrees 20 minutes of that sum. The sum climbs at roughly fourteen degrees ten minutes a day, so a yoga runs about twenty two and a half hours on average, a little shorter than a tithi, and like a tithi it can be skipped between two sunrises or carried across two of them.

The twenty seven arcs are the same width as the twenty seven nakshatras, and Parigha is the nineteenth arc of the grid in both schemes, which is why the two are often tabulated side by side. They are not the same thing and share nothing but their arithmetic: a nakshatra is a segment of the sky the Moon is physically standing in, while a yoga is a number derived from two positions and belongs to no part of the sky at all. Reading a yoga as a star group is the commonest confusion the term invites, and the shared name of the nineteenth position, Mula, is where it usually starts.

Parigha sits among the nine yogas classed as unfavourable. Nine of twenty seven is a third of the cycle, so an inauspicious yoga is a common event rather than a rare one, and the muhurta literature treats it accordingly: it weighs against a time without ruling it out, and is routinely overridden where the tithi, the nakshatra and the weekday agree.