Origin 600 to 800 CE
The Khavedamsha (D-40), also called Swavedamsha, divides each sign into forty parts. It is the divisional chart of auspicious and inauspicious effects and of the maternal legacy, examining the general good and bad fortune of the native and the influences inherited through the mother line. It reveals the balance of favorable and unfavorable results across life and the matrilineal karmic inheritance. As one of the finer vargas in the Shodashavarga scheme, it is read for overall tenor and maternal ancestry.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period600 to 800 CE 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra One of the shodashavarga, the sixteen divisional charts set out in the extant Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra. Nine of the sixteen appear only in this later layer; the graded schemes of six, seven, ten and sixteen divisions are the text's own, and the sixteen-fold set is not attested in the earlier literature. Origin PeriodThis finer divisional chart is set out in the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, which Pingree's survey situates within the sixth to eighth century CE stratum of classical Sanskrit horoscopy, later than the handful of vargas Varahamihira's earlier Brihat Jataka already names. 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Origin of the NameThe name is a word-numeral rather than an ordinal. In the bhutasankhya system a thing standing for a number replaces the number: "kha", the sky or the void, stands for nought, and "veda" for four. Khaveda, read in the Indian order, is forty. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerParashara, to whom the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra ascribes itself. The ascription is pseudepigraphic: Parashara is a sage of the epic and puranic literature, the extant text is a compilation of roughly the seventh to eighth century with later interpolation, and its surviving manuscripts are of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The system is "Parashari" by convention, not by authorship. 1 Identity
Also Known As Attributions
GovernsAuspicious and inauspicious effects, maternal legacy 1 Learn More
D-40 Khavedamsha, the Chart of Maternal Legacy
The Khavedamsha chart, D-40, is the fourteenth of the sixteen divisional charts, formed by dividing each sign into forty parts. It signifies auspicious and inauspicious effects in general and, in particular, the legacy inherited through the maternal line, the good and ill fortune passed down from the mother's side. It is also called the Swavedamsha. An astrologer consults the D-40 for the overall balance of favourable and unfavourable indications and for matrilineal inheritance. The chart is one of the shodashavarga, the finer harmonic subdivisions through which jyotisha magnifies each department of a single nativity. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the divisional charts are a mathematical method for extracting focused readings from the same planetary positions recorded at the moment of birth.
The classical rule governing the forty divisions of the Khavedamsha is one of the least consistently transmitted in the sixteen-fold set, and modern manuals differ on its precise construction more than they do for the D-1 through D-12; what is agreed across sources is its place in the vimshopaka bala weighting as one of the finer, lower-weighted charts, consulted as a supplementary check on general fortune and specifically on the maternal line rather than as a chart with the settled, heavily cross-referenced status of the Navamsha or Dashamsha.
D-40 in Practice: Forty Five Minutes of Arc
One division of the Khavedamsha spans 45 minutes of arc, three quarters of a degree, forty to a sign and 480 in the zodiac. The ascendant crosses that arc in about three minutes.
Three minutes is inside the noise of nearly every birth time, so the house structure of a D-40 belongs to the small class of readings that require a time recorded to the minute by someone present. Stated the other way round: if the time came from a family memory, the D-40 ascendant is not information and should not be presented as any.
The planets survive the same uncertainty. The Moon crosses 45 minutes of arc in about an hour and twenty minutes, the Sun in about eighteen hours, and every slower body in days or longer. A reading of planetary placements in the D-40 from an approximate time is sound; a reading of its houses is not.
The Khavedamsha belongs only to the shodashavarga of sixteen. Its subject is the auspicious and inauspicious effects a person inherits, and the tradition associates it particularly with the maternal line, which pairs it with the D-45 and its paternal counterpart. Read together the two charts express a view of inheritance as something transmitted along two distinct lines rather than as a single undifferentiated legacy.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Originates in Language
The term is Sanskrit, and the technical vocabulary of the Panchanga and of jyotisha more widely is Sanskrit throughout, whatever the vernacular in which a given almanac is printed. The name is a Sanskrit term. Regional almanacs render it in the local script and pronunciation, so a reader will meet the same term in several transliterations without any difference of reference.
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