Chandra

Chandra yogas are the combinations reckoned from the Moon rather than from the Ascendant. Jyotisha treats the Moon as a second reference point, the chandra lagna, and reads the whole chart from it in parallel with the reading from the rising sign, on the ground that the Moon signifies the mind and the immediate texture of experience where the Ascendant signifies the body and the life as a whole. The best known members of the class are the flanking yogas, sunapha, anapha, durudhara and their negative kemadruma, together with adhi yoga and gaja kesari. The practice has no close western equivalent; Hellenistic astrology has the Lot of Fortune, which is derived from the Moon and can serve as an alternative reference, but it does not run a full second chart from the lunar position as Indian practice does.

The four flanking yogas differ by exactly which houses from the Moon hold other planets: Sunapha occurs when a planet other than the Sun sits in the second house from the Moon, Anapha when one sits in the twelfth from the Moon, and Durudhara when planets occupy both; Phaladeepika describes the results in traditional, formulaic terms, Sunapha natives as self-made and wise, Anapha natives as powerful and well regarded, Durudhara natives as prosperous and well attended. Kemadruma, the negative case, occurs when neither house holds a planet, and the tradition holds it can be weakened or cancelled if the Moon itself sits in a kendra from the Ascendant or receives a benefic aspect, conditions later commentators treat as softening what is otherwise counted among the more feared combinations in the system.

Reading a chart from the Moon as well as from the Ascendant is not a peculiarity of one school but a standard method, and it has a practical justification the tradition states plainly: the Ascendant depends on the time of birth to the minute, while the Moon's sign is stable across a period of two days or more. Where a birth time is uncertain, the lunar reading survives the uncertainty and the rising sign does not.

That is why the Chandra yogas retain their force in practice even where a chart is doubtful, and it is one reason South Indian and North Indian traditions both preserve the method. It also explains why the flanking yogas, formed by planets in the second and twelfth from the Moon, are among the most frequently cited combinations in the whole corpus: they can be assessed from a date alone.

The timing rule applies here as everywhere. A lunar combination is expected to show during the periods of the planets that form it, and the Moon's own dasha in the Vimshottari scheme runs ten years. The atlas sets out the structure of the class and the reasoning behind it, and does not offer it as guidance for any individual.

The Moon's speed is what makes this possible and also what limits it. It moves through a sign in roughly two and a quarter days, so a lunar reading is stable across a birth time uncertain by hours but not across one uncertain by days, and the nakshatra it occupies, a finer division of about a day, is stable across a narrower window still. The tradition uses all three scales, and which is available depends on how well the birth is recorded.