The Dashas

A dasha is a planetary period, a stretch of years in which one graha takes the chair and sets the tone for everything that happens. The Western chart answers the question of timing with transits, the moving planets passing over the fixed ones, and the Transits and Retrogrades page covers that in full. Jyotish has transits too, and uses them, but its first answer to "when" is the dasha. Your life is divided into chapters, each chapter has a planet whose name is on it, and the sequence was fixed the moment you were born.

I find this one of the most useful things the Vedic chart adds to a reading, and one of the easiest to misuse. So let me explain how it works and then how I hold it.

The Vimshottari cycle

There are several dasha systems in the classical texts. The one almost every Jyotish reader uses, and the one I use, is the Vimshottari dasha. Vimshottari means one hundred and twenty, and the whole cycle runs for 120 years, which the old texts took as the full span of a human life. Most of us see rather less than a full cycle, so the order you start in matters a great deal.

The cycle has nine periods, one for each graha, and they run in the same order the nakshatra rulers run round the zodiac. Ketu has seven years. Venus has twenty. The Sun has six. The Moon has ten. Mars has seven. Rahu has eighteen. Jupiter has sixteen. Saturn has nineteen. Mercury has seventeen. Add them up and you get 120.

The lengths are not even and they are not meant to be. Venus and Rahu and Saturn get long turns. The Sun, Mars and Ketu get short sharp ones. A twenty year Venus period is a whole adult life lived under one planet's weather. A six year Sun period comes and goes while you are still deciding what it was about.

Where your cycle starts

This is where the dashas join the rest of the Vedic chart.

Your first dasha is ruled by the planet that rules the nakshatra your Moon was in at birth. If your Moon was in Rohini, ruled by the Moon, you were born into a Moon period. If it was in Ashwini, ruled by Ketu, you were born into a Ketu period. The sequence then runs forward from there in the fixed order, so the Rohini child goes Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Ketu, Venus, Sun, and the Ashwini child goes Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars and on round.

You do not get the whole of that first period. How much of it you get depends on how far the Moon had travelled through the nakshatra when you were born. A Moon at the very start of Rohini gives nearly the full ten years of the Moon dasha. A Moon near the end of Rohini gives only a few months of it before Mars takes over. This is why the Moon's exact sidereal position matters so much in Jyotish, and why a rough birth time can put the first dasha, and so every dasha after it, out by months or years. The Nakshatras page explains the mansions themselves and how to find yours.

Sub periods

Each major period, the mahadasha, is divided into nine sub periods called antardashas, running in the same order and starting with the major period's own planet. So a Venus mahadasha opens with a Venus antardasha, then Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury and Ketu. Each sub period's length is in proportion to its planet's share of the 120 years, so inside twenty years of Venus the Venus sub period runs a little over three years and the Sun sub period about a year.

Below that the texts divide again, into sub sub periods, and the serious practitioner can take the division down to days. I rarely go further than the antardasha in a reading. The major period gives the chapter. The sub period gives the paragraph. Below that you are reading the weather hour by hour, and in my experience that is where Jyotish stops being guidance and starts being anxiety.

How a period colours a life

The planet of the moment brings itself forward. In a Saturn period, Saturn's matters, work, duty, limits, the long slow build, come to the front of life whether you invited them or not. In a Venus period it is love, comfort, art and relationship that take the stage. In a Rahu period it is appetite and the pull of the new, and in the Ketu period that follows a Mercury period, it is release and a certain stripping back.

But the planet does not arrive in the abstract. It arrives as it is placed in your chart. A Saturn period for someone whose Saturn sits well, in Libra say, or in a house that suits it, tends to be a period of steady achievement and respect earned slowly. A Saturn period for someone whose Saturn is struggling asks harder questions and takes longer to answer them. The dasha turns up the volume on whatever that graha was already saying. The Grahas page explains how I judge the placement, and The Bhavas page the house, and both of those judgements feed straight into how I read a period.

The houses the dasha lord rules also wake up. If Jupiter rules your fourth and seventh houses and a Jupiter period begins, home and partnership are where the growth is likely to show. This is why two people in the same Jupiter dasha can have quite different sixteen years.

Reading the dashas without fear

I have watched people find out they are in a Saturn or a Rahu or a Ketu period and go pale. I have also watched them find out they are entering a Venus or Jupiter period and relax before anything has happened. Neither response is quite right.

A dasha describes the kind of work in front of you and the kind of return available. It does not describe an outcome. The Saturn period that frightens people on paper is the one in which I most often see them build the thing they are later known for. The Jupiter period everyone wants can be sixteen years of saying yes to too much. Ketu periods end things, and some things need ending. Rahu periods want, and wanting is how most of what you love in your life got there.

So I read the dasha as the chapter heading, and I read your chart for what is written under it. The chapter heading says Saturn. Your chart says which Saturn, in which house, with whom. The way you live says the rest. The texts offer remedies for a difficult period, gemstones, mantras, fasts, and I do not prescribe them. The remedy for a Saturn period is to do Saturn's work with as much grace as you can find on the day.

Transits alongside the dashas

Jyotish does not drop transits in favour of dashas. It layers them. The slow movers, Saturn and Jupiter especially, are watched as they pass over the natal Moon and the lagna, and a transit that agrees with the running dasha lands harder than one that does not. When Saturn is both your dasha lord and sitting on your Moon by transit, I say so. When they pull in different directions, the dasha generally wins the argument and the transit colours the months.

The Week Ahead posts and the Moon posts follow the live sky in the Western zodiac. The dashas run underneath all of that, slow and personal, and they do not show up in a weekly forecast because they are not weekly and they are not everyone's.

Finding your own

Working out your dashas needs the Moon's exact sidereal position at birth and then a fair bit of arithmetic, and this page does not do the sum for you. My full portraits give your current major period and sub period, with the dates in your own time zone, and read them against the rest of the chart. If you know your nakshatra already, you know where your cycle began, and you can follow the order above to see roughly whose turn it is likely to be now.

What would you do differently this year if you knew whose chapter you were in?

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.