Which rudraksha should I wear for my rashi?
Your rashi (राशि) is the sign the Moon occupied at birth (never the Sun's sign), and the common rudraksha-by-rashi reading takes the lord of that sign and names its bead. Sun gives the 1 and 12 mukhi, Moon the 2, Mars the 3, Mercury the 4, Jupiter the 5, Venus the 6 and 13, Saturn the 7 and 14, Rahu the 8 and Ketu the 9. That is one reading of three, though, and the calculator prints all three because they routinely disagree. A jyotishi reading the whole chart is likelier to work from the lagna lord, and the tradition's habit of naming a bead for a difficult period works from the mahadasha lord instead.
From the rashi lord, which needs only a date and a place
The Moon stays in a rashi for about two and a quarter days, so this reading survives an uncertain birth time better than anything else on the page. It is the reading behind every "rudraksha for your rashi" table in circulation, and it is the one worth using when the recorded time is a family memory rather than a document. Our moon sign calculator shows how close to a boundary your own Moon sits.
From the lagna lord, which needs an accurate time
The lagna is the sign rising at the moment of birth and it changes about every two hours, so this reading moves with the clock in a way the rashi reading does not. It is also the one a practitioner working from a whole chart is likeliest to give, because the lagna lord is read as carrying the constitution and the direction of the chart rather than the mind alone.
From the mahadasha lord, which changes during a life
The Vimshottari mahadasha running now belongs to one graha for years at a stretch, and the tradition names its bead for the length of that period. This is the only one of the three readings that moves during a lifetime, which is why it is printed with the dates rather than on its own. Our dasha calculator gives the full sequence.
What does each mukhi from 1 to 14 mean?
The mukhi (मुखी) are the natural grooves running down the bead, and the Shiva Purana and the Padma Purana both carry chapters on what each is held to be. The one-faced bead is called the form of Shiva himself; the 2 mukhi is Ardhanarishvara and is read for harmony between two people; the 3 is Agni, the 4 Brahma, the 5 Kalagni Rudra, the 6 Kartikeya, the 7 Mahalakshmi, the 8 Ganesha, the 9 Durga, the 10 Vishnu, the 11 the eleven Rudras, the 12 Surya, the 13 Indra and the 14 Hanuman, called Deva Mani. The graha attribution that makes a chart-based recommendation possible is later practice laid over that older layer, and the table above prints both, with the beeja mantra the texts give for each.
Is the 5 mukhi rudraksha right for everybody?
The tradition treats it that way, and it is the commonest bead by a wide margin: most malas are strung from it. The 5 mukhi is attached to Kalagni Rudra and to Jupiter, and the texts set no chart condition on wearing it, which is exactly why it is the bead named when nobody has read a chart at all. That makes it the honest answer to the question most people arrive with. If you want a bead and do not want a reading, the tradition's own universal recommendation is already there, costs little, and asks nothing of your birth details. The three chart readings above sit on top of that default rather than replacing it.
How do the texts say a rudraksha should be worn?
With four conventions, all of them reported here as tradition and not as a prescription of our own. Monday is the day given for first wearing, and Shravan the season; red or black cotton thread, or silk, is what the texts describe, with metal settings a later and now ordinary practice; each mukhi has its own beeja mantra, recited a fixed number of times when the bead is first put on, with Om Namah Shivaya as the general recitation; and the bead is kept clean, taken off before a cremation, and neither lent nor borrowed. These are rules of observance within a tradition, of the same kind as the ones our panchang sets out for other observances.
Thread, metal and touching the skin
What the texts actually ask is that the bead touch the skin rather than sit over cloth; the thread is the older instruction and the silver or gold cap is later practice that nobody now treats as irregular. Where a bead is capped, the tradition asks that the grooves stay visible, since a setting that hides the mukhi hides the one thing that identifies the bead.
The mantra, and the count the texts give
Each mukhi carries its own beeja mantra, printed in Devanagari in the table above, and the prescription is to recite it a fixed number of times at first wearing, commonly one hundred and eight, the length of a full mala. Where the specific mantra is not known, the texts accept Om Namah Shivaya, which is why it is the recitation most often heard with a rudraksha of any face.
How do you tell a real rudraksha from a made one?
This is the practical question on the page, and it is worth more than any recommendation. The mukhi are natural grooves, so on a genuine bead they run continuously from hole to hole and the surface between them is irregular rather than even. Carved grooves usually stop short, run too straight, or sit at an even spacing no seed produces. Two beads glued together to fake a high count leave a seam. The commercial signal is simpler still: the rarer the claimed face, the likelier the bead is made, because the 1, 14 and 21 mukhi beads are rare enough that genuine ones do not turn up in quantity.
What the grooves do on a seed and not on a carving
A natural mukhi is a line where the seed's segments meet, so it runs the whole length of the bead and its depth varies along the way. A carved line is cut, so it is even in depth and often fades before the hole. Soaking, floating and other tests circulate widely and prove very little; looking carefully at where each groove starts and stops proves more.
Why a rare face is the warning sign
Genuine one-faced and fourteen-faced beads are rare, and the demand for them is not. That is the gap joined and carved beads are made to fill, which is why a seller with a supply of rare faces is the situation to be most careful in. The tradition's own universal bead is the 5 mukhi, which is common, cheap and exactly what the texts recommend to everybody.
Can a rudraksha and a gemstone be worn together?
The two belong to different streams and the tradition does not set them against one another. A gemstone is selected by lordship from the lagna and is held to strengthen one graha; a rudraksha is chosen from the graha behind a mukhi and is described in the texts as an observance rather than an amplifier. Where practitioners do object it is usually to a specific pairing (the bead of one graha with the stone of a graha read as hostile to it), which is a whole-chart judgement rather than a rule a table can apply. If you want the gem side of the question answered on your own chart, our gemstone calculator runs the Parashari lordship rule set and prints what it withholds as well as what it selects.
Does a rudraksha have any measured effect?
No effect of wearing a rudraksha on any outcome has been demonstrated, and nothing on this page says otherwise. The mukhi table, the graha mapping and the wearing conventions are reported as the tradition gives them, and the calculator's job is to show which rule produced which bead rather than to promise anything from wearing one. Two things follow. First, the universal 5 mukhi is a perfectly good answer and needs no reading at all. Second, the money involved is worth watching: the trade is full of carved and joined beads sold as rare high-mukhi ones, and the more a bead costs the more careful it is reasonable to be.
How this is calculated
Nirayana rashis with the Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) ayanamsha and whole-sign bhavas, computed to arc-second accuracy. Sunrise and sunset are the ones almanacs show, the Sun's upper edge with refraction, so the daily windows agree with the calendars you compare them with. More on our method.