What is Ashtakavarga and what does a bindu mean?
A bindu is a vote, not a score. Ashtakavarga takes eight reference points (the seven grahas from the Sun to Saturn, plus the lagna) and asks each of them, for one graha at a time, whether a given sign counts as benefic when measured from where that reference point sits. Each yes is one bindu. Do that for all twelve signs and you have that graha's Bhinnashtakavarga (BAV) row, a maximum of eight bindus per sign. Add the seven rows together and you have the Sarvashtakavarga (SAV), also written Sarva Ashtakavarga: one number per sign out of a possible 56. Nothing here depends on aspects or on degrees: the tables are the classical benefic-house lists, and the only inputs are the signs the seven grahas occupy and the sign of the ascendant.
Why does Sarvashtakavarga always total 337?
Because each graha's benefic-house table has a fixed number of entries, so each BAV row has a fixed total no matter where the planets fall: Sun 48, Moon 49, Mars 39, Mercury 54, Jupiter 56, Venus 52 and Saturn 39. Those seven add to 337, in every chart ever cast. The consequence matters more than the arithmetic: Ashtakavarga is a zero-sum reading of your own chart. A sign cannot be rich unless another is poor, and a chart cannot be globally strong or globally weak on this measure. It also gives you a free check: if a calculator hands you twelve numbers that do not sum to 337, it is wrong, and you can stop reading there.
What is a good Ashtakavarga score for a sign?
The average is 337 ÷ 12, which is a shade over 28. The bands this calculator labels are the conventional ones: 30 or more is strong, 28 to 29 above average, 25 to 27 average, and under 25 weak. Read them comparatively. What matters is which of your own signs are richest and which are poorest, not how your Taurus compares with someone else's. A high count is read as a sign that supports what crosses it, and a low one as a sign where the same crossing is harder work. Neither is a verdict on the house or on you; it is a statement about how much support that stretch of the zodiac gives.
How do I use Ashtakavarga for transits?
Transits are what Ashtakavarga in astrology is actually for, and this is the question most pages never reach: an Ashtakavarga prediction is at bottom a statement about support for a crossing, not about an event. When a graha transits a sign, do not look at the SAV total. Look up that sign in the transiting graha's own BAV row. Five or more bindus is read as a supported crossing; three or fewer as a laboured one. That single rule explains why the same Saturn transit is not felt alike by two people with the same Moon sign: their Saturn BAV counts for that sign differ, sometimes by four or five bindus. The SAV row is the coarser instrument, useful for judging which houses of your chart are broadly supported and, in muhurta, which signs to avoid electing into.
What is Trikon Shodhana?
Trikon Shodhana is the first of the two classical reductions, and it works on the four trines: Aries, Leo and Sagittarius together; Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn; Gemini, Libra and Aquarius; Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces. Within one trine, if any of the three signs holds zero bindus, all three become zero; otherwise the smallest of the three is subtracted from all three. The logic is that only the surplus over the weakest sign of a trine counts as real strength; a graha that favours all three equally has expressed no preference. It is applied to each of the seven BAV rows separately, and our results page shows each trine's before, subtracted and after figures so the step can be checked rather than trusted.
What is Ekadhipatya Shodhana?
Ekadhipatya Shodhana settles the five pairs of rashis that share a lord: Aries with Scorpio, Gemini with Virgo, Sagittarius with Pisces, Taurus with Libra, and Capricorn with Aquarius. Leo and Cancer belong to no pair, because the Sun and Moon own one sign each. What happens to a pair turns on one thing only, whether a graha is standing in either of the two signs, and there are three cases, set out below. Two details are easy to get backwards, and both were wrong in this engine once: the step subtracts rather than replaces, and it applies to every BAV row: the Sun's own row still has its Taurus and Libra settled by Venus's ownership.
Neither rashi occupied: both lose the smaller count
The plain case, and the only one in which both signs are reduced. Take the two counts, find the smaller, and subtract it from each. A pair holding 6 and 4 becomes 2 and 0; a pair holding 5 and 5 becomes 0 and 0. Because the step subtracts rather than replaces, a sign already at zero neither reduces nor is reduced, which is why a pair containing a zero so often comes through this step untouched.
One rashi occupied: the empty one loses the occupied one's count
Asymmetric, and the branch most often implemented backwards. The sign holding a graha keeps its count in full; the empty one has the occupied sign's count subtracted from it, and never falls below zero. So an occupied Taurus at 3 beside an empty Libra at 6 leaves Taurus at 3 and Libra at 3. Note which figure is subtracted: it is the occupied sign's count, not the smaller of the two, and those coincide only when the occupied sign happens to hold the smaller count.
Both rashis occupied: the pair stands
Nothing is subtracted. Where a graha occupies each sign of the pair, both counts survive the step intact and pass into the Pinda exactly as Trikon Shodhana left them. This is the case people forget when checking a published example by hand, and it is the one our results page marks explicitly, so a row that looks unreduced can be read as unreduced on purpose rather than as a step we skipped.
What is Shodhya Pinda and what is it for?
Shodhya Pinda is the figure the twice-reduced rows lead to, and it is where BAV stops being a working and becomes a result. It is taken one graha at a time, from that graha's own reduced row, and it has two parts which are simply added: the Rashi Pinda and the Graha Pinda. Both parts lean on multipliers that the texts state and no text derives, so the Pinda is a classical strength figure rather than a measurement of anything. Some traditions feed it into a longevity calculation. We do not compute one, and nothing on this page is a statement about lifespan.
Rashi Pinda: the reduced row weighted by sign
Each sign's remaining bindus are multiplied by that sign's fixed multiplier and the twelve products added. The multipliers are Aries 7, Taurus 10, Gemini 8, Cancer 4, Leo 10, Virgo 5, Libra 7, Scorpio 8, Sagittarius 9, Capricorn 5, Aquarius 11, Pisces 12. They are not proportional to anything in the sky and nothing in the classical sources derives them, so two surviving bindus in Pisces count for three times what two in Cancer count for, purely by table.
Graha Pinda: the bindus each graha is standing on
The second half looks only at the twelve figures under the seven grahas themselves. For each graha, the reduced bindus in the sign it occupies (not the sign it rules) are multiplied by that graha's own multiplier, with Jupiter 10 and Mars 8 at the top of the table and the rest between 5 and 7. Added to the Rashi Pinda, the result is the Shodhya Pinda for that row. It is the step most free calculators stop short of.
Why do two Ashtakavarga calculators disagree?
Usually because they stop at different points. Most free tools print the SAV row and nothing else; some add the BAV rows; few run either reduction, and fewer print the Pinda, so two "Ashtakavarga charts" can be showing different quantities under the same heading. Where the reductions are implemented, the Ekadhipatya rule has genuine variants in circulation. And the 337 total is a weaker check than it looks: this engine once carried two BAV rows with bindus sitting in the wrong signs while every row total, and the 337, stayed correct. Both were found only by comparing the intermediate output sign by sign against a second independent implementation, which is why the working is on the page.
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.