What is Ashtakavarga?
Explainer · reviewed September 2026
Ashtakavarga is a counting system. For each of seven planets it asks, sign by sign, how many of a fixed list of classical rules that sign satisfies — giving it a score from 0 to 8 called bindus. Seven such tables are added together into the Sarvashtakavarga, which always totals exactly 337 points for every chart ever cast. That fixed total is what makes the whole system checkable: if your arithmetic does not come to 337, it is wrong.
On this page
What a bindu actually counts
Each planet has its own table of eight contributors — the seven planets and the ascendant. Every contributor supplies a list of positions, counted from where that contributor sits in the chart, at which it grants one point. The Sun's table, for instance, grants a point in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th and 11th positions counted from the Sun itself, and a different list counted from the Moon, and so on for all eight.
A bindu is therefore a count of satisfied rules and nothing else. It is arithmetic over planetary positions. It is not a rating, not a probability, and not a score for the person — a point about which we are deliberate, because the whole system invites being read as a leaderboard and the classical texts do not use it that way.
Why the total is always 337
The number of points each planet's table can award is fixed by the table, not by the chart: 48 for the Sun, 49 for the Moon, 39 for Mars, 54 for Mercury, 56 for Jupiter, 52 for Venus and 39 for Saturn. Those seven add to 337. Moving the planets around moves the points between signs; it never creates or destroys one.
That is an unusual property for an astrological technique and it is the reason this page exists. Almost nothing else in the discipline can be checked by a reader against an independent implementation. This can. If two pieces of software disagree about your Sarvashtakavarga, exactly one of them is wrong, and the disagreement is settleable.
A worked example you can check
The chart below is a fixed demonstration chart, not anyone's. Ascendant in Simha; Sun and Jupiter in Karka; Moon in Kumbha; Mars, Mercury and Venus in Simha; Saturn in Makara.
Sarvashtakavarga by sign, from Mesha: 33, 40, 37, 22, 25, 22, 27, 29, 29, 29, 21, 23. Those twelve add to 337.
The same table read the other way — each planet's own total across all twelve signs — gives 48, 49, 39, 54, 56, 52, 39, which also adds to 337. A correct implementation reconciles on both axes. Run this chart through your own software and compare.
What the numbers are used for, and what they are not
Prashna Marga uses the count to weight a transit: the same passage of Saturn is read differently depending on how many bindus the sign it is crossing holds in your own Saturn table. That is the technique's honest use — it makes an identical transit mean different things for two different people, which is unusual and genuinely per-person.
It is not a ranking of your houses and it is not a verdict. A low count in one place is one term among several; the source itself says a single low figure indicates a minor complaint, not an outcome. We do not convert bindu counts into predictions, dates, or advice to buy anything, and we do not publish the chapter's literal result lists for the lowest counts, which are severe and which the edition's own notes say should not be applied verbatim.
What we compute, and what we do not
We compute all eight tables and the Sarvashtakavarga, reconciled against the canonical 337 and, independently, against the chapter's own transposed table at stanzas 57 and 58 — 96 further constraints that the tables have to satisfy simultaneously.
We do not compute the two classical reductions, trikoṇa śodhana and ekādhipatya śodhana, so every figure we show is an unreduced one. We also work at the level of whole signs; the finer kakshyā division, which splits each sign into eight parts of 3°45', is not implemented, so our counts describe a month rather than a particular week.
One transparency note, because this page's claim is that the arithmetic is checkable. In the Moon's table, the row contributed by Jupiter is printed differently by the two editions we hold, and neither printing satisfies the chapter's own constraints. We use the reading those constraints force. A reader checking that one row against a printed edition will find a mismatch, and should know it is deliberate rather than an error.