36-guna compatibility (guna milan)

What the 36 gunas actually count

Guna milan compares two Moons. Not two whole charts — two Moons, by nakshatra and by sign, across eight tests called kootas. Each koota is worth a different number of points, they add to thirty-six, and the total is what families quote to each other.

Knowing that it is only the Moons is the first useful thing on this page. A guna score is a real measurement of a real thing, and it is a much narrower thing than most people are told.

The eight, and what each is worth

• Varna — 1 point. Broad temperament grouping. The smallest weight in the system, and routinely over-read because of its name.
• Vashya — 2. Mutual influence; who accommodates whom.
• Tara — 3. The count from one birth star to the other, read for wellbeing.
• Yoni — 4. The animal symbols; physical and instinctive compatibility.
• Graha Maitri — 5. Friendship between the two Moon-sign lords. Often the koota that quietly rescues a mediocre total.
• Gana — 6. Deva, Manushya or Rakshasa temperament. Rakshasa means intensity here, not anything demonic, and mistranslating it has caused a great deal of unnecessary distress.
• Bhakoot — 7. The distance between the two Moon signs. Certain distances are held to strain the household.
• Nadi — 8. Constitution and progeny. The heaviest single koota, and the one that most often stops a match.

Which is why a bare total is close to useless. Twenty-four out of thirty-six with Nadi and Bhakoot both full is a very different position from twenty-four with both empty, and no number tells you which one you are looking at. The bar at the top of this page draws each koota as wide as it is worth, so a wide empty bar is instantly the thing to look at.

The cancellations most matchers skip

Both of the heavy kootas have classical exceptions, and this is the half that most often goes missing.

Nadi dosha is held to be relieved when the two share a Moon sign but differ in nakshatra, or share a nakshatra but sit in different padas, among other conditions given in the matching literature. Bhakoot dosha is commonly held to be cancelled when Graha Maitri is strong — when the two sign lords are friends.

A matcher that reports the dosha without checking its cancellation has told a family half a fact about a marriage, and half a fact there is worse than none. We check and we show the check, whichever way it goes.

Manglik, checked on both sides

The classical rule is symmetrical: when both charts carry Mangal Dosha, it is held to cancel for the pair.

Almost nobody checks it, and the reason is practical rather than sinister — checking requires opening the second chart, and the common practice is to assess one side and report. So a family is told their side is Manglik, the anxiety starts, and the fact that would have settled it was one computation away.

This page runs the full Mangal Dosha assessment on both charts — from the Lagna, the Moon and Venus, with every classical cancellation — and then applies the symmetrical rule. It is the same code our free Mangal Dosha calculator runs, so the two pages cannot disagree.

What a guna score genuinely cannot see

This matters more than the score, so it is worth being blunt.

• It only reads the Moons. The seventh house — the house of marriage itself — is not in it. Nor is its lord, nor Venus, nor Jupiter for a woman's chart, all of which classical matching weighs heavily.
• It ignores timing. Two people entering difficult dashas in the same years is a real consideration and no koota touches it.
• It says nothing about the people. It has never met them.

So the score is an input, not a verdict. A page with four fields per person has no standing to advise anybody on a marriage, and this one does not try.

Why nothing here is for sale

A low guna score arriving at an anxious family is one of the most reliably monetised moments in this trade. Name a number, sharpen the description, attach a fee.

We do not offer anything for a low score, and we would rather say why than be quietly virtuous about it: the moment a page can profit from your number being low, you can no longer tell whether the number is low.

What to do with a difficult result

Take it to a person. Specifically, take both full charts to someone who will read the seventh houses, the lords, the running dashas and the cancellations — which is the work this page has explicitly not done.

And know what you are entitled to ask them: which text, which rule, and did you check the cancellation. Those three questions are the whole of what separates a reading from a sale.

How this is computed

Both Moons from the Swiss Ephemeris, sidereal, Lahiri ayanamsa, each for its own birth moment at its own coordinates with the timezone that actually applied on that date. The eight kootas carry the classical weightings. Manglik is assessed on each chart by the same module the standalone calculator and the paid compatibility report both use.

Common questions

How many gunas are enough?

The commonly quoted floor is eighteen, and it is a convention rather than a rule from a verse. More usefully: the total matters less than which kootas are missing and whether their cancellations apply — both of which are shown above.

We scored low. Does that mean we should not marry?

No, and nothing on this page is equipped to answer that. Guna milan reads two Moons; it has not seen your seventh houses, your dashas, or you.

Another matcher gave us a different number

Usually a different ayanamsa moving one Moon into a different nakshatra, or a different convention on Tara or Vashya, or cancellations counted by one and not the other. The koota-by-koota breakdown above lets you find which.

Do you keep our birth details?

No — neither person's. Both come in for the computation and are dropped when the answer goes back. No account, no email, nothing written anywhere.