What a dasha is
Most of astrology describes what a chart is. The dasha describes when — which part of that chart is doing the talking at any given point in your life. It is the timing system, and it is the reason a chart drawn once at birth can say anything about a particular decade.
Vimshottari is the system in general use: a cycle of a hundred and twenty years, divided unequally among the nine grahas, each ruling a stretch of your life in a fixed order.
The unequal shares are the point
Ketu 7 years · Venus 20 · Sun 6 · Moon 10 · Mars 7 · Rahu 18 · Jupiter 16 · Saturn 19 · Mercury 17.
Those add to a hundred and twenty, and the inequality does real work. A Venus mahadasha is twenty years — a fifth of the notional lifespan, long enough to be most of an adulthood. A Sun mahadasha is six. So "what period am I in" is not a symmetrical question: some answers mean a chapter and some mean an interlude, and the bar at the top of this page draws them in proportion for exactly that reason.
Where your cycle starts, and why it cannot be guessed
This is the part that separates a real dasha from a table.
The cycle is entered at the lord of the nakshatra your Moon occupied at birth — and it is entered PART WAY THROUGH. If your Moon was forty per cent of the way across its nakshatra, forty per cent of that lord's period had already elapsed before you were born, so your first mahadasha is a partial one.
Every boundary in the rest of your life inherits that offset. Which means a dasha table that starts everybody at a full period is wrong for almost everybody, and wrong by up to several years — permanently, for the whole life. There is no way to produce this from a birthday. It needs the Moon's exact longitude, which needs a computed chart.
Mahadasha, antardasha, and why one alone is useless
A sixteen-year Jupiter mahadasha tells you almost nothing about next Tuesday. The period is subdivided — the antardasha, or bhukti — in the same nine-fold order and the same proportions, so within Jupiter's sixteen years there is a Jupiter-Jupiter stretch, then Jupiter-Saturn, then Jupiter-Mercury, and so on.
The useful reading is the pair. The mahadasha is the weather and the antardasha is the day. A benign mahadasha with a difficult sub-period feels quite different from the same mahadasha two years later — and that difference is where the timing system earns its keep.
We give both, and we stop at two levels. There is a third (pratyantardasha) and a fourth below that, and they are computed by plenty of software — but a birth time recorded to the nearest five minutes cannot honestly support a period boundary quoted to the day. Going deeper than the input allows is a way of looking precise, not of being right.
What the lord signifies, and what it does not
Each graha carries classical significations. Saturn is time, labour, the old and the slow, things done properly or not at all. Venus is marriage, art, comfort, vehicles. Rahu is the foreign, the sudden, ambition without a map.
That is a subject, not an outcome. What a Saturn period actually delivers depends on where Saturn sits in your own chart, which house it rules from your ascendant, its dignity, and what aspects it. The same Saturn mahadasha is a promotion for one person and an exhaustion for another, and the difference is in the chart, not in the period.
So this page names the lord and its significations and stops there. Any page that tells you what a dasha will do to you, knowing only your birth details, has stopped computing and started performing.
How much your birth time matters here
Less than for the ascendant, more than for the slow planets — and it is worth being specific rather than reassuring.
The Moon moves about half a degree an hour. A nakshatra is 13°20'. So an hour's error in your recorded birth time shifts your position within the nakshatra by roughly four per cent, which moves your period boundaries by a few months — not enough to change WHICH planet rules a stretch of your life, but enough that a boundary quoted to the exact day is claiming more than the input can carry.
The exception is a birth close to a nakshatra boundary, where an hour changes the starting lord outright and the whole sequence with it. Our nakshatra calculator will tell you whether you are in that position.
Other dasha systems exist
Vimshottari is not the only one. Ashtottari runs a hundred and eight years, Yogini thirty-six, Kalachakra works from the nakshatra pada by an entirely different scheme, and there are conditional dashas that classical texts apply only when a chart meets certain criteria.
They give different dates. We compute Vimshottari because it is the one in general use and the one almost every Indian astrologer will be working from, and we say so rather than presenting it as the only system there is.
How this is computed
The Moon's longitude comes from the Swiss Ephemeris, sidereal, with the Lahiri ayanamsa, for your birth moment at your birth coordinates and with the timezone offset that actually applied on that date. The nakshatra lord and the elapsed fraction come straight from that longitude; the rest is the fixed order and the fixed proportions.
The same computation prints the dasha timeline in our paid Life Kundali, so the free dates and the booklet's are the same dates.
Common questions
My dasha dates are different somewhere else
Three usual causes: the other calculation used a different ayanamsa, or it started you at a full first period instead of the partial one, or it used a different dasha system entirely. The first two are visible in what this page prints.
Is a Saturn or Rahu period bad?
The framing is the problem. Both are read as demanding rather than as malign, and what a period delivers depends on that planet's own condition in your chart. Plenty of people do their most durable work inside a Saturn dasha.
Why stop at two levels?
Because a birth time rounded to five minutes cannot support a third-level boundary quoted to the day. Deeper would look more precise and be less honest.
Do you keep my birth details?
No. The details come in for the computation and are dropped when the answer goes back. No account, no email, nothing written anywhere.
What the texts say — read on
These pages describe what the tradition says, with its sources. None of them tells you what to do.
