What the texts actually prescribe
Everybody arrives at this question the same way. Something in a chart gets named — a dosha, a period, a placement — and the next sentence out of the reader's mouth is: what do I do about it.
In this trade, the answer to that question is usually a price.
So it is worth setting out, plainly and in one place, what the classical literature actually contains — because the shape of it is the argument.
The categories the texts give
The remedial literature is not a long list of products. It is a short list of kinds of action, and it has been more or less the same short list for a very long time.
- Japa — repetition. A mantra associated with a graha or a deity, repeated a stated number of times. The counts are given in the digests and they are large: the figure for each graha runs into tens of thousands, and the point of the number is the duration, not the arithmetic.
- Dāna — giving. The most textually grounded of all of them, and the one with the most specific instructions. Each graha has items associated with it, and the instruction is to give them away — not to acquire them.
- Vrata and upavāsa — observance and fasting. Usually tied to a weekday, because each weekday belongs to a graha.
- Homa — the fire offering. The most elaborate, requiring a priest and a procedure, and the one place where a genuine cost appears in the classical picture.
- Tīrtha and snāna — pilgrimage and bathing.
- Sevā — service. Care given to the people or animals a graha is said to signify.
- Dhāraṇa — wearing. Metals, and stones. This is the category the modern market is built almost entirely on, and it is the one worth looking at hardest.
Notice what that list costs
Six of those seven are free, or close to it.
Repetition costs time. Giving costs whatever you choose to give, and the merit in the texts attaches to the giving rather than to the value. Fasting costs nothing. Service costs nothing. Bathing in a river costs nothing.
That is not an accident of translation or a modern softening. It is what the corpus says, and it is consistent across the works that discuss the subject at all.
The remedy that requires you to buy an object is one item on a list of seven, and it is the item the entire industry has been built around.
Now the count
That is the shape of the literature. Here is its size, which is the part nobody publishes.
We read eight classical texts. Between them they give 7,772 cited rules. We went through every one and asked a single question: does this rule tell a reader to do something? Not what will happen to them — what they should do.
Forty-seven do.
Forty-seven prescriptions in 7,772 rules. The remedy literature that this entire industry rests on is, measured, about half a percent of what the texts say.
Of those forty-seven, ten sit in two chapters we do not reproduce — the reason is below. That leaves thirty-seven, and they fall out like this:
- Vrata — fasting, observance, penance — 12 · costs nothing
- Puja, homa, worship — 9 · a priest, sometimes
- Dāna — giving something away — 5 · what you choose to give
- Sevā — service — 4 · costs nothing
- Mantra, japa — 3 · costs time
- Ratna — wearing a stone — 1 · costs the stone
One.
We want to be exact about that number, because it is the one that matters and it would be easy to inflate. Two hundred and twenty-one readings in the corpus contain the word gem. Almost all of them are predictions — that a person will acquire gems, deal in them, be wealthy. Two are instructions to wear one, and one of those two sits in the chapters we hold back.
The gemstone trade is the largest remedy business in the world. Its classical warrant, in the eight texts, is one line.
The two chapters we are not reproducing
Honesty cuts both ways, so we will say what we are leaving out.
Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra has two chapters given over to remedies — 83 and 84. We read 116 rules in them. Three quarters are about the absence of a son, and nearly as many attribute that absence to a sin or a curse carried from a previous birth. The remedies offered are remedies for that.
We are not putting that in front of a person who came here looking for help. Someone reaches a remedies page at a hard moment, and telling them that a childless marriage is punishment for something they did in a life they cannot remember is not information — it is an injury, and in this market it is an injury with a price list attached.
So we are telling you the chapters exist, what they contain, and how much of the remedy literature they are. We are not printing them as advice. If you want to read them they are in any edition of the text, under those numbers.
That is the same rule the booklet follows: say what was computed, say what is being withheld, say how much of it there is, and let the reader decide whether to go and look.
What is not in the texts at all
Some things sold as classical remedies do not appear in the classical remedy literature in the form they are sold.
- A guaranteed outcome. No text in this literature promises a result. The vocabulary is of pacification and mitigation — śānti — not of cancellation. A remedy sold with a guarantee is being sold on a claim its own source does not make.
- The package. A fixed bundle addressing a named dosha, priced as a unit, is a commercial product and a recent one.
- Urgency. The classical observances are tied to periods, weekdays and seasons, all of which recur. Nothing in the literature is available only until the end of the week.
The stones, honestly
Gem-wearing is genuinely in the tradition. What is much thinner than the market implies is the specific, systematised, one-stone-per-planet table with carat minimums and a metal and a weekday — the form in which it is actually sold. That system is prominent in later and more recent works, and it is not what the early remedial chapters spend their space on.
We are not saying the practice is invented. We are saying that a reader being quoted a figure for a stone deserves to know that the cheapest categories are the best attested ones.
Why this page exists here
We sell no remedies. Not one, in any product, at any price.
That is the only reason a page like this can be written straight. Anybody who sells remedies has a reason to make this list look longer, more expensive and more urgent than it is. We have no reason to make it look like anything.
What a reader does with it is theirs. The tradition is set out; the decision was never ours to make.
Source — Counted across the eight classical texts this engine reads — Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, Brihat Jataka, Hora Sara, Jataka Parijata, Jaimini Sutras, Phaladeepika, Sarvartha Chintamani and Uttara Kalamrita — 7,772 cited rules in all, counted on 16 September 2026
Every claim on this site names its source, and every calculator shows its arithmetic.