Vedic Astrology & Kundli (Jyotish)

Almost everyone opening a vedic chart for the first time discovers they are no longer the sign they thought. It is not a mistake: western astrology uses the tropical zodiac, anchored to the spring equinox, while Indian Jyotish uses the sidereal one, anchored to the actual stars. The two coincided around the fourth century, but the precession of the equinoxes — the slow wobble of Earth's axis, one full turn roughly every 26,000 years — has pulled them a little over 24 degrees apart. That gap is called the ayanamsha, and it is enough to move most people back one sign.

Everything else follows from that choice. Jyotish works with the Nakshatras, the 27 lunar mansions the zodiac is divided into: they matter more than the signs, because the Moon and not the Sun is the central body of the Indian tradition. Houses are called Bhavas and usually follow the Whole Sign system, the oldest one, where each sign is one entire house. The Dashas are what western astrology has no equivalent for: a calendar of planetary periods computed from the Moon's exact degree at birth, giving every phase of a life its ruling planet. And the Yogas are recognised combinations — Gaja Kesari, Budhaditya, Kuja Dosha — that the classical texts describe one by one.

The ayanamsha is not a single number: different schools compute it in slightly different ways, and the selector above lets you choose. Lahiri is the Indian government's official value and the most widely used; Raman and Krishnamurti shift the result by fractions of a degree, enough to change the sign of anyone born near a boundary. None of the three is truer than the others — they are conventions about exactly where to fix the zero point of the sidereal zodiac. The positions you will read are computed to the arcminute; what the tradition reads into them remains tradition.