Lagna Shodhan — when the birth time is not known

What it is

A kundli is cast for a minute. The lagna — the sign rising in the east — changes roughly every two hours, and its degree moves through the houses far faster; so a birth time that is unknown, remembered only as 'morning' or 'after dinner', or written on a certificate rounded to the hour, leaves the one element of the chart that everything else hangs on uncertain. Lagna Shodhan is the classical remedy: śodhana means purification, and janma-samaya śodhana is the setting-right of the birth time from what is known about the person and the life.

In SIA this is a tool of its own, found under Lagna Shodhan inside the app. It is SIA's own instrument: built on the śāstra's statements about how a lagna is verified and about what each rising sign and each Moon sign makes of a person, and it works in the same verse-cited way as everything else here — every statement it rests on opens to its verse.

What you answer

You give the date and place of birth, and whatever is known of the time — an exact time you doubt, a part of the day, a window, or nothing at all; a year alone is enough to begin. Then SIA asks you questions. They are plain yes-or-no questions about everyday life — how you take a slight, what you do when a queue is jumped, whether a fast feels like a burden — never a question that needs astrology to answer. Each one is there because the texts read that trait of nature from the rising sign, the Moon's sign or a graha's standing, so your answers speak, one at a time, for one candidate birth time against another.

The booklet is bilingual and adapts to your answers; most people finish in thirty to forty questions. You may say 'don't know' to any of them — an honest 'don't know' costs nothing and a guessed answer helps no one.

In the texts

What you receive

A birth-time window — the part of the day, narrowed as far as your answers allow, with the rising sign it implies — stated with a plain measure of how firmly it stands. Beside it, the classical checks Parāśara sets for a lagna — the prāṇapada and Gulika tests — applied to the time found and cited to their verses. Where the day offers two windows that your answers cannot separate — the morning and the evening of the same clock hour, say — SIA says so, and asks for the one fact that would settle it, rather than choosing for you.

When the answers are too few or too divided to name a window, SIA does not name one. It tells you what is missing — the month, the day, the part of the day, the Moon's sign — and stops there. A rectification that always produces an answer is not a rectification; a stated 'not resolved' is. Runs are kept in your history, and when SIA's own reading of a run improves later, the run is recomputed and you are told.

In the texts

What the texts state

Parāśara does not leave the verification of a lagna to taste. A birth lagna not purified by the prāṇapada, by Gulika or by the Moon is declared impure; the prāṇapada is derived from the Sun's position by a stated rule that depends on whether the Sun's sign is movable, fixed or dual; and the rāśi of a human birth is placed in a stated relation to the prāṇapada's rāśi. Those verses are printed below, in the edition's own words, and they are the ground the tool stands on. What each Moon sign and rising sign says of a person's nature — the source of the questions — is read from the Sāravalī and from Parāśara's own chapter on nature, likewise quoted.

In SIA

Lagna Shodhan is part of every plan — one run a month on Lite, two on Parivār, ten on Professional and forty on Professional MAX — and a run that ends 'not resolved' is not counted against the allowance. The window it finds can be used at once: cast the kundli for the time it names, and the reading, the daśā table and the divisional charts follow from it, every line cited as always.

Questions

Related

• Lagna (Ascendant)The rising sign, the other lagnas, and Lagna Shodhan.
• Janam KundliThe birth chart — what it holds, how SIA computes it, what is free.
• Vimshottari DashaThe 120-year cycle: counting rule, years, balance, sub-periods.
• The twelve rāśisTwelve rāśis — lords, limbs of the kāla-puruṣa, lagna results.