The panchang, and how to read the five things in it

A panchang is the day, written down as the sky saw it. The word means five limbs, and the five are the tithi, the weekday, the nakshatra, the yoga and the karana. All five are worked out from one thing: where the Sun and the Moon stood at sunrise, at your place, on that date.

That last part is the piece most people miss. A panchang is local. Sunrise in Nagpur is not sunrise in Delhi, and a tithi that ends at 09:40 here ends at a different clock time there. A panchang without a place on it is a panchang for somebody else's morning.

The five entries, one at a time

Tithi. The distance the Moon has pulled ahead of the Sun, counted in steps of twelve degrees. Thirty of those steps make a lunar month: fifteen while the Moon fills up to the full Moon, fifteen while it empties down to the new Moon. A tithi is not a day. It runs anywhere from about twenty hours to about twenty seven, because the Moon does not travel at a constant speed. That is why a festival sometimes lands on what feels like the wrong date, and why two panchangs can disagree by a day.

Vara, the weekday. The only entry whose name you do not have to work out from the sky, though when it changes hands still depends on your sunrise. It is the seven day cycle, and each day carries a planet: Sunday the Sun, Monday the Moon, Tuesday Mars, Wednesday Mercury, Thursday Jupiter, Friday Venus, Saturday Saturn. In the panchang the weekday changes at sunrise, not at midnight, so Tuesday morning at 4 am is still Monday as far as the almanac is concerned.

Nakshatra. The sky's ring of stars divided into twenty seven parts, and the entry tells you which part the Moon is passing through. This is the one that does most of the work in practice. Muhurta rules, the nakshatra you were born under, the name syllable a child is sometimes given: all of it comes off this line.

Yoga. Add the Sun's position and the Moon's position together, divide the total into twenty seven parts, and see where the sum falls. That is the yoga. It tracks where the two stand added together, not the gap between them. The gap is the tithi's job, and the two lines are easy to confuse. Twenty seven names, from Vishkambha to Vaidhriti, and on the usual list nine of them are the ones tradition keeps away from beginnings, with Vyatipata and Vaidhriti counted the heaviest two.

Karana. Half a tithi, six degrees, so sixty in a lunar month, filled by eleven names. Seven rotate, four are fixed near the new Moon. The one people ask about is Vishti, better known as Bhadra.

Five lines, and underneath all five there are only two moving objects. That is worth holding on to, because a page that treats each line as a separate omen is counting the same two things five times and selling you the arithmetic as prophecy.

What the panchang is actually for

Three jobs, in the order they matter.

Fixing the calendar. Ekadashi, Ganesh Chaturthi, Navratri, Diwali, Sankashti, every fast and every festival is defined by a tithi, sometimes with a condition attached about whether that tithi is running at sunrise or at moonrise. The panchang is what turns a tithi into a date on the wall.

Choosing a moment, the muhurta. A wedding, a house warming, opening a shop, the first day at a new job. The tradition has rules that read across the five lines together: a good nakshatra, a tithi that is not one of the rejected ones, a weekday that suits the work, and no Bhadra sitting in the middle of it. This is where the panchang earns its keep, and it is a small, practical job. You are choosing between Tuesday morning and Thursday evening, not deciding whether the marriage is a good idea.

A daily look. Some people check it the way others check the weather. There is nothing wrong with that as long as it stays a look and does not turn into a reason to postpone living.

What the panchang does not do

It does not read your life. The panchang is the same for everybody standing in the same city on the same morning, and every one of those people had a different day. A kundli is the sky at one birth, for one person. A panchang is the sky today, for a place. Confusing the two is a common mistake in what gets written about this subject online, and almost every frightening article about a tithi or a karana comes out of it.

It also does not decide anything. The rule about Bhadra says do not begin during it. It does not say the half day is cursed. The rule about the difficult daily yogas says the same thing in the same narrow way. Read those rules as written, and most of the fear attached to them falls away.

Why two panchangs disagree

This is a fair question and it has a real answer.

The older printed almanacs were computed from tables that were set down centuries ago and have drifted from the actual sky by a small amount. Most modern panchangs, and the better ones online, compute from the real positions of the Sun and Moon. Where they still differ, it is usually one of three things: a different zero point for the zodiac, a different place and therefore a different sunrise, or a different convention for which tithi owns a day when the tithi changes hands mid morning.

Small differences are normal and are not a scandal. If two panchangs disagree about a festival date, the reason is usually the third one on that list, and your family tradition is a perfectly good tie breaker.

How I use it

For a date, I use it carefully. For a birth, I read it once, note the nakshatra and the tithi, and then move on to the chart, because that is where the answer lives. If somebody has told you that a line in the panchang on your birthday explains your marriage, your money or your health, they have not looked at your chart. That is what a reading is for.

The free kundli on this site shows you the whole panchang for your date of birth, place included, with no email asked for. If you were born in a place whose sunrise you have never thought about, that is a quietly interesting thing to see.

Questions people ask

What are the five parts of the panchang?

Tithi, vara or weekday, nakshatra, yoga and karana. Tithi is the Moon's distance ahead of the Sun in twelve degree steps. Nakshatra is the part of the star ring the Moon is passing. Yoga is the Sun and Moon added together and divided into twenty seven. Karana is half a tithi. The weekday is just the seven day cycle.

Why does the panchang day start at sunrise?

Because the tradition counts a day from sunrise to the next sunrise rather than from midnight. This is why the tithi and the weekday printed against a date are the ones running at that morning's sunrise, and why something at 3 am belongs to the previous panchang day.

Do I need a panchang for my city?

Yes, if you are using it to fix a time. The five entries change hands at clock times that depend on your longitude and your sunrise, so a Delhi panchang can be five minutes to about twenty five out for Nagpur, and which of the two cities sees the Sun first changes with the season. For a festival date it usually makes no difference. For a muhurta it can.