Bindu

Definition

A bindu — a dot or point — is the mark you tally in the Ashtakavarga grid to score how strong a planet is in a given sign or house. Saravali and Raman treat the bindu as the benefic mark (a small zero, 0), and a sign that earns no contribution gets a malefic line instead. The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra reads it the other way around: there the dot a planet gives is the inauspicious mark, set against the rekha (line), which marks the auspicious place.

In Tradition

Classical and modern Jyotish texts agree the bindu count measures favourability: the more bindus a sign or planet gathers, the better the results read, and the fewer it holds, the poorer. Saravali ties eight bindus in a planet's own sign to royal elevation and their complete absence to constant evils, and Raman reads a high bindu count as happiness and wealth and a low one as very bad.

In Practice

A jyotishi — a Vedic astrologer — counts the bindus a sign receives in the Ashtakavarga to judge how a planet's transit through it will fare; more bindus point to more favourable results. Raman reads above thirty bindus in a sign as happiness and wealth and fewer than twenty-five as very bad, while Saravali grades a planet by the bindus in the sign it occupies — from royal elevation at eight down to evils at all times when none are present. Rath looks for sources of gain among planets holding bindus in the eleventh house from the ascendant, and sources of expenditure among those in the twelfth, weighing income against spending by which house carries the higher total in the Sarvashtakavarga. The Prasna Marga index then sorts the totals into Bhanduka, Sevaka, Poshaka and Ghataka by house-triads to read how someone earns a living.

Historical Origin

The bindu is attested in the classical Sanskrit texts: the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (Ch.66, attributed to Maharshi Parasara) and Saravali (Ch.53-54, Kalyana Varma, in R. Santhanam's translation), both preserved here as verbatim translated passages. Modern authors elaborate it — B.V. Raman in Hindu Predictive Astrology and in his index to Prasna Marga, and Rath in Crux of Vedic Astrology.

Further Reading

• Maharshi Parasara, Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra
• Kalyana Varma, trans. R. Santhanam, Saravali
• B.V. Raman, Hindu Predictive Astrology
• B.V. Raman, Prasna Marga Part II, An Index of Technical Terms
• Rath, Crux of Vedic Astrology