Dina, Gana, Mahendra: what each porutham tests

Each of the ten poruthams reads one of three things — a count between two birth stars, a relation between two Moon signs, or a classification table — and which of the three it reads predicts how much the schools argue about it. A report usually prints them as a column of names with a tick or a cross beside each. The names give no clue what was compared, and the marks give no clue which of them could stop the match on its own.

Both matter before the report is discussed with a family. What follows is each test with what it reads, what the tradition says it governs, and whether a failure costs a mark or ends the assessment. For the shape of the system as a whole, and for why the ten are not the northern eight relabelled, see the ten poruthams explained.

Which four poruthams are decided by a count between two stars?

Dina, Mahendra, Stree Deergha and Vedha. The first three of those run off the same single number: take the bride’s birth star, count forward round the circle of twenty-seven to the groom’s, and include both ends. That count is the whole input. No planets, no birth time beyond what fixes the Moon, nothing else about either person.

Once you know it, three findings follow immediately, and they need not agree with each other. Mahendra wants the count to be one of eight specific numbers. Stree Deergha wants it large. Dina wants it to leave a particular remainder on division by nine. It is entirely ordinary for one count to satisfy two of those and fail the third, which is why a family sometimes hears that the stars are far enough apart and also that the day-count is wrong — both statements about the same number.

The counting convention itself deserves a sentence, because it trips people up. Both ends are included, so a bride and groom sharing a star have a count of one, not nought, and a groom one star ahead has a count of two. Some published tables count exclusively and then compensate elsewhere, which is harmless internally and produces off-by-one nonsense the moment two tables are mixed.

Mahendra is the calm one. It agrees at counts of 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22 and 25, and it is the only test in the whole set where the sources are unanimous: Raman, the regional almanacs and the commercial tables all print the same eight numbers. The tradition associates it with progeny, longevity and protection, and it carries a substitution rule: Mahendra is held to suffice where Dina and Rasyadhipathi are absent. One test standing in for two others has no expression in a points system.

Vedha is the exception in this group, because it is not a count at all. It is a fixed table of star pairs held to obstruct each other, applied in both directions. In Raman’s table Chitra has no partner; Tamil tradition instead makes Chitra, Mrigashira and Dhanishta mutually obstructing, which creates pairs the other reading does not contain. Vedha is a blocking condition, not a mark, and it is the shortest test in the system to check by eye.

How does Dina Porutham actually work, step by step?

Divide the count by nine and look at the remainder. Two, four, six, eight and zero are favourable under the rule Raman gives; everything else is not. Then apply four exceptions, each of which decides real couples.

The first exception is absolute. A count of twenty-seven — which is to say, the star immediately before the bride’s — is rejected whether it otherwise agrees or not. The sources are blunt about it and give no reasoning.

The second runs the other way. Six stars are singled out so that a couple sharing one of them takes the top grade automatically: Ardra, Rohini, Hasta, Pushya, Magha and Shravana. Share any other star and you get no such reprieve.

The third is where the pada enters. Three counts are graded as the middle band instead of agreement or refusal, and each carries a specific pada as its exception: a couple at that count with the groom in that one quarter of his star is treated differently from the same couple with him in any of the other three. This is one of the few places in the whole southern system where the pada is load-bearing, and it is one of the parts implementations most often drop.

The fourth is not an exception so much as a fork in the tradition. Tamil practice does not divide by nine at all; it carries an explicit list of favourable counts. Two versions of that list are in print, one with eleven numbers and one with thirteen, and they differ at the counts of six, twenty-two, twenty-four and twenty-seven. Two astrologers both applying “Dina Porutham” correctly can be applying two different rules, and neither is making a mistake.

One more split catches every same-star couple. A remainder of one is Janma tara, the couple’s own star. The southern rule treats it as inauspicious; the northern tara rules accept it. So a bride and groom born under the same nakshatra fall on exactly that seam, and which side they land on depends entirely on which tradition is asked.

Five published thresholds, one count

Stree Deergha is the most contested number in the system, because five different thresholds are in print for one requirement that nobody actually disputes. Everybody agrees the groom’s star should be well ahead of the bride’s. Nobody agrees on how far ahead.

• Raman gives “preferably beyond the 9th” and adds that some authorities accept beyond the 7th — two positions from one page.
• Tamil practice and several commercial tables set the good grade beyond the 13th.
• One published note attaches a threshold of beyond the 14th to a particular community, which is a kind of qualification the other sources do not make at all.
• One widely used implementation reserves its top grade for counts beyond the 18th.
• Two almanacs abandon the single line and run graded bands instead, so a count that fails elsewhere reads as the middle grade instead of a refusal.

Put a couple at a count of eleven or twelve and watch what happens. They clear Raman’s line comfortably. They fail the Tamil one. On a banded scale they are middling. Same two birth stars, same arithmetic, three documented verdicts — and the threshold that was applied is almost never printed beside the result.

Raman also attaches an exception that is easy to miss: the consideration may be ignored where Rasi Kuta and Graha Maitri obtain. So a couple failing on the threshold may not be failing at all under the same author who set the threshold. Our own engine evaluates the count against every published threshold at once and prints which sources it passes for, because the honest output for a contested rule is a list, not a verdict.

Three tests, one pair of Moon signs

Rasi, Rasyadhipathi and Vasya each read a different property of the same two signs. They need the Moon’s sign, not its star, so they are stable against small errors in a remembered birth time.

Rasi tests where the groom’s Moon sign falls counted from the bride’s. The 6th, 8th and 12th are refused; a mutual 7th is the best case; the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th and 11th agree. A mutual 6th and 8th carries its own name, Shashtashtaka. What most implementations drop is the same-sign case: when both partners share a sign, the reading is auspicious only if the bride’s star does not precede the groom’s — unless one of eight named stars is involved, in which case it is exempt. That is a rule inside a rule inside a porutham, and it decides real couples silently.

Raman adds a directional layer that most tables flatten. At several distances the reading differs depending on whether you count from the bride to the groom or the other way round, so the same gap between two signs carries one description in one direction and a different one in the other. A report that prints a single word for Rasi has already chosen a direction on your behalf.

Rasyadhipathi tests friendship between the lords of the two Moon signs, using the classical friendship table set out in works like Jataka Parijata. Same lord or mutual friends agrees; enmity refuses. Raman calls it the most important kuta of the set. The split is over what a neutral relation does, and Kerala and Tamil practice take opposite positions on it: one decision, taken once, in a book, that flips the porutham.

The friendship table has a wrinkle families find maddening and it is real: the relations are not symmetric. One planet can count another a friend while the second counts the first an enemy. So “are the lords friendly” is genuinely two questions, and an implementation has to decide whether one direction of enmity is enough to refuse.

These three are also the tests where an implementation can silently substitute the northern equivalent and produce something that looks right. Bhakoot reads the same distance between two Moon signs that Rasi does, and Graha Maitri reads the same two sign lords that Rasyadhipathi does, and in both cases the pass rules differ. A tool that computes the northern koota and prints the southern name has produced a document that cannot be checked against either tradition.

Vasya asks whether one sign falls within the other’s vashya list, a relation of ascendancy between signs and not a symmetric one either. It agrees when the relation runs in either direction and takes the top grade only when it runs both ways. It uses the sign list directly, not the five-group matrix the northern koota uses, so a report can agree on Vasya Porutham while losing marks on Vashya Koota with no inconsistency at all. The tradition gives Vasya more prominence where Gana and Rasi are absent.

Which three poruthams are read off a classification table?

Gana, Yoni and Rajju, each of which sorts the twenty-seven stars into a handful of classes and compares the two classes. These are the tests that overlap the northern system most directly, and the rates quoted here are from the northern scoring of the same tables measured over every one of the 11,664 ordered star-and-pada pairings. Those are positions, not people: the rates describe the space of possible pairings and carry no demographic fact about Indian births at all.

Gana sorts the stars into three temperament classes: deva, manushya and rakshasa. It is worth 6 points in the northern arithmetic, where 33.3% of pairings take full marks and 22.2% score nothing. Southern grading is finer and, more importantly, directional. Two of the same class grade well; a deva bride with a manushya groom is the middle case; a rakshasa groom with a bride of either other class is passable; a rakshasa bride with a groom of either other class is not. The nine combinations do not reduce to six, because the table is not symmetric — the same two classes read differently depending on which partner holds which. The classification itself, and what it does and does not mean, is in the piece on gana as a category.

Yoni attaches an animal symbol to each star and compares the two animals on a nought-to-four matrix, with the lowest cells reserved for pairs the tradition treats as sworn enemies. It is worth 4 points in the north, and full marks are the rarest result of any koota at 7.3%. Southern practice adds a weight the northern scoring does not: each animal carries a sex, and Kerala practice in particular weights the combination of the two sexes heavily. Popular tables get several of those sex assignments backwards relative to Raman, which matters if two reports disagree about a yoni result they should agree on.

Rajju sorts the stars into five groups named for parts of the body and asks whether both partners fall in the same one. That is the whole computation. It is not a mark, and the consequences the classical sources attach to each group are worded as statements about a category and not about a couple, so they are not reproduced here. The mechanism, the exception Raman states, and why the word means something different in Kerala are all in the rajju piece.

Eight of the ten cost marks. Two of them end the assessment.

What does the tradition say each porutham governs?

Each of the ten carries an attributed subject, and knowing which one is attached to a failed test tells you what the objection in the room is actually about. These are the tradition’s own attributions, stated as the sources state them. They are not predictions and nothing here says what will happen to anybody.

• Dina is attached to day-to-day wellbeing and health, which is why it is treated as a primary test in Tamil practice despite resting on a single division.
• Gana is attached to temperament and disposition; the three classes are described as characters, not fortunes.
• Mahendra is attached to progeny, longevity and protection, and it is the test most often cited when a family is anxious about children.
• Stree Deergha is attached to the bride’s longevity and prosperity, which is where its name comes from and why its threshold is argued about so hard.
• Yoni is attached to physical compatibility, and it is the one component of the whole system that the English-language sites describe with the least restraint.
• Rasi is attached to the increase and standing of the family, read from the distance between the two Moon signs.
• Rasyadhipathi is attached to affection and mutual regard, which is Raman’s stated reason for ranking it the most important of the set.
• Vasya is attached to mutual attraction and the balance of influence between the partners, and the tradition is candid that the relation it reads is not a symmetric one.
• Rajju is attached to the stability and duration of the marriage, and its language is severe enough that we quote it only where a report cites its own source.
• Vedha is attached to obstruction: the two stars are held to get in each other’s way, with no further explanation offered anywhere.

Notice the pattern. The tests that carry the heaviest attributions — Stree Deergha, Rajju, Mahendra — are not the tests with the most careful mechanics. Stree Deergha rests on a number five sources disagree about; Rajju rests on a single table lookup; Mahendra rests on membership of a list of eight. The seriousness of the claim and the sophistication of the calculation run in opposite directions, and a family being handed a verdict about longevity is entitled to know it came out of a subtraction between two star numbers. Seven of the ten never see a planet, an ascendant or a birth time at all, which is the short form of a longer commitment set out in the things this site refuses to claim.

Which of the ten can refuse a match on their own?

Rajju and Vedha, and only in the readings that treat them as blocking conditions and not as marks. That qualification is the whole of the difficulty, because whether a given astrologer treats them that way is a position he holds, not a step he performs.

A veto behaves differently from a low score in one specific way: nothing else in the report bears on it. A couple agreeing on eight poruthams with a same-group rajju is refused with the eight agreements printed above the refusal, and there is no arithmetic that lets the eight speak to the one. That is what a blocking condition means, and a report that averages it into a count has quietly changed the kind of statement it is making.

Both vetoes do carry documented exceptions, which is the part families are least often told. Rajju has the best-attested one in the set: it need not be considered when Graha Maitri, Rasi, Dina and Mahendra are all present, which is four findings that are either there or not. A second published rule then withholds that exception from one of the five groups. Both, with their sources and the four schools that disagree about what kind of object rajju is, are in the rajju piece above.

Vedha has fewer escape routes and a narrower table, so it fires on far fewer couples. When it does fire it tends to be decisive, because there is no threshold to argue about and no counting convention to dispute: the two stars are either a listed pair or they are not.

The other eight cost marks and can be traded against each other through the count. Which is why the honest reading of a porutham report is not the summary word at the top but the ten findings underneath it, sorted into marks and refusals before anything else is discussed.

Three consecutive stars, three different reports

Take the published sample couple on this site. Priya was born in Pune with the Moon in Ashwini; Arjun in Chennai with the Moon in Purva Bhadrapada, the twenty-fifth star. Their count is twenty-five, seven of the ten agree, and the verdict is madhyamam with no veto raised. Now move his birth by about a day.

Now give the groom the next star along, Uttara Bhadrapada, which is what a birth about a day later would have produced. The count becomes twenty-six, and five separate findings change at once. Dina flips from refusing to agreeing, because twenty-six leaves a favourable remainder where twenty-five did not. Mahendra flips the other way, because twenty-six is not one of its eight numbers. His Moon sign moves from Kumbha to Meena, which puts it twelve signs from hers — one of the three refused distances — so Rasi flips to refusing, and Vasya loses its one-directional relation and refuses too. Meanwhile Rasyadhipathi flips to agreeing, because Meena is lorded by Jupiter and Jupiter and Mars are friends where Saturn and Mars are not. Net effect on the count: six instead of seven. Still madhyamam.

Move one place further, to Revati, and the arithmetic barely stirs while the character of the report changes completely. The count reaches twenty-seven, which Dina rejects outright under the rule that has no exceptions. Gana improves to the best grade, since both partners are then deva. And Rajju fails, because Revati sits in the same foot group as Ashwini, so a veto is raised, and the count of five drops the verdict to adhamam with a blocking condition on top of it.

Three consecutive stars. Three birthdays about a day apart. Madhyamam, madhyamam, then adhamam with a veto. We ran all three through the same engine rather than reasoning about them, because the point of the exercise is that the discontinuities are real and not intuitions. This is also the strongest practical argument for checking a birth time before arguing about a verdict: if the Moon was near a star boundary, the report is describing a couple who may not be you.

Which tests would a northern report score that are not on this list?

Nadi, Varna and Tara. Nadi is the heaviest component in the entire northern thirty-six: worth 8 points, lost completely by 33.3% of all pairings, and absent from the Tamil ten in any form.

That single absence explains a great deal of cross-regional confusion. A couple refused in Pune on nadi grounds can take the same two birth details to Madurai and find the subject does not come up, because there is no line for it. What makes it worse is a vocabulary collision: Kerala usage applies the word rajju to the nadi classification itself, which is a different table from the five body groups the Tamil Rajju Porutham reads. Two reports can both say “rajju” and mean unrelated things. The northern component and its base rate are set out in the nadi piece.

Varna sits outside the ten as well, though it appears in the twelve-porutham lists some Tamil sources prefer. In the north it is the smallest koota at 1 point, and 62.5% of all pairings take it, which is worth remembering when a report presents it as a finding rather than as a near-certainty. Tara, the star-count koota worth 3 points, has no direct porutham either, though Dina reads the same distance for a different purpose.

Do the ten compensate for each other?

The sources say they do, in specific named pairs, and the count out of ten cannot express any of it. This is the part of the system that gets lost first when it is translated into software, and it is the part an experienced astrologer is actually using.

Three of these compensation rules are stated plainly enough to quote. Mahendra is held to suffice in the absence of Dina and Rasyadhipathi. Vasya is said to gain prominence where Gana and Rasi are absent. Rajju need not be considered where Graha Maitri, Rasi, Dina and Mahendra are all present. Read them together and a shape appears: the tradition expects a reader to look at which findings are missing, not merely how many.

There is a second kind of internal tension that nobody wrote a rule for. Dina and Mahendra read the identical number and can return opposite results, as they do at a count of twenty-six. Rasi and Vasya read the identical pair of signs and can likewise part company. Gana and Yoni are both temperament-adjacent tables and routinely disagree. None of that is a defect; it follows from the way the ten were assembled. But it does mean the ten are not ten independent observations of one thing, and treating the count as though they were is a statistical mistake the tradition never made.

Which is the honest case for reading the findings rather than the summary. Seven agreements including Dina and Mahendra is a different document from seven agreements that lost both, and the tradition has language for the difference where the count has none.

One more thing, and it cuts against the page you are reading. Setting the ten out test by test makes the system look tidier than it is. Each entry above has a name, an input, a rule and a set of published thresholds, which reads as though somebody designed the ten together. Nobody did. They were built at different times for different purposes, collected into a list by regional practice, and then handed a count out of ten that no early source computes. The tidiness is this page’s doing, and a reader should discount it accordingly.

Reading your own report against the list

A column of ten ticks does not say what was compared, which threshold was applied, or whether a cross cost a mark or ended the assessment. A tick against Stree Deergha means the count cleared whichever line that implementation holds. A cross against Rajju means something categorically different from a cross against Vasya. A tick against Dina may rest on a division by nine or on a list of favourable numbers that does not contain the same counts.

The column looks like a scorecard. It is not one.

Mark each of the ten instead with which kind of test it is, and the questions to ask sort themselves. It takes about five minutes with the report in front of you and it changes what the next conversation can be about.

If the failures are all in the counted-distance group, the question is which threshold was used, because a named alternative may exist for that exact test and a couple sitting between two published lines is a common situation, not a rare one. If a failure is in the Moon-sign group, the question is which convention was applied to neutral lords, or which direction the Rasi reading was taken in. If the failure is Rajju or Vedha, neither of those questions applies and a different one does: was the four-kuta exception checked, since that is the best-attested carve-out in the set.

And if a northern report is also in the room, remember what its number contains. That total is computed across eight components averaging 20.1 out of thirty-six, with 66.7% of all pairings clearing the eighteen-point line — and not one of those eight is Dina, Mahendra, Stree Deergha, Rasyadhipathi, Rajju or Vedha. Six of the ten poruthams are simply not in it. You can confirm which star and pada each birth actually falls in with the nakshatra finder before any of this is argued about.