10 Porutham — the Tamil system, computed properly

What this tool computes

Two birth stars go in. Ten separate tests come out, each one marked as agreeing or not agreeing on its own terms. This is Dashakoota — what Tamil and Kerala families usually call porutham, or jathaka porutham. The ten are Dina, Gana, Mahendra, Stree-Dirgha, Yoni, Rashi, Rashyadhipathi, Vasya, Rajju and Vedha. Each asks a different question about where the two stars sit relative to one another, and each is answered separately. There is no running total out of thirty-six here. There is a count of how many of the ten agree, and southern practice conventionally treats six or more as madhyamam — middling, and workable.

The check worth running on any porutham report

A report can carry the word porutham at the top and be Ashtakoota underneath, with the eight kootas given Tamil names and two more rows added to reach ten. That is checkable in about ten seconds, and it is worth checking, because the two systems do not contain the same rules. Ashtakoota has no Rajju and no Vedha. It has no Mahendra and no Stree-Dirgha either. If the page shows ten rows but the arithmetic beneath them still adds up to a score out of thirty-six, the ten labels are sitting on top of eight kootas.

The omission that matters most is Rajju. Southern practice weighs it heavily, and in some households a Rajju failure is treated as decisive on its own — heavier than a low count elsewhere. A system that never computes it cannot report it.

What the count does and does not mean

It means that ten named rules, applied to two birth stars, produced this many agreements. It is a statement about a convention and two stars. It is not a statement about two people, and this tool will not make one.

It is also not the whole of what a southern astrologer looks at. Papasamyam — the balance of malefics between the two charts — is handled separately and needs full birth details, not just stars. And the ten do not command a single reading everywhere: across the five schools this engine implements, 56.4% of all 11,664 equally weighted possible pairings trigger a tested difference or veto across the combined census checks. A count is an output of a method. Ask which method.

Do we need our birth times for this?

Not for the ten poruthams themselves. All ten are computed from the two birth stars and their padas, so a date that fixes the nakshatra is enough. Papasamyam and chevvai dosham do need birth time and place, because they depend on house positions rather than stars.

Why does a Kerala reading differ from a Tamil one?

Mostly in which of the ten a household treats as compulsory, and in the variant tables used for Rajju and Vedha. The stars do not change. What changes is the weight attached to each rule and the threshold at which a family stops.

Is eight out of ten better than twenty-eight out of thirty-six?

The two are not convertible, and a report that converts one into the other has invented an exchange rate. Dashakoota counts satisfied rules; Ashtakoota sums weighted points. A couple can sit comfortably in one and awkwardly in the other, which is exactly what happens when two families read from different traditions.