Pañcāṅga means “five limbs” — pañca, five, and aṅga, limb. A panchang is not a calendar in the Western sense. It is a description of a moment in five independent measurements, and each limb answers a different question.
A printed panchang — the almanac many Hindu households keep, often a thin annual booklet or a wall calendar with small print under each date — lists these five for every day, usually with the clock times at which each one changes. It also carries sunrise and sunset, the lunar month, festival days and much else. But the five limbs are the core, and the name.
The five limbs
Put simply, the five answer these questions:
- Tithi — how far has the Moon moved from the Sun?
- Vāra — which day of the week is it?
- Nakṣatra — which star-division is the Moon in?
- Yoga — what do the Sun and Moon come to when taken together?
- Karaṇa — which half of the current tithi is running?
1. Tithi — the lunar day
The Moon’s angular distance from the Sun, in twelve-degree steps; thirty to a lunar month. This is the limb most observance depends on, and it is set out in full in what a tithi is.
Because a tithi runs on the Moon rather than the clock, it can begin or end at any hour, and a panchang gives the time at which it changes. Almost every fast and festival — Ekadashi, Chaturthi, Purnima, Amavasya — is fixed by this limb.
2. Vāra — the weekday
The seven weekdays, each named for a graha: Ravi (Sun), Soma (Moon), Maṅgala (Mars), Budha (Mercury), Guru (Jupiter), Śukra (Venus), Śani (Saturn).
Unlike the other four limbs, the vāra is not a measurement of the sky at all. It is a count that simply runs on, seven by seven. In the traditional reckoning the Hindu day begins at sunrise rather than midnight, so the vāra changes at sunrise.
The order is the interesting part, because it looks arbitrary and is not. Arrange the seven grahas by apparent orbital period, slowest to fastest: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. Assign them in that repeating order to the twenty-four hours of a day, each hour ruled by one graha. Whichever graha rules the first hour gives the day its name. Step forward twenty-four hours and you land three places along the list — and stepping three at a time through that sequence produces exactly the weekday order the whole world uses. The Hindu, Greco-Roman and modern Western week share this structure.
To check it: start a day with Saturn in the first hour. Twenty-four hours on, the list has gone round three full times (twenty-one hours) and three places further — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, then the Sun. So Saturday is followed by Sunday. Three more places from the Sun — Venus, Mercury, Moon — gives Monday. Three more — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars — gives Tuesday, and so on through the week. These planetary hours are called horā.
3. Nakṣatra — the Moon’s asterism
Which of the twenty-seven divisions of the ecliptic the Moon occupies. Where the tithi measures the Moon against the Sun, the nakshatra measures it against the fixed stars — two independent readings of the same body. See how to read a nakshatra.
Each division is 13°20′ wide, and the Moon spends roughly a day in each. In a panchang the nakshatra is a property of the day, used for choosing times and for some observances. The same division is also what people mean by their birth nakshatra — the one the Moon occupied when they were born — but that is a separate use of the same measurement.
4. Yoga — the combined figure
The least familiar limb. Add the longitude of the Sun to the longitude of the Moon and divide the result into arcs of 13°20′. There are twenty-seven yogas, with names such as Vishkambha, Priti, Ayushman and Siddhi. It is a single number describing the Sun and Moon together rather than either alone, and it is used mainly in muhurta.
Note that this yoga is a technical term of the calendar. It has nothing to do with yoga as a physical or meditative practice, and it is also distinct from the many planetary “yogas” — combinations — discussed in horoscope interpretation. A few of the twenty-seven, such as Vyatipata and Vaidhriti, are traditionally avoided when choosing a time to begin something.
5. Karaṇa — the half-tithi
Each tithi divides into two karanas, so there are sixty in a lunar month, drawn from a set of eleven names. Four of the eleven are sthira (fixed) and appear once each per month; the other seven rotate. Also principally a muhurta instrument.
The arithmetic works out neatly. The four fixed karanas — Shakuni, Chatushpada, Naga and Kimstughna — sit together around the new moon. The seven movable ones — Bava, Balava, Kaulava, Taitila, Gara, Vanija and Vishti — cycle through the rest of the month eight times: 7 × 8 = 56, and 56 + 4 = 60. Vishti, also called Bhadra, is the karana most often avoided for auspicious beginnings.
What a panchang is for
Two things, mostly.
Observance — establishing which day a tithi-based festival or fast falls on. Muhurta — selecting a time to begin something, by finding a moment whose five limbs are jointly favourable for the act in question. Varahamihira’s Bṛhat Saṃhitā and the later muhurta literature are largely concerned with exactly this.
In practice, a family planning a wedding, a housewarming or a child’s naming ceremony might consult a priest or astrologer, who reads the panchang to find days on which the tithi, weekday, nakshatra, yoga and karana suit that particular kind of event. No single limb decides the question; they are weighed together.
Note what a panchang is not. It is not a horoscope and it says nothing about an individual. It describes a moment in time as it applies to everyone at a given place.
Why two panchangs disagree
They usually agree about the astronomy and differ about the conventions, of which there are three main ones.
- Ayanamsa — the offset between the sidereal and tropical zodiacs. Lahiri is the Indian government standard; other schools use slightly different values. This affects the limbs that depend on a position against the stars — the nakshatra and the yoga — but not the tithi or karana, which depend only on the gap between Sun and Moon.
- Location — sunrise, and therefore which tithi is current at sunrise, depends on where you are.
- The rule for assigning a tithi to a day — sunrise, midday, moonrise or the relevant watch of the night, depending on the observance and the tradition.
Two panchangs applying different conventions to identical astronomy will print different dates, and each is right within its own system. This is the single commonest source of confusion about Hindu festival dates.
Two further differences sit alongside these. Some panchangs compute positions with modern astronomical tables and others follow traditional computations descended from the Surya Siddhanta, and the results can differ by a noticeable margin. And regions differ over whether a lunar month ends at the new moon or the full moon, which changes the month name printed against the dark half without changing the day itself.
What AdiVeda does and does not publish
AdiVeda explains the five limbs. It does not publish a daily panchang, compute tithis, or generate festival dates or muhurtas — deliberately, and permanently.
Anything of that kind has to be computed for a specific place with a stated ayanamsa and a stated rule set, and it has to be maintained every year. A site that publishes a date it cannot stand behind is worse than a site that explains the system and points you to a source that can. Where you need dates, use a panchang that names its conventions.
Where this comes from
The five-limb structure and the definitions of each limb are standard in the classical jyotisha and calendrical literature, principally the Surya Siddhanta and Varāhamihira’s works. The hora-lord derivation of the weekday order is classical and is the same argument found in Greek and Latin sources. The observance conventions are living tradition and genuinely vary.
Read on AdiVeda
- What Is a Tithi? — the first limb in detail, including why tithis are skipped or repeated.
- How to Read a Nakshatra — the third limb, and the fields on AdiVeda’s nakshatra pages.
- Maha Shivaratri and Navratri — two observances fixed by the lunar calendar.
- Navagraha Stotram — a hymn to the nine grahas whose names the weekdays carry.
See today’s tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana and Rahu Kaal in the Hindu Panchang, calculated for your city · Festival & Holiday Calendar