Reference
Vedic astrology terms, in plain English
Jyotish carries a lot of Sanskrit, and most of it is explained badly — either in more Sanskrit, or in language designed to worry you. Here is what each term actually means, and how concerned to be when you meet it in your own chart.
Yoga
A yoga is a specific combination of planets that the classical texts link to a particular result. Think of them as recipes — certain planets in certain places, and the tradition tells you what tends to follow. Most charts have several.
Raja Yoga
“Raja” means king. These are the combinations traditionally tied to status and authority. Read today as recognition, leadership, and rising in whatever world you work in.
Dhana Yoga
“Dhana” means wealth. These combinations are linked to money arriving — through earnings, savings, property, or gains that come via other people.
Nabhasa Yoga
These are named for the overall shape your planets make across the whole chart — clustered together, spread evenly, or forming a pattern. They describe the general character of a life rather than any single event.
Dosha
A dosha is a difficulty, not a curse. It flags a combination the texts say needs care. Most have traditional remedies, and many are cancelled outright by other placements in the same chart. Finding one here is common and not a cause for alarm.
Strength
How fully the combination is formed in your chart. A yoga can be technically present but weak, in which case its effects stay muted. The higher the bar, the more plainly it tends to show up in life.
Maha Dasha Sequence
Vedic astrology divides a life into long planetary chapters, each ruled by one planet, running in a fixed order and always totalling 120 years. Which one you are born into depends on the Moon's position at birth. The planet ruling the current chapter colours everything happening in that stretch of life.
Antar Dasha
Each long chapter is divided into sub-periods, again ruled by each planet in turn. So a Rahu chapter contains a Rahu-Jupiter stretch, a Rahu-Saturn stretch, and so on. The sub-period is what explains why one year inside a long chapter feels different from the next.
Energy Ring
A circular map of the sky at the moment you were born. The twelve zodiac signs run around the outside and each planet sits at the exact degree it occupied. The lines across the middle join planets that pull on one another. Tap any planet to read what it means for you.
North Indian Chart
The diamond-shaped kundli used across northern India. Your ascendant is always the top-centre diamond and the houses count anti-clockwise from there, so the frame stays identical for everyone — only what sits inside it changes.
South Indian Chart
The square kundli used across southern India. Here the twelve zodiac signs occupy fixed boxes that never move, and your ascendant is marked within them. Many families in the south will recognise this layout from a paper horoscope.
Karmic Flow
The same planets arranged by the twelve areas of life — work, money, family, marriage and so on — rather than by zodiac sign. The curving lines show which areas influence each other, and the darker a line, the stronger the planet driving it.
Transits
Your birth chart never changes — it is the sky frozen at the moment you were born. Transits are where the planets are right now, and how they touch that fixed birth chart. This is what astrologers use to talk about timing: not who you are, but what is happening.
Sade Sati
The roughly seven-and-a-half years when Saturn passes over and around your Moon sign. It has a fearsome reputation, but the tradition describes it as a period of hard work, responsibility and growing up — pruning rather than punishment. Nearly everyone lives through two or three of them.
Ashtakavarga
A scoring system, built from your own birth chart, that rates how comfortable each sign is for a planet passing through it. A high score means that planet has an easier time there; a low score suggests more friction. It is a way of grading a transit rather than judging it good or bad.
Transit House
Which area of your life a planet is moving through at the moment, counted from your birth chart. The same planet in a different house touches a different part of life — work, home, money, relationships.
Retrograde
Sometimes a planet appears to move backwards across the sky, an effect of Earth overtaking it. Vedic tradition reads this as the planet's themes turning inward or going back over old ground, rather than as anything going wrong.
Nakshatra
The moon divides the sky into 27 lunar mansions, and each has its own character. Where a planet sits among them adds a finer layer of meaning than the twelve zodiac signs alone.
Definitions follow the classical sources — chiefly Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra — with the jargon translated rather than repeated.