What Is Vedic Astrology?

Vedic astrology, called Jyotisha in Sanskrit, is a system for reading a birth chart: the positions of the Sun, Moon and planets against the twelve zodiac signs and twelve houses at the exact moment and place someone was born. It comes from the same classical Indian texts this site cites throughout, chiefly the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, and from works of that standing such as Phaladeepika and the Jaimini Sutras.

It is not the same system as the astrology printed in most Western newspapers. Western astrology measures the zodiac from the point the Sun crosses the equator each spring, which drifts against the actual constellations over centuries because of a slow wobble in the Earth's axis called precession. Vedic astrology corrects for that drift, using what is called a sidereal zodiac, anchored to the visible stars rather than to the seasons. The practical result is that a birth chart's sign placements in the two systems can differ, often by close to a full sign.

A birth chart itself is arithmetic before it is anything else: given a date, a clock time and a place, an ephemeris computes exactly where each planet stood in the sky, and where the horizon and the meridian stood, at that instant. Every calculator on this site runs that computation entirely in your browser, from the same engine, before any interpretation is layered on top of it.

What a chart is read for is where systems and individual practitioners genuinely differ, and this site does not try to settle that. What it does insist on is traceability: an interpretive claim made on this site is either a citation to a specific verse, a labelled commentary on one, or arithmetic that follows from the system's own structure, and never an invented rule dressed up as a classical one. The method page sets this out in full.