A Panchang Has Five Limbs, and One of Them Is Not a Raj Yoga

A panchang has five limbs: tithi, vara, nakshatra, yoga, and karana. Tithi is the Moon's elongation from the Sun, thirty of them in a lunar month, with Purnima the full Moon and Amavasya the new Moon. Vara is the weekday counted from sunrise, not from midnight. Nakshatra is the Moon's star, twenty-seven in the zodiac, and it also starts Vimshottari if you are casting a birth chart. Karana is half a tithi. Yoga in this list is one of twenty-seven sums of solar and lunar longitude, with names such as Vishkumbha or Siddhi. That yoga is not a birth-chart yoga. A good panchang yoga on a wedding day does not mean the couple has Gajakesari.

An election that checks only the weekday ignores a broken tithi. An election that loves a nakshatra and ignores karana is unfinished. Marriage muhurta traditionally wants a workable nakshatra, a tithi that is not avoided, a decent lagna for the hour, and attention to the couple's own 7th houses. The panchang does not replace those 7th houses. It times the hour. Local sunrise changes vara, Rahu kalam, and which civil date owns a tithi. A panchang printed for another city can be one limb off. In India the civil clock is Asia/Kolkata for every city, and sunrise still differs from Dwarka to Guwahati. Use the place of the event.

Your kundli freezes the five limbs at birth and then builds houses from the lagna. Today's panchang is a new set of limbs for today. People read today's nakshatra as if it were their birth star. The birth nakshatra is the one the Moon occupied at delivery. Today's nakshatra is whoever the Moon is visiting now. Both matter, for different jobs. Jyothish calculation of either one is astronomical: Lahiri ayanamsa for the sidereal Moon, and a clock. Importance of the panchang is that festivals, shraddha, and vows still follow it. Importance of the kundli is that your 10th lord does not change when the tithi changes. Keep the two books on two shelves.