Variyana, the Auspicious Yoga

Variyana is the eighteenth nityayoga, and its name is glossed as excellent or comfortable. It is one of the auspicious yogas, favourable for undertakings connected with ease, comfort, and beneficial outcomes. Reckoned from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it advances as the lights separate through the month. In the panchanga it contributes its favourable quality to the reckoning of an auspicious moment, one of the five daily limbs the tradition weighs. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, in which each of the twenty-seven yogas carries a settled favourable or unfavourable nature; Variyana falls among the benefic set, commending its period for good works. The astronomical basis is the combined motion of Sun and Moon.

Some manuscript traditions and regional panchanga publications give this eighteenth yoga's name as Variyas or in a related comparative grammatical form rather than as Variyana, both pointing to the same underlying sense of surpassing excellence, since the comparative and superlative grades of Sanskrit adjectives are formed with related suffixes to the ordinary adjectival form; this kind of minor orthographic variation between one printed almanac and another is common across the twenty-seven yoga names and is generally a matter of regional transliteration convention rather than any disagreement about which yoga is meant or where it falls in the sequence of twenty-seven.