Vyaghata

Vyaghata is the thirteenth nityayoga, and its name means a beating, an obstruction, or a striking blow. It is one of the inauspicious yogas, associated with conflict and setback, and the panchanga counts it among the configurations to be avoided for auspicious undertakings. Like the others it is derived from the combined longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven equal parts, advancing through the month. In selecting a muhurta an astrologer avoids the malefic yogas, and Vyaghata, with its sense of a thwarting blow, is one the tradition treats with caution. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, which assigns each of the twenty-seven yogas a fixed favourable or unfavourable nature; the astronomical basis is only the summed motion of the two lights.

Vyaghata combines the prefix vi, apart or asunder, with ghata, a striking or a blow, giving a sense closer to a shattering or dispersing blow than to an ordinary strike, which fits the yoga's classical association not merely with conflict but with setbacks that scatter or undo what has already been accomplished, a nuance the general gloss "a beating, an obstruction" given above does not fully capture. The same root ghata also names, in an entirely unrelated everyday sense, a clay water pot, and Sanskrit dictionaries list both senses, the blow and the pot, as separate developments from an underlying root concerned with striking or forming by striking, the latter presumably from the potter's shaping blows.

The yoga is the limb of the panchanga that has no counterpart in the sky. Nothing about the day looks different when one ends and the next begins. Where the tithi measures the Moon's separation FROM the Sun, the yoga measures the two longitudes ADDED together, and cuts the resulting circle into twenty seven equal arcs of thirteen degrees twenty minutes. Vyaghata is the arc from 160 degrees 00 minutes to 173 degrees 20 minutes of that sum. The sum climbs at roughly fourteen degrees ten minutes a day, so a yoga runs about twenty two and a half hours on average, a little shorter than a tithi, and like a tithi it can be skipped between two sunrises or carried across two of them.

The twenty seven arcs are the same width as the twenty seven nakshatras, and Vyaghata is the thirteenth arc of the grid in both schemes, which is why the two are often tabulated side by side. They are not the same thing and share nothing but their arithmetic: a nakshatra is a segment of the sky the Moon is physically standing in, while a yoga is a number derived from two positions and belongs to no part of the sky at all. Reading a yoga as a star group is the commonest confusion the term invites, and the shared name of the thirteenth position, Hasta, is where it usually starts.

Vyaghata sits among the nine yogas classed as unfavourable. Nine of twenty seven is a third of the cycle, so an inauspicious yoga is a common event rather than a rare one, and the muhurta literature treats it accordingly: it weighs against a time without ruling it out, and is routinely overridden where the tithi, the nakshatra and the weekday agree.