Yoga Categories
Solar
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Origin 500 to 800 CE
Solar Yoga is one of six categories used in this atlas to group the planetary combinations, or yogas, of classical Vedic astrology, and it names combinations built specifically around the Sun, paralleling the Moon centred combinations grouped as Chandra Yoga. Sun centred yogas are typically read for vitality, authority and standing in public life, themes that follow the Sun's classical association with the self and with kings. It is the counterpart category to Chandra Yoga, the two together covering yogas defined by the two luminaries rather than by the five other classical planets.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodA class of the named planetary combinations of the classical jataka literature 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Origin Periodc. 500-800 CE 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 1 Identity
DefinitionYogas formed from the Sun 1 Learn More
The Solar Yogas as a Class
Solar yogas are the combinations reckoned from or formed with the Sun. The best known are the veshi, vasi and ubhayachari set, formed by planets other than the Moon in the second, the twelfth, and both places from the Sun, exactly parallel in construction to the lunar flanking yogas but taken from the solar position. Combinations of the Sun with individual planets, such as budha-aditya with Mercury, also belong here.
The class is smaller and less used than the lunar one, and the reason is structural: because Mercury and Venus are never far from the Sun, the places adjacent to it are frequently occupied by those two planets and the resulting yogas are common and weakly differentiating. The classical texts also have to reckon with combustion, the doctrine that a planet close to the Sun is burnt and weakened, which cuts against reading proximity to the Sun as strengthening.
When a Solar Yoga Operates
The solar combinations are built on the same geometry as the lunar ones, planets standing in the second, the twelfth, or both places from a luminary, and the parallel is exact enough that the two sets are usually presented together. Where they differ is in the exclusion: the Moon is excluded from forming the solar flanking yogas, as the Sun is from the lunar ones, so that a luminary is never read as its own attendant.
The class is smaller than the lunar one and used less, and the classical handbooks give it correspondingly less space. That imbalance is a fact about the corpus rather than a judgment about the Sun, and it is consistent with the general weighting of jyotisha, which treats the Moon as the principal significator of the mind and gives it a larger share of the interpretive apparatus than the Sun receives.
Budha Aditya, the conjunction of Mercury with the Sun, is the member of this class most often cited in modern practice, and it carries a standing complication: Mercury conjunct the Sun is by definition close to it and therefore liable to combustion, which the tradition treats as weakening. The combination and the condition that undermines it arrive together, and the handbooks discuss both.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Originates in Language
The term is Sanskrit, and the technical vocabulary of the Panchanga and of jyotisha more widely is Sanskrit throughout, whatever the vernacular in which a given almanac is printed. The name is a Sanskrit term. Regional almanacs render it in the local script and pronunciation, so a reader will meet the same term in several transliterations without any difference of reference.
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