The Moon dasha

the ten year Moon mahadasha in the Vimshottari sequence

What the tradition reads

In the Vimshottari system, the Moon governs a period of ten years, the sixth longest of the nine, shorter than Mercury's seventeen, Rahu's eighteen, Saturn's nineteen and Venus's twenty, but longer than Mars, Ketu and the Sun. Phaladeepika reads the Moon's dasha as a season of tranquillity of mind and success in undertakings generally, together with good food, the acquisition of a wife or partner, children, ornaments, clothes, gems, cattle and land. The tradition treats the Moon as the significator of the mind, of the mother, and of the native's own emotional footing, so a period ruled by it is read as one in which day to day comfort, domestic stability and inner steadiness come to the fore rather than any single dramatic event, provided the Moon is not weak or afflicted at birth, in which case the same qualities of mind are read as unsettled or anxious instead. Ten years is long enough to establish a household's ordinary rhythms without being long enough to remake its outward shape entirely, and the tradition reads a Moon dasha accordingly, as a period judged less by what it visibly builds than by how settled or unsettled a person feels while living through it.

The story

Chandra, the Moon, married all twenty seven daughters of the sage Daksha, the same twenty seven who personify the lunar mansions the Moon travels through every month, but favoured Rohini above the rest despite Daksha's repeated warnings. In anger, Daksha cursed him to waste away with a consumptive illness, and it was only when the other gods interceded that the curse was softened rather than lifted outright: Chandra was granted relief for half of each month by bathing in a sacred tirtha, and it is this bargain, in the tradition's telling, that accounts for the Moon's endless waxing and waning rather than a single fixed state. A dasha ruled by a planet whose entire visible nature is one of steady increase followed by steady decrease, never settling permanently at full or at empty, fits neatly with the tradition's reading of the period as one measured in mood and steadiness rather than outward event, a ten year stretch that rises and falls with the native's own inner tide much as Chandra himself does every month across the sky.

Written from

Corpus key dasha:Moon.