The Sun dasha

the six year Sun mahadasha in the Vimshottari sequence

What the tradition reads

In the Vimshottari system, the great cycle of a hundred and twenty years counted from the Moon's lunar mansion, the Sun governs a period of six years, the shortest of the nine. Phaladeepika reads a badly placed Sun's dasha as a season of quarrel, sudden displeasure from those in authority, sickness among relatives and unsettled wandering. A Sun well placed at birth is read instead as bringing wealth won through bold and forceful action, journeys, dealings with kings and those in power, and renewed contention that nonetheless turns to the native's advantage. The tradition treats the Sun as the significator of authority, of the father, and of the native's own vitality and standing among others, so its dasha, though the briefest of the nine, is read as concentrated rather than mild: whatever it brings tends to arrive quickly and press its claim at once rather than unfold gradually the way a longer period might. Because six years is a short span to reshape a life's outward architecture, classical commentary treats a Sun dasha less as a hinge on which the whole chart turns than as a compressed test of standing, health and relations with authority, over and judged almost before its lessons are fully absorbed.

The story

Surya is counted among the Adityas, the sons of the sage Kashyapa and the goddess Aditi, and rides a chariot drawn by seven horses, said to stand for the seven metres of Sanskrit verse, with Aruna, the ruddy dawn, seated as his charioteer. His wife Sanjna, unable to bear the full force of his brightness, made a double of herself named Chhaya to stand in her place and withdrew, and it was Chhaya who later bore him Shani, the planet of hardship and delay, while Sanjna's own children by him include Yama, lord of the dead, and the twin Ashvins. A single source of light, in this telling, casts children as different as the god of death and the god of affliction alongside gods of healing, an unevenness the tradition reads directly into the Sun's own dasha: a short, bright period that can warm a life or scorch it depending on what stood too close to it at birth, and a figure whose brilliance was, from the beginning, more than one wife or one household could comfortably stand beside.

Written from

Corpus key dasha:Sun.