Panchanga
every reader
What the tradition reads
The panchanga is the traditional Hindu almanac and, within any single chart or day, the set of five limbs it is built from: the vara, or weekday; the tithi, the lunar day measured by the angle between Sun and Moon; the nakshatra the Moon currently occupies; the yoga, a further angular relationship combining the Sun's and Moon's longitudes; and the karana, half of a tithi. All five depend on the Moon's motion relative to the Sun rather than on the solar calendar alone, which is why the panchanga must be recalculated for every day rather than read once from a fixed yearly table. Astrologers consult a person's panchanga at birth, alongside the rashi and nakshatra placements it already draws on, as a further layer of description, and consult the panchanga of a future date, quite apart from any birth chart, when choosing an auspicious moment, a muhurta, for a wedding, a journey, or the start of any undertaking the tradition treats as worth timing carefully.
The story
Panchanga is a Sanskrit compound of pancha, five, and anga, a limb or a part, naming the almanac directly by its five constituent measurements rather than by any single one of them. The tradition's own working theories for calculating these five limbs go back to the classical astronomical texts, chiefly the Surya Siddhanta and the later Grahalaghava, which supplied the formulas Indian almanac makers used for many centuries before modern astronomical observation showed their assumptions had drifted from the sky they were meant to describe. That drift eventually prompted the government of India to prepare, in 1957, a single National Panchanga recalculated from contemporary astronomical data rather than the older texts' formulas, a project first proposed in 1952 by Meghnad Saha and Lahiri; the Lahiris Ephemeris that grew out of that same effort remains, by the source's own account, the most widely used English almanac in Vedic astrology today.
Written from
Corpus key glossary:panchanga.