The Dashami tithi

a birth on a Dashami tithi, in either fortnight

What the tradition reads

Dashami is the tenth of the fourteen shared tithi names, one of the three Purna tithis, a class myzodiaq.in reads as bringing satisfaction and completeness, favoured for finishing a project, for religious ceremony, housewarming and major milestones, while cautioning against destructive acts or risky new ventures on the same day. Clickastro.com names Dharma, the god of righteousness, as Dashami's own ruling deity, and reports that the tithi favours the completion of work already in progress, government related business, marriage, music and the purchase of new garments. The two readings sit closely together, Purna's general sense of fullness matched by a deity whose very name means righteous conduct or duty properly done, so that Dashami emerges in the tradition as a day less for starting something than for bringing what is already underway to a proper, well ordered close.

The story

Dharma, the deity clickastro.com names for Dashami, appears personified in the Mahabharata as the god invoked by Kunti through a mantra capable of summoning any deity to father a child, called on at the request of her husband Pandu, who could father no children of his own, specifically so that the son born would be truthful, knowledgeable and just enough to one day rule. Yudhishthira, the son Dharma fathers, is named at his very birth for the righteous, courageous king he is destined to become, and carries the god's own office in his epithets ever after, Dharmaputra, son of Dharma, and Dharmaraja, king of Dharma, epithets Wikipedia records as following him through the whole of the epic. A tithi ruled by the god whose entire mythic purpose is to produce a son fit to govern justly fits Dashami's own reading as a day for bringing effort to its proper, well earned conclusion, the fullness of Purna answered by a deity whose name is duty completed rather than duty merely begun.

Written from

Corpus key tithi:Dashami.