--- title: "Ashtakavarga Transit Strength: Why Malefics Fail by Design" slug: "ashtakavarga-transit-strength" canonical_url: "https://mahadasha.com/ashtakavarga-transit-strength" description: "Ashtakavarga transit strength scores each sign 0 to 8. Mars and Saturn average 3.25 against a pass mark of 4, so they fail before your chart is drawn." published_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" modified_date: "2026-08-05 09:00:00" author: "Pawan Acharya" keywords: "ashtakavarga, ashtakavarga transit strength, bindu, sarvashtakavarga, gochara ashtakavarga, bhinnashtakavarga" locale: "en" --- # Ashtakavarga Transit Strength: Why Malefics Fail by Design > Ashtakavarga scores every sign from 0 to 8 and tells you whether a transit will deliver. It also hands Mars and Saturn a losing hand before your chart is drawn, and almost nobody mentions that. Ashtakavarga transit strength is the answer to the obvious objection to gochar. If a transit's house is the same for everyone who shares your Moon sign, then a twelfth of the world gets the same forecast. Ashtakavarga is the tradition's own fix for that, and it produces a number between 0 and 8 for every sign in your chart. The word means eightfold. Each planet's table collects contributions from seven planets plus the ascendant, and the count of favourable contributions in a given sign is called the bindu count for that sign. ## Reading ashtakavarga transit strength Two levels of it are in common use. The bhinnashtakavarga is one planet's own table, twelve signs each scored 0 to 8. The sarvashtakavarga adds the seven together, so each sign gets a number that is usually somewhere in the twenties or thirties. For a transit, the standard method is to take the transiting planet's own bhinnashtakavarga and look up the sign it is entering. Four or more bindus is conventionally treated as enough for the transit to deliver, and fewer than four as not. Some schools use five. That is the whole technique. It is refreshingly concrete for this subject, and it answers the objection directly: two people with the same Moon sign, born in different years, have different bindus in the sign Jupiter is entering, so they get different answers from the same ingress. ## The part almost nobody mentions Every planet's table carries a fixed number of bindus in total. Not fixed for you, fixed for everyone, permanently, because the totals are a property of the system rather than of a chart. Sun 48. Moon 49. Mars 39. Mercury 54. Jupiter 56. Venus 52. Saturn 39. The seven sum to 337, which is why every correctly computed sarvashtakavarga in the world totals exactly 337. Now divide each by twelve to get the average bindus per sign. Jupiter 4.67. Mercury 4.50. Venus 4.33. Moon 4.08. Sun 4.00. Mars 3.25. Saturn 3.25. Set that against a pass mark of four. Jupiter clears it on average without knowing anything about your chart. Mars and Saturn sit three quarters of a bindu below it, permanently, in every chart that has ever been cast. They fail the test more often than they pass it, and the reason is not that the technique has looked at them and found them wanting. It is that their tables were given 30 percent fewer bindus to distribute. This is worth sitting with, because it means part of what ashtakavarga appears to discover about malefic transits is built into its own arithmetic before any measurement occurs. That does not make the technique useless. It does mean that "Saturn only has 2 bindus there" is a less independent observation than it sounds. ## What the numbers actually look like Computed across 4,000 charts, so 48,000 individual sign-values, the sarvashtakavarga per sign came out with a mean of 28.08, which is 337 divided by 12 exactly, and a standard deviation of 4.69. The lowest single value seen was 14 and the highest was 51. The shape matters for interpretation. Roughly 53 percent of signs land at or above the average. About 37 percent reach 30 or more, 9 percent reach 35, and only 1.2 percent reach 40. So a sign with 40 bindus is genuinely unusual, one in eighty, while a sign with 30 is common enough that treating it as remarkable is a mistake. If someone tells you a house in your chart is exceptionally strong on 31 bindus, the honest response is that about a third of all houses in all charts are at least that. ## Two people born the same day A reasonable worry about any birth-time-sensitive technique is how much it really moves. For ashtakavarga the answer is: more than you would guess. Taking one date and computing twelve births at two-hourly intervals produced twelve different sarvashtakavarga vectors. Not the same numbers assigned to different houses. Different numbers. The reason is that the ascendant is one of the eight contributors to every single table, so moving the birth time moves the lagna and moves bindus around the zodiac with it. Two days apart changes 10 or 11 of the 12 sign values. This is a technique that responds to the birth time rather than merely to the birth date, which is a point in its favour and also a warning about how much weight to put on it if your birth time is approximate. ## Kaksha, the finer division There is a level below the sign. Each sign divides into eight kakshas of 3 degrees 45 minutes, one for each contributor, in the order Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon and the ascendant. The claim is that a transiting planet delivers according to whether the kaksha lord of the segment it is crossing gave a bindu in that sign. It is the finest timing tool the system offers, and it means a planet crossing one sign passes through eight distinct sub-conditions rather than one. For a fast planet that is a distinction without much use, because the Moon crosses a kaksha in about four and a half hours. For Saturn, which spends roughly 112 days in each kaksha, it turns a two and a half year transit into eight readable segments, and that is where the technique earns its keep. ## Where the tables come from Worth being straight about the foundations. The eight lists behind each planet's ashtakavarga are traditional assignments. They are not derived from anything, and the texts that transmit them do not explain how they were arrived at. So the 337, the fixed per-planet totals and everything downstream of them are consequences of those lists rather than independent discoveries. The arithmetic on top is rigorous and reproducible. What it is rigorous about is a set of inherited tables. That is not a dismissal. Most useful systems have axioms somewhere at the bottom. It is a reason to treat a bindu count as a well-defined quantity within a tradition rather than as a measurement of anything in the sky, and to be suspicious of anyone who presents it as the latter. ## The step most calculators skip Before the sarvashtakavarga is used for prediction, the classical procedure applies two reductions, trikona shodhana and ekadhipatya shodhana. The first adjusts bindus among the three signs of each element, the second handles the signs that share a ruling planet. These are not optional refinements in the source material, they are part of the method, and they change the numbers substantially. A great many calculators report raw bindus and stop there. Which means that if two tools give you different sarvashtakavarga figures, the most likely explanation is not that one of them is broken. It is that one applied the reductions and the other did not. Ask which you are looking at before comparing numbers between sources, and treat any total that is not 337 as a sign that something upstream is wrong regardless. ## What it can and cannot settle Ashtakavarga is the most quantitative thing in classical transit work and that is both its strength and the reason to be careful with it. A number feels like evidence in a way a sentence does not, and these numbers are the output of a fixed table rather than of an observation. What it does well is discriminate. Two charts, one ingress, different answers, derived by a rule anyone can check and reproduce. That is a real property and most of gochar does not have it. What it cannot do is escape its own construction, which is what the malefic totals demonstrate. Use it to compare the same planet across your own twelve signs, where the fixed total cancels out and the comparison is meaningful. Be much more careful comparing different planets to each other, where it does not. [The Transit Calculator](https://mahadasha.com/transit-calculator) reports bindu counts alongside current positions, and [the gochar overview](https://mahadasha.com/planetary-transits-in-vedic-astrology) covers the house-based layer this is refining. For the transits where the stakes feel highest, the bindu count is worth checking before anything else. [Sade Sati](https://mahadasha.com/sade-sati) is the obvious case: same three houses for everyone with your Moon sign, and a Saturn bindu count that is entirely your own. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is a good ashtakavarga transit strength score? Four or more bindus in the transited sign is the usual threshold, with some schools using five. For sarvashtakavarga, 30 or more per sign is treated as strong, though about 37 percent of all signs in all charts reach that. ### What is the total of all ashtakavarga bindus? Always 337. The seven planets contribute fixed totals of 48, 49, 39, 54, 56, 52 and 39, and those never vary. If a calculator gives you a sarvashtakavarga that does not sum to 337, it is computing something wrong. ### Why do Mars and Saturn score badly in ashtakavarga? Their tables carry 39 bindus each against Jupiter's 56, so they average 3.25 per sign against a pass mark of 4. They fall short on average in every chart, before anything about your own positions is considered. ### What is a kaksha? One eighth of a sign, 3 degrees 45 minutes wide, each ruled by one of the eight contributors. Saturn spends about 112 days in each, which is what makes kaksha useful for splitting a long transit into readable segments.