What a Panchāṅgam actually is

The five limbs

The five are vāra, tithi, nakṣatra, yoga and karaṇa. Each is a different way of measuring the same two moving bodies.

Vāra is the weekday — the only one of the five that is not astronomical in origin. It runs from sunrise to sunrise, not from midnight, which is why a Panchāṅgam can say Tuesday about hours you would call Monday night.

Tithi is the lunar day: the time the Moon takes to gain twelve degrees on the Sun. There are thirty in a lunar month, fifteen in the waxing fortnight and fifteen in the waning one.

Nakṣatra is the twenty-seventh of the sky the Moon is standing in — the lunar mansion. It changes roughly once a day.

Yoga is derived by adding the longitudes of the Sun and the Moon and dividing the result into twenty-seven parts. It has no simple physical picture; it is a composite quantity, and twenty-seven of them are named.

Karaṇa is half a tithi. Sixty of them fill a lunar month, and eleven names rotate through them.

Why none of them are whole days

This is the single most useful thing to understand about an almanac, and the thing most often missed. A tithi is not a day. It is a span of time that begins and ends at particular clock moments, and it can begin at nine in the evening and end at half past three the following afternoon.

So when a calendar says “today is Ekādaśī”, what it means is that Ekādaśī was running at the moment that defines the day — usually sunrise. Someone looking at the sky at four in the afternoon may be in the next tithi already.

This is why a well-made almanac prints an end time beside each value, and why this site does. It is also why two calendars can put the same festival on different days without either of them being wrong.

What it is not

A Panchāṅgam is not a prediction and it does not say what will happen to anyone. It states positions. Everything beyond that — which day suits which rite, which windows are set aside, what a family’s own tradition asks for — is interpretation, and belongs to a priest rather than to a table.

This site keeps those two things in separate files for exactly that reason: the astronomy is objective and testable, the interpretation is Sri Kumar Gurukkal’s.

What a family may do

• Look at the day’s tithi before a household observance rather than at the English date — the vratam follows the tithi.
• Note the end time as well as the value. If Ekādaśī ends at 9:14 in the morning, the fast is kept differently from a day on which it runs until evening.
• If you are checking a date against family in India, expect a difference. Their sunrise is not yours.

Often misunderstood

• That a Panchāṅgam predicts. It measures.
• That the five limbs are five separate calendars. They are five readings of the same two bodies.
• That the day begins at midnight. In an almanac it usually begins at sunrise.

Where traditions differ

• Some traditions take the day from sunrise, others from moonrise or midnight for particular observances. This site anchors each vratam to the moment that tradition defines it by — Pradosham at sunset, Sankaṣṭī at moonrise — rather than judging them all at one hour.

Explaining it to a child

The Moon walks past the Sun a little every day. When it has walked twelve steps, one lunar day has passed. The almanac is just someone counting the Moon’s steps and writing them down.