Tarabala and Chandrabala: the two checks a public calendar cannot make
The star the count would start from today, before your own birth star is applied — the count would start from Dhanishta, star number 23 of twenty-seven, in force at New Delhi sunrise on 31 July 2026 — your own birth star supplies the other end of it.
Why a shortlist is not an answer
Every date table on this site — and in every printed panchang — is computed for the sky, not for a person. Tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana and the solar month are identical for everyone in a city on a given day. That is precisely what makes them publishable, and precisely what makes them incomplete: the two checks that personalise a date both count FROM your own birth Moon, and a website that does not know your birth details cannot perform either.
Tarabala counts nakshatras. Chandrabala counts signs. Between them they answer the question a date table cannot: not whether the day is good, but whether the day is good for you. In traditional practice they are among the first things a priest checks once a family brings a proposed date, and they are the most common reason an apparently excellent date is sent back.
They are also the reason the honesty line on this site’s occasion pages says what it says. A shortlist that has cleared the tithi, nakshatra and combustion bars has done real work and removed most of the year. It has not done these two.
The nine taras
Count from your birth nakshatra to the nakshatra in force on the proposed day, counting your own star as one, and reduce the total by nines. The remainder places the day in one of nine taras, four of which are held to be adverse. Because twenty-seven divides evenly by nine, each tara covers three of the twenty-seven stars for any given person, and the cycle repeats three times round the zodiac.
| Count | Tara | Sense | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Janma | The birth star itself | Adverse for new undertakings |
| 2 | Sampat | Wealth | Favourable |
| 3 | Vipat | Calamity | Adverse |
| 4 | Kshema | Well-being | Favourable |
| 5 | Pratyari | Obstruction | Adverse |
| 6 | Sadhaka | Accomplishment | Favourable |
| 7 | Vadha (Naidhana) | Destruction | Adverse — the heaviest of the four |
| 8 | Mitra | Friend | Favourable |
| 9 | Ati-Mitra (Parama Mitra) | Close friend | Favourable |
Five of nine are favourable, so a random day has a little better than an even chance of clearing Tarabala for any one person. Two people with different birth stars will get different answers for the same date, which is why a wedding needs the count run for both.
Chandrabala, and the eight-house problem
Chandrabala is the simpler of the two: count signs from your birth Moon sign to the sign the transiting Moon occupies on the proposed day. The fourth, eighth and twelfth are the positions traditionally avoided, and the eighth carries the most weight. Several traditions add the sixth to that list; others treat only the eighth as genuinely disqualifying.
Because the Moon crosses a sign in roughly two and a quarter days, Chandrabala closes about a fifth of any month for any one person under the strict reading. That is a substantial cut, and it is one of the two reasons a family sometimes finds that a date which suits the bride is poor for the groom, or that a date acceptable to both falls in a month the season has already closed.
The interaction with Tarabala is worth understanding. The two are counted from different things — one from the star, one from the sign — so they fail independently, and a date can clear one while failing the other. A priest checking a proposed date runs both, and where a conflict is unavoidable there is a classical hierarchy for whose chart takes precedence in which rite, which is exactly the kind of judgement that belongs to a person rather than a table.
Running them against a shortlisted date
The sequence that actually works is: shortlist first, personalise second. Use a computed date table to remove everything the season, the tithi rules, the nakshatra rules and the combustion bars have already closed — that is the bulk of the year and it can be done publicly. Then take the handful that survive and run Tarabala and Chandrabala for each person the rite concerns.
Doing it in the other order wastes effort. Personal checks on a date that turns out to sit inside Kharmas, or under a barred nakshatra for that specific rite, are work spent on a date that was never available. This is also why the site’s tables list every qualifying date in a year rather than picking one: the point of a shortlist is to give a real chart something to test.
What neither check can do is settle a date on its own. A day that clears Tarabala, Chandrabala, the tithi and the nakshatra can still be a poor moment because of a running planetary period or because the house governing the act is under pressure in that chart. Those layers sit above these two, and they are the ones a full reading exists for.
It is worth being blunt about the arithmetic, because it sets expectations. Tarabala clears roughly five days in nine for one person, and Chandrabala closes about a fifth of the month under the strict reading. Applied to one individual that leaves a comfortable majority of days open; applied to two people at once, as a wedding requires, the survivors thin considerably. When a priest returns three dates from a list of twelve, this is usually where the other nine went, and it is not a sign that the list was poorly built.
Frequently asked questions
Whose Tarabala matters most for a wedding?
Traditionally the count is run for both the bride and the groom, and where they conflict most lineages give more weight to the bride’s chart for the wedding rite itself. Practice varies enough that it is genuinely a question for the priest conducting the ceremony rather than one with a single correct answer, and families that follow different customs will resolve it differently.
Can I check Tarabala without knowing my birth time?
Often, yes — approximately. Tarabala counts from the birth nakshatra, and the Moon stays in one star for roughly a day, so a birth date alone usually narrows it to one or two candidates. Chandrabala needs only the Moon sign and is even more forgiving. The pada, and therefore the finer chart work, is what genuinely requires the time.
Related guides
How this guide is maintained
Everything computed on this site â the sunrise and sunset behind every window on this page, and the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana behind the date tables â comes from a Lahiri sidereal ephemeris and a NOAA sunrise model applied to the exact coordinates of the city shown, with New Delhi as the reference city for anything not city-specific. Where this guide describes a rule that genuinely varies between texts, regions or family traditions, it says so in the paragraph rather than picking a side quietly, and where the site’s own date scorer takes a documented shortcut, the shortcut is named.
What no guide on this site can do is weigh your own chart. The tables here are a panchang shortlist — the classical tests a calendar can settle — and the personal layer that decides between the surviving dates is a separate step. Start with the occasion pages for computed dates, and see how we compute muhurat for the full method.
Written and maintained by Savan Vyas. A rule applied wrongly here is a bug, and corrections are genuinely welcome.
For a full personalised muhurat matched to your own birth chart, ask Soma on AskSoma.