The twenty-seven nitya yogas and the nine muhurat avoids

By Savan Vyas · Reviewed against the AskSoma timing engine · Updated July 2026

The nitya yoga in force at sunrise today — the nitya yoga at New Delhi sunrise on 31 July 2026 is Saubhagya, which this site’s scorer does not bar.

A sum, not an aspect

The word yoga does a lot of work in Jyotish and means different things in different places. The nitya yoga of the panchang is the narrowest and most mechanical of them: take the sidereal longitude of the Sun, add the sidereal longitude of the Moon, and divide the total into twenty-seven parts of thirteen degrees and twenty minutes. Whichever part the sum falls into names the day’s yoga.

This is a sum, not a relationship. It is easy to assume the yoga describes some aspect or angle between the two bodies, but the tithi already does that job — the tithi is their DIFFERENCE. The yoga is their sum, which is a quantity with no obvious physical meaning and which advances at a steady combined rate of roughly fourteen degrees a day, so a yoga lasts a little under a full day and the sequence marches evenly through the list.

Because it is a sum, the nitya yoga is unrelated to the yogas people mean when they talk about Gajakesari or Raja yogas in a birth chart. Those are planetary combinations. This is a calendar unit. The shared name causes more confusion online than almost any other term in the vocabulary.

All twenty-seven, with their verdicts

The list runs in fixed order and repeats. The verdicts are the ones the muhurta literature commonly assigns, and they are one of the more stable parts of the tradition — the same nine appear as defects across most texts, with Vishkambha the only genuine borderline case.

This site’s date scorer bars eight of these outright — Atiganda, Shoola, Ganda, Vyaghata, Vajra, Vyatipata, Parigha and Vaidhriti — and does not exclude Vishkambha, because the classical defect attaches only to its opening portion and a sunrise reading cannot tell you whether you are inside it.

A veto rather than a reason

Yogas behave asymmetrically in electional work. A favourable yoga is a small bonus — worth one point in this site’s scoring, alongside a Sarvartha Siddhi combination — and nobody chooses a date because Siddhi or Shubha happens to fall on it. An adverse yoga, however, is treated as a genuine cancellation: a date sitting on Vyatipata or Vaidhriti is usually dropped even when its tithi and nakshatra are excellent.

Two of the nine carry more weight than the rest. Vyatipata and Vaidhriti are singled out across traditions as the heaviest, and both are also observed as days for charity and ancestral offerings rather than beginnings. The remaining seven — Atiganda, Shoola, Ganda, Vyaghata, Vajra, Parigha and the opening of Vishkambha — are avoided for the same general reason without the same devotional overlay.

Parigha deserves one footnote because it is the most commonly misapplied. Several texts treat only the FIRST HALF of Parigha as defective and release the remainder, so an almanac that shows a Parigha ending at noon may still list an afternoon muhurat on that day. This site takes the conservative reading and excludes the whole yoga, which means a handful of dates other sources would offer do not appear on ours.

Reading a yoga honestly

The first thing to check on any yoga is the ending time, not the name. Because a yoga runs a little under a day and is labelled from sunrise, a defective yoga that expires at nine in the morning leaves most of the day clear in the readings that allow it, and a favourable one that expires at the same hour gives you very little. An almanac that prints only the name is withholding the half of the information you need.

The second thing is to notice how coarse this limb is. Twenty-seven yogas over a year of sunrises means each one lands on roughly thirteen or fourteen days, so nine adverse yogas remove something close to a third of the calendar before any other rule is applied. That is a large cut for a limb whose derivation nobody has a physical account of, and it is one reason different traditions treat the defects with different severity.

Which brings the honest point. This site applies the yoga bars because they are standard and because applying them silently would be worse than applying them openly — but a family whose tradition releases the second half of Parigha, or which ignores Vishkambha entirely, is not making a mistake. Where the rule varies, the variation is the fact, and you should follow your own lineage.

If you want a single practical takeaway from the list, it is that the nine adverse yogas cluster nowhere in particular. They are scattered through the sequence rather than grouped at one end, so they arrive every ten days or so regardless of the season and cannot be planned around in advance the way Kharmas or a combustion window can. A yoga is therefore something you check on a candidate date rather than something you build a search around.

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How this guide is maintained

Everything computed on this site — the sunrise and sunset behind every window on this page, and the tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana behind the date tables — 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.