---
type: Bundle
bundle: jyotisha-kala
bundle_version: "0.12.0"
title: "Jyotiṣa-Kāla -- The Vocabulary of Time: Pañcāṅga, Kāla-Reckoning, and the Celestial Frame"
description: "OKF v0.12 bundle: the Jyotiṣa vocabulary of time. The five-limb almanac (pañcāṅga), the measured kāla ladder, the sidereal celestial frame, and the Vedāṅga-gaṇita heritage, with gateway interception of the commercially captured horoscopic terms. 26 concepts in 5 tiers + 8 primary-text references, canonical OKF v0.2."
darshana:
  - Jyotiṣa
timestamp: "2026-07-09"
okf_version: "0.2"
license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
---

# Jyotiṣa-Kāla -- The Vocabulary of Time: Pañcāṅga, Kāla-Reckoning, and the Celestial Frame

**Bundle v0.12.0 | 26 concepts in 5 tiers | 8 primary-text references | canonical OKF v0.2**

## What This Bundle Does Not Claim

This bundle is **descriptive vocabulary, not astrology, and not an endorsement of astrology**. It documents what the classical Jyotiṣa terms mean, how the tradition organized them, and how they are systematically mistranslated. It makes **no predictive claims**: nothing in it asserts that planetary positions influence events, that elected times produce outcomes, that daśās schedule fortunes, or that charts describe persons. Whether any predictive practice works is an **empirical question this corpus does not adjudicate**, and the horoscopic terms included here (Tiers 4-5) are included as **gateway interceptions**: they carry the highest commercial distortion in the whole vocabulary (birth-star matching scores, shubh-muhurat sales, daśā fear-marketing, rāśi personality content), and an AI system inheriting those flattened senses misrepresents the source tradition twice over, once against the astronomy and once against the classics. The bundle equally rejects the opposite flattening: the calendrical and computational achievement documented here, the pañcāṅga, the unit ladder, the siddhānta genre, the gaṇita, is real intellectual history, and dismissing all of Jyotiṣa as superstition erases the astronomy along with the astrology. The corrective work lives in the `not:` fields, concept by concept, not in polemic.

## A Structural Note (the three skandhas and the strata)

The tradition's own taxonomy divides Jyotiṣa into three skandhas: **siddhānta-gaṇita** (computational astronomy), **horā** (horoscopy), and **saṃhitā** (public omens and the world). The strata also differ in age: the **Vedāṅga stratum** (Lagadha) is ritual calendrics containing no horoscopy; the **siddhānta literature** is mathematical astronomy; the **horoscopic apparatus** (rāśis, houses, aspects) enters with Hellenistic contact in the early centuries CE, a debt Varāhamihira himself records. This bundle leads with the calendrical and computational payload and intercepts the horoscopic vocabulary at the gateway; it does not launder the youngest stratum in the oldest stratum's prestige.

## Cross-Bundle Warnings

- **kāla (the sharp one):** here it is Jyotiṣa's instrumental, measurable time (`school_scope`), NOT the cosmic yuga-time of **cosmology-creation (v0.7)** (yuga, mahāyuga, kalpa, manvantara stay there). Same word, two registers, cross-linked and never merged.
- **yoga, a FIFTH referent:** the pañcāṅga yoga is an arc computed on the SUM of solar and lunar longitudes, alongside the sādhana yoga (**v0.1**), the darśana (**v0.2**), and the horoscopic combination sense noted in-body. Nothing but the root is shared.
- **bhāva collision:** the horā bhāva (house) is unrelated to the devotional bhāva of **bhakti-marga (v0.4)**; both files carry the warning.
- **graha ≠ planet:** the navagraha include a star, a satellite, and two node-points; Uranus and Neptune are excluded. Functional category, not astronomy's.
- **nakṣatra ≠ rāśi ≠ star sign:** 27 lunar mansions and 12 sidereal signs are different divisions of the circle, and neither is the tropical sun-sign; the **ayanāṃśa** file carries the sidereal-tropical hinge.
- **karma is NOT re-treated:** four senses already live in the corpus (**v0.1** moral action, **v0.9** Vaiśeṣika motion, **v0.10** ritual act, **v0.11** therapeutic procedure); this bundle adds no fifth.
- **ṛtu adjacency:** the seasonal wheel here is calendrical structure; the medical seasonal regimen (ṛtucaryā) lives in **ayurveda-consciousness (v0.11)**.

## Named and Deferred

The full phalita apparatus of the **Bṛhat Parāśara Horā Śāstra** tradition (varga divisional charts, aṣṭakavarga, the horoscopic yogas, remedial prescription), **praśna** (horary), **tājika** (Perso-Arabic annual charts), and **nāḍī** literature are out of scope and deferred by name, on the Navya-Nyāya precedent of v0.9. Nothing chart-interpretive or remedial appears anywhere in this bundle.

## Tier 1 -- Pañcāṅga: The Five Limbs of the Day (CRITICAL AI risk)
| Concept | One-line |
|---|---|
| [pañcāṅga](concepts/panchanga.md) | the five-limb almanac, **not a horoscope** |
| [tithi](concepts/tithi.md) | the elastic lunar day of 12° elongation, **not a solar day** |
| [vāra](concepts/vara.md) | the sunrise-bounded weekday generated by hour-lords, not an arbitrary list |
| [nakṣatra](concepts/nakshatra.md) | 27 lunar mansions, **not a star sign** |
| [yoga (pañcāṅga)](concepts/yoga-panchanga.md) | the luni-solar sum-arc, a FIFTH sense of yoga, **not practice or union** |
| [karaṇa](concepts/karana.md) | the half-tithi with the Viṣṭi exclusion, not a redundant subdivision |

## Tier 2 -- Kāla Reckoning: Units and Cycles (HIGH)
| Concept | One-line |
|---|---|
| [kāla (Jyotiṣa)](concepts/kala-jyotisha.md) | the measured unit ladder, **not the cosmic kāla of v0.7** |
| [muhūrta](concepts/muhurta.md) | the 48-minute unit and the electional discipline, **not an outcome guarantee** |
| [ghaṭikā](concepts/ghatika.md) | the 24-minute water-clock unit, **not an hour** |
| [ayana](concepts/ayana.md) | the solstitial half-year, **not fixed to Makara Saṅkrānti** |
| [māsa](concepts/masa.md) | the tithi-counted lunar month with intercalation, **not a Gregorian month** |
| [saṃvatsara](concepts/samvatsara.md) | the sixty named years of the Jupiter cycle, **not an era count** |
| [ṛtu](concepts/ritu.md) | six seasons, **not four** |

## Tier 3 -- The Celestial Frame (HIGH)
| Concept | One-line |
|---|---|
| [graha](concepts/graha.md) | nine seizers by function, **not astronomical planets** |
| [rāśi](concepts/rashi.md) | twelve sidereal signs, **not tropical sun-signs** |
| [ayanāṃśa](concepts/ayanamsha.md) | the precession gap between the zodiacs, the technical hinge |
| [Rāhu-Ketu](concepts/rahu-ketu.md) | the eclipse nodes, chāyā-grahas, **not demons and not bodies** |
| [lagna](concepts/lagna.md) | the ascendant, the chart's here-and-now axis, **not a sun sign** |
| [bhāva (Jyotiṣa)](concepts/bhava-jyotisha.md) | the twelve houses, **not the devotional bhāva of v0.4** |

## Tier 4 -- Vedāṅga and Gaṇita Heritage (MEDIUM-HIGH)
| Concept | One-line |
|---|---|
| [Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa](concepts/vedanga-jyotisha.md) | the eye of the Veda: ritual calendrics with **no horoscopy in it** |
| [siddhānta](concepts/siddhanta.md) | the self-correcting astronomical treatise genre, **not scripture** |
| [gaṇita](concepts/ganita.md) | the computational branch, **not Vedic-maths tricks** |
| [horā](concepts/hora.md) | the horoscopic skandha, gateway-intercepted, **not the whole of Jyotiṣa** |

## Tier 5 -- Reception-Sensitive Horoscopic Terms (gateway, MEDIUM)
| Concept | One-line |
|---|---|
| [daśā](concepts/dasha.md) | planetary-period architecture, **not a doom timetable** |
| [gocara](concepts/gochara.md) | transits read from the natal Moon, **not retrograde panic** |
| [jātaka](concepts/jataka.md) | natal horoscopy, **not the Buddhist Jātaka tales** |

## References

Primary texts in `references/`: lagadha-vedanga-jyotisha, surya-siddhanta, aryabhatiya, panchasiddhantika, brihat-samhita, brihat-jataka, siddhanta-shiromani, muhurta-chintamani.
