D4 Chart Calculator (Chaturthamsa)

The D4 is read for immovable property — land, a house, anything that is owned rather than carried — and for the emotional counterpart of it: whether a person has a place that functions as a base. The two are not the same question and the chart answers both. A strong D4 with an afflicted fourth house in the birth chart is the classic signature of property acquired without much peace in it.

Because the parts land on the angles, the D4 preserves modality. A planet in a movable sign in the D1 stays movable in the D4. That property is diagnostic: a chart dominated by movable signs in the D4 is read as property that changes hands, addresses that move, a base that is periodically rebuilt; a fixed-sign D4 as holdings that stay.

The Moon is the karaka of the fourth house and of the mother, Mars of land itself, and Venus of vehicles and comfort. Those three, plus the 4th lord of the birth chart located in the D4, carry most of the reading. Saturn in the D4 is read for what is built slowly and for what is inherited late; Rahu there, for property acquired through unconventional routes.

Each sign is divided into four Chaturthamsas of 7 degrees 30 minutes. The four parts count to the 1st, 4th, 7th and 10th signs from the sign itself — the kendras, the four angles. A planet therefore lands in a sign of the same modality as the one it occupies in the birth chart: a planet in a movable sign stays in a movable sign, a fixed one in a fixed sign.

That rule is the whole difference between a divisional chart and a decorative second drawing of the birth chart. The start sign — which sign the parts are counted from — is fixed per varga by classical text and is not the cyclic multiplication most calculators use. The two agree only for divisors 16, 20 and 27.

Parashara gives the Chaturthamsa in the sixth chapter of the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra and names it turyamsa as well. The assignment is to the fourth house — bhumi and griha, land and dwelling — and by extension to the whole fourth-house complex: mother, vehicles, education in its early sense, and the quality of rest a person can actually get at home.

The kendra rule that produces the chart is worth stating twice, because it explains the D4's character. The angles are the strongest houses in Parashari astrology and the most structural: they are where things stand rather than where they move. A division that maps every part of a sign onto the angles is a division about what is fixed, and that is exactly the domain the text assigns it.

1. Read the D4 ascendant and its modality The D4 lagna shares its modality with the birth lagna. Which of the four angles the sign is drawn from tells you whether the base is built, inherited, moved into or made — and it is the frame every other placement is read against.
2. Locate the 4th lord of the birth chart inside the D4 This is the single most specific line the chart gives. The birth chart's 4th lord, seen in the Chaturthamsa, describes what happens to the fourth-house matters over a lifetime rather than what they are at the start.
3. Read the fourth house of the D4 itself The fourth of the fourth. Its sign, its occupants and its lord describe the actual dwelling: whether there is one, whether it is owned, and what its atmosphere is. An empty fourth house here is not a negative finding — most houses in most charts are empty — and the lord's placement carries the reading in that case.
4. Check Mars for land and Venus for comfort Mars is bhumi karaka. Strong and well-placed, it is read for land actually held; afflicted, for disputes over it, which is one of the oldest specific readings in the literature. Venus governs vehicles and the pleasantness of a home, and is read separately from the question of ownership.
5. Do not read the D4 for timing on its own Whether and when property is acquired is a Dasha question answered with the birth chart's 4th house, its lord, and transits over them. The D4 says what kind and how durable. Reading a purchase date out of a natal varga is reading something that is not in it.

A planet occupying the same sign in the birth chart and in the D4 is vargottama in this division — literally 'best in division'. The reading is stability rather than strength: the planet is doing the same thing at two resolutions of one chart, so whatever it signifies is consistent rather than conditional. The result table above marks them.

Two cautions. A consistently difficult placement is also vargottama, and the reading is then that the difficulty is stable. And in the D12 and the D60 the division counts from the sign itself, so a planet at the very start of a sign is vargottama by construction rather than by merit — a property of the rule and not a dignity. The vargottama calculator checks every planet against every division at once.

A wrong divisional chart does not look wrong. It renders cleanly, it is internally consistent, and nothing warns you — which is why the same three mistakes have propagated across the internet for twenty years. All three come from computing a varga with arithmetic instead of with its classical rule.

The cyclic shortcut. Multiplying the sign index by the divisor and taking the result modulo twelve is a tempting one-liner and it agrees with Parashara only for divisors 16, 20 and 27. For 12 and 60 it always yields a multiple of twelve — Aries — so it discards the planet's own sign and puts an entire chart in one sign. A D12 or D60 in which every planet shares a sign is this bug, and it is common enough that most readers have seen one without recognising it.

The missing odd-even reversal. The D7 counts from the 7th sign in an even sign and the D10 from the 9th. A generic divisor ignores both, which displaces every even-sign planet by six signs in a D7 and eight in a D10 — roughly half the chart, moved half the zodiac, with no symptom at all.

Treating the D30 as an equal division. The Trimsamsa has five unequal bands per sign, reversed in even signs. Dividing by thirty instead produces a chart that is wrong at every degree of every sign, and one that shows planets in Cancer or Leo — signs a real Trimsamsa cannot contain.

The check for this varga: every planet stays in its own modality — a planet in a movable sign lands in a movable sign. If a D4 you have been given anywhere fails that test, the start-sign rule was not applied and every placement in it is suspect.

The start-sign rules this site uses are stated in the engine and pinned by a test against a hand-derived chart, with a published citation for each of the sixteen. That is not a claim of infallibility; it is a claim that the rules are written down where they can be checked, which is the only kind of claim a calculator can honestly make.

A Chaturthamsa division is 7 degrees 30 minutes wide. The ascendant moves through roughly one degree every four minutes of clock time, so the D4 ascendant holds for about 30 minutes before it changes sign. That figure is an average: the rate varies with latitude and with which sign is rising, and near the poles it varies a great deal.

Planets are far steadier than the ascendant, which is why a rounded birth time damages a divisional chart unevenly rather than uniformly. The Moon is the fastest of them and changes Chaturthamsa about every 13.7 hours; the Sun takes around a month per sign in the birth chart and correspondingly longer per division; Jupiter and Saturn are effectively fixed across a whole day. So if your recorded time is uncertain, distrust the ascendant first and the Moon second, and read the slow planets with confidence.

This page assumes a rectified birth time — a time established or confirmed against events, rather than one recalled to the nearest quarter hour. Every divisional chart beyond the D9 is highly sensitive to birth time, and the finer ones are not merely less reliable on a rounded time but arbitrary: at half a degree per division the D60 ascendant changes about every two minutes, so a time rounded to five minutes leaves two or three equally likely charts and no way to choose between them. If you do not have a time you trust, the honest thing is to read the birth chart and the Navamsa and stop there.

The ascendant is not a property of the instant alone. It is the point of the ecliptic rising over a particular horizon, so it is a function of the moment and of the coordinate together, and the two trade off exactly: the sky turns one degree every four minutes, and one degree of longitude is four minutes of local time. Moving 7 degrees 30 minutes of longitude — about 774 km east or west at Indian latitudes — moves the ascendant by one whole Chaturthamsa part, which is to say it hands you a different D4 ascendant and rotates every house in the chart above.

Latitude matters separately and less obviously. It does not shift the clock, it changes how fast each sign climbs — the ascensional difference — so two places on the same meridian and the same instant still rise different degrees, and the gap grows the further from the equator you are. This is why a chart cast for a state capital is not a rounding of a chart cast for a village two districts away; it is a different chart that happens to look plausible.

So enter the town you were actually born in. The place search above accepts any village, town or city a geocoder knows, not a shortlist of metros, and it prints the latitude, longitude and timezone it used above the result so you can check them against a map. Since a D4 division is the unit this page is built from, a birth place picked for convenience damages the result in the same way and by the same mechanism as a birth time rounded to the nearest quarter hour.

The D4 does not predict a property purchase, a date, or a price. It has no mechanism for any of the three. A tool that produces one from a divisional chart is generating text, not reading a chart.

A difficult D4 is not a statement that a person will be without a home. Housing in the real world is decided by income, family, policy and geography, and none of those are in this chart.

Nothing in the D4 is property or investment advice. Whether to buy, where, or when is not a question this site answers, and a chart is not a substitute for a lawyer, a survey or a bank.

Two limits apply to every page in this family and are worth stating in one place. Divisional charts beyond the D9 are highly birth-time sensitive, and every reading here assumes a rectified birth time. And nothing on this site is medical, legal or financial advice: a chart is a traditional interpretive framework, not a diagnosis, not a forecast, and never a reason to delay professional help.

Parashara's sixteen divisions are a single instrument, not sixteen instruments. The birth chart is cut at sixteen different resolutions — halves, thirds, quarters, sevenths, ninths, tenths, twelfths, sixteenths, twentieths, twenty-fourths, twenty-sevenths, thirtieths, fortieths, forty-fifths and sixtieths — and a planet's condition is judged from how it behaves across them rather than from any one. The D4 is one of those sixteen and is read in that company.

The weighting is called Vimshopaka Bala, twenty-point strength, and it is where the tradition states which divisions carry most. D1, D9 and D60 take the largest shares; the D2, D3, D7, D10 and D12 sit in the middle; the D16, D20, D24, D27, D40 and D45 carry least. That ordering is worth respecting. A reading built on a minor varga against the evidence of the major ones is almost always reading a birth-time error.

Two of the sixteen are not equal divisions and must never be computed with a generic divisor. The D30 Trimsamsa has five unequal bands per sign, reversed in even signs. The D60 Shashtiamsa is an equal division for the rashi but its sixty deities are enumerated forwards in odd signs and backwards in even ones. Beyond those, the start-sign rule differs per varga and only coincides with the cyclic shortcut for divisors 16, 20 and 27 — for 12 and 60 the shortcut collapses the whole chart into Aries. Every chart on this site uses the classical rules, which are pinned by a test against a hand-derived chart.

D8 Ashtamsa and D11 Rudramsa are deliberately absent from this engine and from this site. They are not part of Parashara's sixteen, and the published rules for them disagree with each other, so there is no single chart to compute. Publishing one would mean choosing a rule and not saying so.