the eight things a match measures

Before the eight, understand the two families they fall into. This is the single most useful thing on this page.

Both come from the same measurement — where the moon was — just chopped finer or coarser. But the fine chop is more than twice as sensitive to a missing hour.

Which is why, if you don't have a birth time, the honest thing isn't to hand you a number anyway. It's to tell you that four lines are settled, four are still moving, and here's the range they move within.

Worth 1 point. From the moon sign. The twelve signs are sorted into four classes and compared.

It's described as measuring spiritual outlook and ease between two people. But the actual scoring rule is worth reading in the open, because it is not neutral. Drik Panchang states it plainly: if the boy's varna is superior or equal to the girl's, one point; if lower, no point — and glosses the factor as assuring that the bride would be obedient to her husband.

Worth one point out of thirty-six. Make of that what you like — we mostly note that whoever assigned the weights already thought it was the least important thing on the list.

Worth 2. From the moon sign. The signs are sorted into five groups — two-footed, four-footed, water-dwelling, forest-dwelling, insect — and the pair is checked for mutual influence.

The tradition is explicit that one-sided control scores badly. The thing being measured isn't power, it's whether the pull goes both ways.

The friend version: can each of you actually change the other's mind, or does one of you always end up going along with it.

Worth 3. From the birth star. Count the distance from one person's star to the other's, both ways, and see where the count lands in a nine-step cycle.

Said to govern fortune, health and destiny between the two of you.

In plain terms: whether things tend to go well when you're together. Not who you are — what happens around you as a pair. Some people are steady on their own and unlucky in combination, and this is the line that's trying to catch that.

Worth 4. From the birth star. Each of the 27 stars carries an animal. The two animals are compared.

This is the sexual and physical compatibility line, and the tradition is not shy about it.

The animal framing sounds odd in English until you see what it's for: it's a compact way of encoding temperament and appetite — pace, aggression, need for space. Two animals that hunt each other score badly. Two that share ground score well.

The friend version: whether your bodies keep the same hours.

Worth 5. From the moon sign — specifically from the two rulers of those signs.

Every sign has a planet that owns it, and the planets have long-standing friendships and enmities. This factor asks whether your two moon-lords get on.

Said to measure mental and psychological compatibility, and affection.

This is the closest thing on the list to "do you actually like each other." Not attraction — five points' worth of whether you find the same things funny and the same things exhausting.

Worth 6. From the birth star. The 27 stars are sorted into three natures: deva (godly), manushya (human), rakshasa (demonic).

Those labels land badly in English. Read them as three energies: gentle and yielding, ordinary and mixed, and forceful and disruptive. Nobody is being called a demon — a lot of very effective people sit in the third group.

Said to touch nature, longevity and prosperity. The classic problem pair is deva with rakshasa: not evil meeting good, just a person who de-escalates paired with a person who escalates. Anyone who has lived through that argument knows why it earned six points.

Worth 7. From the moon sign. Purely positional: how far apart the two moon signs sit around the circle.

Certain distances score zero outright: signs 6 and 8 apart (shadashtak), 2 and 12 apart (dwirdwadash), and 5 and 9 apart (nav-pancham). That scoring is near-universal in the calculators. What's genuinely odd is the third one — in ordinary chart reading, a 5–9 relationship between signs is treated as one of the best there is, which sits strangely with it being a scoring failure here. We'd rather flag the tension than pretend it resolves.

Said to govern family life, children, wealth — whether the household grows.

The friend version: not whether you love each other, but whether the shape of a life together works. Two people can be devoted and still find that every practical decision costs three arguments.

Worth 8. From the birth star. The most heavily weighted factor in the system, and — along with bhakut and varna — one of the three that are strictly all-or-nothing.

The 27 stars are split into three nadis, mapped onto the Ayurvedic constitutions: adi (vata), madhya (pitta), antya (kapha). Different nadis: full 8. Same nadi: 0. There is no in-between.

The traditional reasoning is about health and children — two people of the same dominant constitution were held to double a weakness rather than balance it. You will often see this glossed today as an old genetic-diversity intuition in astrological clothes. That reading is modern: the classical argument runs on constitution and progeny, not heredity, and we can't source the genetics version to any of the texts.

Cancellations exist here too: same moon sign but different star, same star but different quarter, and several more. As with bhakut, the sources that publish these rules generally admit they can't tie each one to a specific classical text.

Put the parihara rules together and something becomes visible: almost any bad result can be argued away.

That's not a scandal. It's how a living tradition handles a rigid rule meeting a real family who like each other. But it does mean the system is very hard to catch out — if a low score can be waived and a high score can be overridden by nadi or by mangal dosha, there isn't much left that could ever count as a wrong answer.

Worth knowing before you let a number make a decision for you.

Back to the split at the top, now that you know what's in each half.

Without a birth time, the four that move are tara, yoni, gana and nadi — luck, body, temperament and the heaviest line on the sheet. The four that hold up better are varna, vashya, graha maitri and bhakut — and "better" is doing real work in that sentence, because the moon sign is still a coin flip on about 44% of dates. The star four are close to hopeless without a time. The sign four are merely unreliable.

Read that again. The half you lose contains the 8-pointer.

This is why we won't print one confident total for a couple who don't have their times. What we do instead: score what genuinely can be scored, show the range the rest could land in, and say which lines we're holding. And if you can narrow it even to a rough window — morning, afternoon, evening, overnight — most of them settle: across three hundred test pairs, a rough window pinned every single line for 64% of couples.

the numbers behind that are here.