Method · Ayanamsa

True Pushya Paksha vs Raman Ayanamsa: the Numeric Gap

B V Raman's ayanamsha carries the weight of the most widely-read English-language Vedic astrology library of the twentieth century. Computed with Swiss Ephemeris it reads 22.774 degrees on 1 January 2026 against True Pushya Paksha's 23.087, a gap of 0.313 degrees that holds flat across a century. Small in absolute terms, large enough to flip a boundary planet's sign, move a nakshatra pada and shift a dasha start date by months. The numbers, a worked October 2026 case and why Tempora reads with Pushya Paksha.

Tempora has published two ayanamsha comparisons so far: True Pushya Paksha vs Lahiri, the government-standard contrast, and True Pushya Paksha vs KP, the event-prediction school's empirical offset. This article adds the third major alternative: the ayanamsha of Bangalore Venkata Raman, the offset his books and his magazine carried into more chart computations than any other English-language source of the twentieth century.

The comparison follows the same discipline as the earlier two. The values below are computed, not quoted from memory: the same Swiss Ephemeris build that runs Tempora's calibration engine produced every number in the table, and the worked example is a real planetary position on a real 2026 date where the two systems disagree about which sign Jupiter occupies. The choice between systems remains a methodological commitment, not a claim that Raman was wrong.

What Raman's ayanamsha is

Bangalore Venkata Raman (1912 to 1998) is the astrologer most responsible for carrying Jyotisha into English. He revived The Astrological Magazine in 1936 and edited it for six decades, and his books, among them Hindu Predictive Astrology, Three Hundred Important Combinations and Notable Horoscopes, remain standard references on practitioner shelves worldwide. A large fraction of the mid-twentieth-century English-language chart corpus was computed with his ayanamsha because his publications were where those charts appeared.

The offset itself is inherited. Raman continued the reckoning of his grandfather B Suryanarain Rao, whose school placed the zero year, the year when the tropical and sidereal zodiacs coincide, near 397 CE. From that anchor the ayanamsha accumulates at the precession rate, roughly 50.29 arc seconds per year, giving a smooth secular value rather than one tied to the computed position of a specific star.

The convention is checkable from the computed numbers alone. Swiss Ephemeris ships Raman's system as a named sidereal mode and returns 22.411 degrees for 1 January 2000. Dividing 22.411 degrees by 50.29 arc seconds per year gives 1,604 years of accumulated precession, which counts back from 2000 to roughly 396 CE. The arithmetic lands within a year of the stated convention, which is the kind of consistency an offset should show before anything is built on it.

Lahiri's convention sits about a century earlier, near 285 CE, which is why Lahiri's ayanamsha runs larger. The computed gap on 1 January 2026 is 1.446 degrees (Lahiri 24.220, Raman 22.774), the widest spread among the major systems in contemporary use and equivalent to about 104 years of precession at the current rate. Raman's offset therefore sits well below the whole Lahiri-KP-Pushya cluster, and that is what makes this comparison different in kind from the earlier two: the gap here is not a boundary subtlety measured in arc minutes only, it is the largest label shift a practitioner switching systems will encounter.

The numeric gap, computed

The values below come from Tempora's own computation layer: the True Pushya Paksha column from the engine function the calibration runs on, the Raman column from Swiss Ephemeris's named mode, both evaluated at 00:00 UT on 1 January of each year.

Two things stand out. First, the gap is flat: it moves from 0.3131 to 0.3132 degrees across 76 years, a drift of less than 0.0002 degrees, because both systems precess at nearly the same rate and differ almost entirely in where they place the zero point. A chart cast in 1950 and a chart cast in 2026 carry the same 19-arc-minute disagreement. Second, the gap runs in the opposite direction from the Lahiri comparison: Raman's ayanamsha is smaller than True Pushya Paksha's, so every sidereal longitude reads about 0.313 degrees later under Raman. A planet at the very end of a sign under Pushya Paksha has already entered the next sign under Raman.

For calibration purposes the flatness matters more than the size. A constant offset is a systematic relabeling, which a framework can reason about cleanly. The operational question is only where the 0.313 degrees crosses a boundary that a reading depends on.

What the gap does in practice

Planets near sign boundaries flip signs. Any planet whose True Pushya Paksha longitude falls in the last 0.313 degrees of a sign occupies the next sign under Raman. At random that is about 1 percent per planet, and with nine grahas in a chart roughly 9 percent of charts, about 1 in 11, carry at least one planet whose sign depends on the choice. A daily scan of 2026 finds the Sun in the flip zone around 13 January, 13 April and 14 June, Mars around 19 June, 1 August and 10 November, Venus on four separate dates and Mercury and Jupiter on several more. Under whole-sign houses a flipped sign is a flipped house, so everything downstream of house placement moves with it. The Sun's case has a calendar consequence too: each sankranti, the Sun's entry into a sidereal sign, dates about 7.6 hours earlier under Raman, occasionally landing it on the previous civil day.

Nakshatra and pada assignments shift. A nakshatra spans 13 degrees 20 minutes, so the 0.313-degree gap is 2.3 percent of a nakshatra: about 1 natal Moon in 43 sits close enough to a boundary for the two systems to disagree on its nakshatra outright. The pada, a quarter-nakshatra of 3 degrees 20 minutes, is more sensitive: the gap is 9.4 percent of a pada, so roughly 1 placement in 11 changes pada between the systems. Pada-level techniques, navamsa mapping among them, inherit that sensitivity directly. For muhurta work the shift is temporal: the Moon covers 0.313 degrees in about 34 minutes, so every nakshatra-entry time in a panchanga moves by half an hour or so between the two reckonings.

Dasha start dates move by months. Vimshottari computes the balance of the opening dasha from how far the natal Moon has travelled through its nakshatra. Shifting the Moon 0.313 degrees moves that fraction by 2.3 percent, which scales with the nakshatra lord's period: about 1.7 months for a Sun-ruled nakshatra with its 6-year dasha, 2.8 months for a Moon-ruled one, up to 5.6 months for a Venus-ruled nakshatra with its 20-year dasha. Every later dasha boundary inherits the same offset, so the two systems date the same mahadasha transition months apart in every chart, for the entire 120-year cycle. And for the 1 Moon in 43 that changes nakshatra, the opening lord itself changes and the two sequences diverge entirely.

A worked example: Jupiter, October 2026

The cleanest way to see the gap work is a real position on a real date. Take Jupiter in late October 2026, computed at 00:00 UT from the same engine as the table above.

On 21 October 2026 Jupiter's sidereal longitude is 119.755 degrees under True Pushya Paksha and 120.068 degrees under Raman. Under Pushya Paksha that is 29 degrees 45 minutes of Cancer: Jupiter in its sign of exaltation, in Ashlesha nakshatra, fourth pada, ruled by Mercury. Under Raman it is 0 degrees 04 minutes of Leo: Jupiter in the Sun's sign, in Magha nakshatra, first pada, ruled by Ketu. Same planet, same sky, same instant. One system reads an exalted Jupiter closing out a water sign, the other reads Jupiter freshly arrived in a fire sign with its exaltation behind it.

The disagreement has a start and an end. Jupiter crosses into sidereal Leo on 21 October under Raman and on 23 October under True Pushya Paksha, so the two systems disagree about Jupiter's sign for about two days, and about its ingress date permanently. For a transit reading keyed to "Jupiter enters Leo" the event happens on different dates in the two systems, and for any natal chart cast during the disagreement window Jupiter's sign, dignity, nakshatra, nakshatra lord and pada all depend on the ayanamsha. A chart-by-chart version of the same situation exists for every planet: the scan above found comparable flip days for the Sun, Mars, Venus and Mercury across 2026.

What does not change is the geometry. Jupiter's separation from any other body is identical in both systems, so conjunction and aspect contact dates, orbs and exactness carry over untouched. The ayanamsha moves the labels, never the angles. That is precisely why the choice is consequential for label-dependent techniques (sign, house, nakshatra, pada, dasha) and irrelevant for separation-dependent ones.

Why Tempora reads with True Pushya Paksha

The reasons match the ones documented in the Lahiri and KP comparisons and none of them is a verdict on Raman's system. First, calibration consistency: Tempora's lift table was computed with True Pushya Paksha fixed, every calibrated weight references Pushya-anchored nakshatra placements and switching offsets would mean re-running the corpus. Second, the nature of the anchor: True Pushya Paksha is pinned to a named star, delta Cancri at the centre of the Pushya nakshatra, whose position is computed for each date, where Raman's offset is a zero-year convention inherited from an earlier reckoning. An anchor that is itself computed keeps the whole chain inside the ephemeris. Third, reproducibility: the implementation Tempora runs is open source and checkable against Swiss Ephemeris by anyone.

Raman's system has real standing. It carried decades of published chart work, its arithmetic is self-consistent to within a year of its stated convention and it is reproducible through the same ephemeris that computes every number on this page. A practitioner who reads with Raman's ayanamsha and states so is doing exactly what this framework asks: committing to an offset and holding it fixed.

Testable rather than doctrinal

The same birth data produces a chart under both systems and for most charts the central conclusions converge. Where they diverge, at the roughly 1-in-11 pada shifts, the 1-in-43 Moon-nakshatra flips and the months-scale dasha offsets, the divergence is diagnostic: a reading that survives both offsets is robust and a reading that depends on the choice is sitting on a boundary, which is worth knowing regardless of which system is committed to.

Between two internally consistent conventions, argument settles nothing and doctrine settles less. What settles something is a record of dated calls made under a frozen choice. Tempora locks True Pushya Paksha before any window is named, states it on every computed chart and grades outcomes in public, misses included, under the discipline documented in reproducible astrology. A practitioner publishing dated windows under a frozen Raman offset would be building an equally admissible record, and setting the two records side by side would say more about the 0.313 degrees than any number of boundary examples. Until then the honest statement is the same one the earlier comparisons closed on: the choice is a commitment audited by outcomes, and the audit trail is public at the tracker.

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Read next

• True Pushya Paksha vs Lahiri · the original two-way comparison and why Tempora picked the Pushya anchor
• True Pushya Paksha vs KP · the empirically backsolved offset and the three-way spread
• Swiss Ephemeris and Vedic accuracy · the computation layer every number on this page ran through
• Reproducible astrology · the falsifier discipline the ayanamsha commitment operates under
• The forward-call tracker · where the frozen choice gets graded in public