One thousand and thirty-one aphorisms

The Jaimini Sūtras (जैमिनिसूत्र) carry a complete method of reading a birth chart in one thousand and thirty-one aphorisms, arranged as four chapters of four quarters each. Many of them run to three or four words. One of the load-bearing ones runs to two, na grahāḥ, not the planets. The text by itself, with nothing added to it, could be copied out by hand between breakfast and dinner. The handbook the mainstream works from, the Bṛhat Pārāśara Horā Śāstra (बृहत्पाराशरहोराशास्त्र), runs to ninety-seven chapters in the translation most people own.

Compression on that scale is ordinary in this literature, and I have already written about why: the aphorism was the part you carried in your memory, and the explaining was somebody else's job, done later, at greater length, by other people. What this particular book does next is not ordinary.

It encodes.

Thirty-two aphorisms into the first quarter of the first chapter, the author stops teaching astrology and turns to tell you how he is going to write. In B. Suryanarain Rao's English, the aphorism says that throughout this work the signs and the houses are indicated by single letters, for the sake of brevity. The next aphorism, the two-word one, exempts the planets: those are called by their names. So a word standing in one of these lines may not be there for its meaning at all. It may be there because its consonants carry numbers.

Watch the machinery work once. The aphorism that sets the sign periods running contains the word viveka, which in ordinary Sanskrit means discernment, the faculty that tells one thing from another. Under the letter code the syllables are counted rather than read. Va is four, va is four, ka is one, and the digits are taken in reverse order, so the word hands you the number 144. That number is the ceiling of this system's periods: twelve signs, no more than twelve years apiece. A word for good judgement, sitting in a sentence about time, is a quantity in a coat.

Consider what that does to a reader. Someone with excellent Sanskrit and no key gets nothing out of these pages, not a garbled reading, nothing. A book in that condition cannot travel by itself. It goes with a teacher or a commentary attached, and everything in its later history follows from that one fact. The rest of this piece is that history: what the book takes with it, what it has mislaid, and what nobody can settle about it.

Take the escort first, since it is the part a reader can go and count. The critical edition made by the Sanskritist K. V. Abhyankar and published in 1951 prints Nīlakaṇṭha's commentary on all four chapters except the last five quarters. Five of the sixteen quarters, then, carry no old gloss in the edition a scholar reaches for first. The English translation that put the book in front of modern Indian readers, made by B. Suryanarain Rao and kept in print by his grandson through six editions, covers the first two chapters and stops there. Rao is candid about the difficulty as he goes. On the second aphorism in the whole book, which says that signs look at each other in front, he writes: "I do not exactly understand what is meant by the word front." He then follows the commentators, and tells you that is what he is doing.

The escort travelled further than the book did, which is the second thing that follows. The two grammars were never kept on separate shelves. The printed Hora Shastra carries sign aspects, the derived points called padas, the moving significators and the sign periods: the Jaimini apparatus, chapter by chapter, inside the Parashari book. Whatever that arrangement says about who borrowed from whom, and it may say less than either camp would like, it means the compression problem walked into the mainstream handbook along with the doctrine.

The doctrine itself is worth stating plainly, because it is a real alternative and not a variant spelling. It concerns the kārakas (कारक), the significators. In the ordinary grammar a significator is a fixed property of a body: one graha stands for the father in every chart ever cast, another for the spouse, and the list is settled before anybody is born. The tradition calls those the naisargika (नैसर्गिक) karakas, the natural ones. Jaimini's set is not natural. The offices are handed out afresh in each chart, so that a graha holding a post in yours holds a different one, or none at all, in mine. Eight are named in the opening quarter, running from the ātmakāraka (आत्मकारक), which carries the self, down through the ones that carry the minister, the brother, the mother, the children, the cousins and the wife. How the allotment is made is a working matter and not my subject here; the grammar it belongs to is mapped elsewhere.

What belongs here is that the book does not know how many offices there are. The aphorism that opens the sequence offers the choice in its own wording, of the seven or of the eight, the eighth being Rahu, who is not a planet in the ordinary sense at all. A few lines later a second aphorism reports that some teachers treat the significator of the mother and the significator of children as one and the same, which brings the count down to seven. This is not a later muddle introduced by commentators. It is inside the text, in the text's own voice, at the point where the doctrine is being introduced.

The same softness sits under the periods. This school counts them in signs rather than in the star-based year-allotments the mainstream uses, the best known of them the cara daśā (चरदशा), which handbooks print as chara dasha, the moving period. Rao, translating the rule that fixes how long a sign runs, writes that many of the writers are of opinion that it is counted in a certain way, and then gives the count. That phrase is carrying a great deal. Rival procedures circulate today under the one name, each offered as the arithmetic the aphorism intended, and I have not seen a demonstration that closes the question.

If the doctrine cannot be pinned down from inside, the obvious move is to ask when and by whom it was written, and that is where the ground gives way altogether. The name on the book belongs, on any ordinary reckoning, to somebody else. Jaimini is the author of the Mīmāṃsā (मीमांसा) aphorisms on the interpretation of ritual, a work near the foundation of Indian philosophy, and a pupil of Vyāsa in the traditional account. Rao, opening his translation, sets the two beside each other without a pause: the author of the Purva Mimamsa, and of these aphorisms on astrology, one man. He passes on a further report, that the astrological sutras were composed in eight chapters, of which four are what we have. He does not say who counted the missing four.

Against that stands the paper. Pingree's census of Sanskrit manuscripts in the exact sciences, still the standard survey, lists no copy of this text older than the eighteenth century. The earliest dated copy was written in 1729, and no work that can itself be dated appears to mention the book before that. Read strictly, the evidence puts the composition late, in the seventeenth century or the early eighteenth, and in the south, where the manuscripts and the commentators are.

Both positions deserve to be stated carefully, because the reasoning matters well beyond this one book. A dated manuscript fixes a floor under the copy, not under the composition, and a text can be centuries older than every witness that happens to survive. Silence in the citation record is evidence and is weak evidence at the same time, since a book can circulate inside a teaching lineage for a long while without turning up in anything that lasted. What the manuscripts establish is a floor at 1729. Everything standing above that floor is argument, and the arguments are worth reading precisely because none of them finishes the job.

So when practitioners say Jaimini, they mean the first half. The rest of it exists, in manuscript, in Sanskrit, in code, with five quarters that no old commentator explains, waiting for a reader who would have to meet it in the one condition a book of this kind was built never to be met in, which is alone. That is an invitation rather than a warning, and it comes with a question attached. The next time one of these aphorisms is quoted at you as settled doctrine, which quarter of the book is it from, and whose explanation of it are you being handed?