One thousand and thirty-one aphorisms

Most Indian astrology follows one style, the one named after the sage Parashara. There is a second style, named after a Jaimini, and it is a genuinely different instrument. Its book is called the Jaimini Sutras.

A sutra is an aphorism: a rule squeezed into as few words as possible so a student could memorise the whole book. Sanskrit teaching texts were often built this way. The words were what you kept in your head; a teacher supplied the meaning. When the teachers were gone, other people wrote the meaning down, and those written explanations are called commentaries.

This book goes a step further than most. One of its own lines tells you that in many places you must not read the words for their sense at all. You read the letters, which stand for numbers, which stand for the twelve signs and the twelve houses of a chart. So a word meaning "good judgement" can simply be the number 144 in disguise. Someone who reads Sanskrit perfectly, with no key, gets nothing.

The idea the school is famous for is this. In the usual system each planet permanently stands for certain people: one always signifies the father, another the spouse. Here those roles are handed out fresh in every chart, depending on where the planets happen to fall. A planet carrying one role in your chart carries a different one in mine. Even the number of roles is argued over, seven or eight, and the argument is written into the old text itself.

Who wrote it, and when? Nobody knows. The name matches a famous philosopher, and the tradition treats them as one man. But the oldest dated copy anyone has found was written in 1729, and no earlier datable book seems to mention it, which points to a late date and a southern origin. A dated copy only tells you when somebody copied it, not when it was composed. So the question stays open.