Kemadruma and the Job of a Jataka Chapter

A father hears one word, Kemadruma, and hears a life sentence. The chapter he has stumbled into is doing a smaller job, and a more exact one. It is sorting the Moon's neighbours.

The book is Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka, in the chapter on yogas of the Moon. The rule, in the plain sense of that verse, runs like this. Set the Sun aside. A planet in the second house from the Moon is called Sunapha. A planet in the twelfth is called Anapha. Planets on both sides make Durudhura. When neither flank has such a planet, many authors call the yoga Kemadruma.

The same verse already limits the name

The verse then names situations in which the label should be withheld. A kendra, an angle, is involved, and the case where the Moon is joined with a planet is involved. Translators do not agree which angle is meant. One reading has the Moon itself in an angle from the ascendant. Another has some other planet in an angle from the Moon. Both readings are trying to follow a verse that already refuses a stamp on every lonely Moon. A further escape, cancelling the yoga for angles occupied only in the navamsha, is mentioned as something some people say. Varahamihira sets that extra escape outside the established rule.

The following verse gives stock results. Sunapha and Anapha are described in terms of means, health, and reputation. Kemadruma is described bleakly: want, dependence, a life that sits below the rank of the family, and the text includes a royal family in that phrase. The bleakness is the lookup result for a defined pattern. It arrives after the definition, and the definition includes the cancellations.

A chapter is a set of drawers

A classical jataka chapter files a pattern under a name so that a result can be fetched. This chapter files the Moon's immediate company, because the Moon carries the mind in this system and because the Moon's nakshatra starts the dasha. The drawers in this cupboard are Sunapha, Anapha, Durudhura, and Kemadruma. Another chapter files profession. Another files longevity. Opening one drawer and announcing the person is how a single yoga gets promoted into a whole life.

A working reading asks whether the pattern is present at all, once the kendra condition is stated in the commentary being followed. It asks the Moon's sign, the house the Moon rules, and which dasha is running. Those questions are answered on a calculated chart, in sidereal rashis. On this site the ayanamsa is Lahiri. The verse does not know a birth time. A Kundli is the page the verse was written to be laid on.

Questions people keep asking

Is Kemadruma simply a Moon with no planet beside it?

In this chapter it is a Moon with neither the second nor the twelfth occupied by a planet other than the Sun, after the verse's own exceptions. Conjunction with a planet, and the kendra condition, take the name off.

Does the bleak result apply on its own?

It is the stock phrase for the yoga once the yoga is actually present. The chapter spends its care on when the name is allowed. A full jataka still reads longevity, dasha, and the yogas around it.