Varahamihira at Ujjain, Filing the Sky

Ujjain in the sixth century is a meridian as much as a city. Classical astronomy in India reckons longitudes from there. The man tied to that city in this century is Varahamihira, and the work he left is a set of shelves.

A verse in the Brihat Jataka presents him as a resident of Avanti, son of Adityadasa, trained at Kapitthaka. A traditional birth date sits near 505. A later poem, the Jyotirvidabharana, seats him among nine jewels at the court of a Vikramaditya who would have reigned centuries earlier. Scholars treat that poem as a later composition, placed somewhere between the twelfth century and the eighteenth. The court list is a legend of patronage. His books are the evidence.

Three kinds of book

The Pancha Siddhantika summarizes five astronomical canons current in his time: Paulisha, Romaka, Vasishtha, Surya, and Paitamaha. One of them, the Romaka, carries a year-length taken from Greek astronomy. He files it as one school among five. The book is a review of how the year and the planets were being computed.

The Brihat Samhita is the encyclopedia. Its chapters move through the calendar, geography, rain, crops, houses, gems, animals, and the omens people watched in public. A chapter on the signs of the coming rains is weather and agriculture. It has the length and the patience of a reference shelf.

The Brihat Jataka is the natal book: signs, longevity, dasha, profession, yogas of the Moon, planets standing together. That is hora, the branch that reads a birth. He kept it as its own text. The encyclopedia did not have to pretend to be a birth manual, and the birth manual did not have to carry a treatise on rainfall.

Which shelf the sentence is on

He also states that a lunar eclipse is the Moon in the shadow of the Earth. The encyclopedist and the astronomer are the same person. When a modern reader meets a samhita line about a halo around the Moon, or about the price of grain, the useful question is which shelf the line is on. Omens of the year are a public sky. A birth is a particular clock, started at a particular place.

A samhita chapter is a file on the shared sky. A jataka chapter is a file on one birth. The second file, for a living person, is a Kundli drawn for a place and a time.

Questions people keep asking

Was Varahamihira one of Vikramaditya's nine gems?

That list is in the Jyotirvidabharana, a poem composed long after the sixth century. His own verse puts him in Avanti, in his own time, as Adityadasa's son.

Is the Brihat Samhita a book of one-line fortunes?

It is a compilation of astronomy, the calendar, weather, building, and omens. Natal rules are in the Brihat Jataka, a separate book.