The Jaimini Sutras: an overview
The Jaimini Sutras are a classical text traditionally attributed to the sage Jaimini. They describe a separate school of Jyotish, with its own methods of dasha, karakas and aspects.
What it is
The school is known for the Chara dashas, which are sign-based, and for the karaka system, which uses the seven grahas by their placement in the chart. The date of the text is debated.
How it is worked out or read
The Jaimini system is not computed by this site. The Vimshottari dasha and whole-sign houses come from the Parashari tradition.
Where it appears on this site
The dasha systems are compared in the dasha systems article.
The text and its form
The Jaimini Sutras, more fully the Jaimini Upadesha Sutras, are a short and very compressed text in four chapters, attributed by tradition to the sage Jaimini. They are written as sutras, terse rules meant to be memorised and explained by a teacher, so almost every line needs a commentary to be understood. Their date is uncertain, and the attribution to the same Jaimini who founded the Mimamsa school of philosophy is a matter of tradition rather than settled history.
Because the sutras are so brief, different commentators have read some of them in different ways, and several schools of Jaimini practice exist today.
Chara karakas
The most distinctive idea in the Jaimini system is the chara karaka, the variable significator. Instead of fixed significators, such as Venus for the spouse, the grahas are ranked by how far each has travelled within its sign, ignoring the sign itself. The graha with the highest degree becomes the atmakaraka, the significator of the self; the next becomes the amatyakaraka, the significator of career and counsel; and so on down the list to the darakaraka, the significator of the spouse. Different authorities use seven karakas, without Rahu, or eight, with Rahu counted in reverse.
The sign the atmakaraka occupies in the navamsha is called the karakamsha, and it is given special weight in the Jaimini reading of a person's inclinations.
Sign aspects and padas
Jaimini also uses rashi drishti, aspects between signs rather than between planets. Movable signs aspect the fixed signs except the one next to them; fixed signs aspect the movable signs except the one next to them; and dual signs aspect each other. Planets in a sign share its aspects. The system also uses arudha padas, points found by counting from a house to its lord and the same distance again, which are read as the image or outward appearance of that house.
Argala, the intervention of planets in the second, fourth and eleventh from a point, is another Jaimini idea that has spread into wider practice.
Jaimini alongside Parashara
Most practitioners today use the Parashari system as their main framework and draw on Jaimini techniques for particular questions, such as the atmakaraka or chara dasha, a sign-based dasha. A reader who meets Jaimini terms in a reading should ask which method is being used, since a Jaimini aspect and a Parashari aspect can give different answers for the same chart. This site uses Parashari methods for its calculators and explains Jaimini ideas for reference.