What Saptarishi Nadi is
Saptarishi Nadi is a classical Tamil palm-leaf corpus attributed to the Sapta Rishis, the Seven Sages. Unlike a calculation system, it is a body of written verses: each leaf holds one native's chart and their life, and the bundles are shelved by ascendant — one volume per lagna. The best-known published edition is the five-volume set issued by the Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, covering the lagnas from Aries to Leo, in Tamil verse with translation.
A leaf opens with the native's own particulars — the direction the birth house faced, what lay around it, the family — and then proceeds kandam by kandam, a chapter per department of life, closing with the Shanti Kandam of remedies. It is a retrieval tradition: the reader's task is to find the right leaf, not to compute a reading.
The thirteen kandams
| # | Kandam | Bhava | What the verses cover |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | General Kandam | 1 | The native, the birth household and its surroundings, parents, the shape of the life |
| 2 | Dhana Kandam | 2 | Wealth, family line, speech, what is held |
| 3 | Sahaja Kandam | 3 | Siblings, courage, short journeys, effort |
| 4 | Matru Kandam | 4 | Mother, house and land, vehicles, schooling |
| 5 | Putra Kandam | 5 | Children, learning, merit carried from the previous birth |
| 6 | Satru Kandam | 6 | Debt, disease, enemies, service |
| 7 | Kalatra Kandam | 7 | Marriage, the spouse and their family, partnership |
| 8 | Ayur Kandam | 8 | Longevity, upheaval, inheritance, hidden matters |
| 9 | Bhagya Kandam | 9 | Father, fortune, dharma, pilgrimage, the teacher |
| 10 | Karma Kandam | 10 | Livelihood, standing, action in the world |
| 11 | Labha Kandam | 11 | Gains, elder siblings, what is fulfilled |
| 12 | Vyaya Kandam | 12 | Expenditure, foreign residence, confinement and release |
| 13 | Shanti Kandam | — | The pariharam: what is to be pacified, where, and by what act |
Deeksha and Dhyana kandams exist in the tradition and are deliberately absent here: they are given by a lineage to a person, and nothing in a chart produces them.
The olai signature: how a leaf is found
Traditionally a reader narrows the bundles by thumb impression and then by question and answer. Rajvidya narrows by chart. The engine builds an olai signature — the lagna sign, the lagna pada, the Moon's pada and the seating of the nine grahas — and searches the ingested corpus for that signature.
- A matched leaf is shown exactly as ingested, with its volume and page, so you can check it against the published edition.
- A near leaf — six to eight of the nine grahas agreeing — is listed on the Olai Signature screen for comparison only. It is never offered as your reading.
- Below six agreeing grahas, nothing is shown, because that is a different native rather than an approximation of you.
Retrieved or derived — and the page always says which
Most charts will not match a leaf, because the corpus is finite and the sky is not. Where nothing matches, the same thirteen kandams are read from your own chart and labelled derived on every screen. The retrieval banner states which of the two you are looking at before any content appears. This is the most important thing to understand about the module: a derived kandam is an honest classical reading of your chart in the Nadi's chapter structure, not a verse from a palm leaf, and it never pretends otherwise.
The corpus itself is not shipped with the platform and is never generated. Leaves are ingested from a licensed or public-domain transcription, with their volume and page recorded.
What Rajvidya gives you
| Screen | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Reading | The retrieval banner, the birth circumstances from the General Kandam, and the reading itself |
| Kandams | All thirteen chapters, each labelled retrieved or derived |
| Olai Signature | Your signature, the search result, and any near leaves with their agreement count |
| Shanti Kandam | The pariharam: what to pacify, where, and by what act |
| Method | The rules, the source series, the rishi convention and what the engine will not claim |
| Ask Saptarishi Nadi | Your question routed to the kandams that speak to it |
Each kandam is framed by the voice of a rishi, paired to the ruling graha through the Brahmanda ordering read against the weekday lords. That pairing is our stated convention and it decides nothing — never a judgement, a timing or a remedy.
How to use it well
- Read the banner first. Retrieved and derived deserve different levels of trust, and the difference is printed at the top for exactly that reason.
- Check a matched leaf against its citation. Volume and page are shown so you can verify rather than believe.
- Treat near leaves as study material. They are someone else's life, kept visible so you can see how close the corpus came.
- Read the Shanti Kandam last. A remedy makes sense only after the chapter that motivated it.
Try it on your chart
Credits are charged once on the entry screen of a reading.
Sources
Saptarishi Nadi, Madras Government Oriental Manuscripts Library series (Tamil verse with translation), curator T. Chandra Sekharan; scholarly commentary and Tamil palm-leaf digitisation initiatives for manuscript provenance. The kandam structure and the retrieved-versus-derived rule are documented on the module's Method screen.