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How to read your score

Ashtakoot Gun Milan scores eight koots, and they are not weighted equally. Varna is worth 1 point, vashya 2, tara 3, yoni 4, graha maitri 5, gana 6, bhakoot 7 and nadi 8 - thirty-six in total. Two koots, nadi and bhakoot, carry fifteen of those thirty-six between them, so a match can lose several of the lighter koots and still score well, while losing nadi alone costs more than varna, vashya, tara and yoni combined.

Read the breakdown rather than the headline number. A 24 built from full marks on nadi and bhakoot means something different from a 24 assembled out of the lighter koots with nadi at zero, and the traditional reading treats those two cases very differently.

The scorecard also reports Mangal Dosha for each chart separately, because it is not part of the thirty-six and is assessed per person rather than per pair.

A worked example: two real charts

Take 12 April 1990, 08:30 in Mumbai and 3 November 1992, 14:15 in New Delhi. The pair scores 30 out of 36 - and the interesting part is where the six points went missing.

Nadi scores the full 8 and bhakoot the full 7, which between them account for the bucket the score lands in. Graha maitri is full at 5, tara full at 3, varna full at 1. The losses are all in the middle weights: vashya takes 1 of 2, yoni 2 of 4, and gana 3 of 6. That is a pattern worth recognising - temperament and instinct koots partially matched, the two heaviest structural koots clean.

Run the same pair through Dashakoot and the total becomes 31 out of 38. The two extra points are Mahendra and Vedha, and this pair picks up one of them.

How this is computed

Both charts are computed sidereally with the Lahiri ayanamsa from the Swiss Ephemeris, and the koots are scored from the Moon's nakshatra and rashi - the traits each koot keys on are varna, vashya, gana, yoni, nadi and the rashi lord, drawn from the standard tables rather than from an approximation of them.

Tara is computed as a counted distance between the two nakshatras rather than looked up, and bhakoot from the rashi pair. Where a koot has a classical cancellation the scorecard applies it rather than reporting a bare zero.

Dashakoot is the same eight koots plus two binary ones, for a maximum of 38. Mahendra scores 1 when the nakshatra distance from the boy to the girl is 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, 19, 22 or 25; Vedha scores 1 when there is no Vedha obstruction between the two nakshatras. It deliberately reuses the audited eight-koot result rather than re-implementing it, so both views of the same pair always agree on the shared thirty-six.

Common mistakes

The first is treating the total as a verdict. Guna Milan scores out of 36 and the conventional threshold is 18, but the number is a summary of eight separate tests that measure different things. A 24 built on a nadi failure and a 24 built on three small partial scores are not the same situation, and only the breakdown distinguishes them.

The second is running it on approximate birth times. Every koota derives from the Moon's nakshatra and sign, so the same birth-time sensitivity that governs a nakshatra reading governs the whole score. A wrong pada can move gana, yoni and nadi at once, which is enough to swing the total by several points.

The third is ignoring the cancellation rules. The tradition holds that certain failures are set aside under stated conditions - a nadi dosha where both charts share a Moon sign but differ in nakshatra, or a bhakoot failure where the lords of the two signs are friendly. A calculator that reports the raw score without them overstates the problem.

The fourth is expecting Guna Milan to cover everything. It does not look at the seventh house, at Venus and Jupiter, or at Mars placement, which is why mangal dosha is checked separately rather than being one of the eight kootas.

What a fuller comparison adds

Guna Milan is the Moon-based layer. The other layers used alongside it look at the seventh house and its lord in each chart, at the condition of Venus and Jupiter as the natural significators, and at Mars for the placements grouped under mangal dosha.

Dashakoot, shown next to the main score, is the ten-factor variant read in parts of South India. It scores out of 38 rather than 36 and weights the factors differently, so a pair can score comfortably on one and awkwardly on the other without either being wrong.

Treat all of it as one input. The scores describe specific, stated compatibilities between two charts; they are not a prediction, and the tradition that produced them never used them as a sole criterion.

What this does not tell you

Gun Milan is a Moon-based screen, not a whole-chart reading. It looks at the two Moons and the traits they carry; it does not look at the seventh house, its lord, Venus, or the dasha periods the couple will actually live through - all of which a full synastry reading would weigh.

It also cannot see timing. A strong score says nothing about when a marriage is favoured, which is a muhurta question, nor about the periods each chart is running.

And it is scored on birth time. The Moon moves about one degree every two hours, so a nakshatra boundary crossed within an uncertain birth window can change gana, yoni and nadi at once - which is exactly where the heavy points sit. If either time is approximate, treat the score as indicative.

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