Shiva, the Auspicious Yoga

Shiva is the twentieth nityayoga, and its name means auspicious, kindly, and benevolent, the same word names the great god Shiva in his gracious aspect. It is one of the most favourable of the yogas, held excellent for worship, spiritual undertakings, and any work seeking blessing. Reckoned from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it advances as the lights draw apart. In the panchanga it lends its highly auspicious quality to the reckoning of a muhurta. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, in which a benefic yoga such as Shiva is sought out for the most important beginnings; the astronomical basis remains the arithmetic of the two luminaries' combined longitude through the lunar month.

Unlike Brahma and Indra, the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth yogas, which are named for deities associated with creation and kingship respectively, Shiva as the twentieth yoga's name refers to the adjective meaning auspicious or kindly rather than necessarily invoking the god by direct address, though the word is of course also the standard name of the deity himself, and Sanskrit usage does not always sharply distinguish an epithet used as a common adjective from the same word used as a proper name in a given context, so classical commentators occasionally differ on how directly to read a theistic invocation into this particular yoga's naming compared with the more unambiguous Brahma and Indra.